1.5 oz Vodka
4 oz Orange juice
.5 oz Galliano
Combine vodka and orange juice in a glass filled with ice and stir. Pour the Galliano over a barspoon held over the top of the glass so that it floats on top of the drink. Garnish with an orange slice.
Made with vodka, orange juice, and a splash of Galliano (a sweet, herbal, vanilla flavored Italian liqueur), essentially a Harvey Wallbanger is just a gussied up screwdriver.
The most common origin story you’ll find when looking for the history of the Harvey Wallbanger is that a Bartender named Donato “Duke” Antone created it in the early 1950s at his Blackwatch Bar on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Supposedly a local surfer and bar regular named Tom Harvey came into the bar after losing a surfing competition and asked for his favorite cocktail that Duke made. After getting a little drunk, he supposedly started venting about losing the competition and eventually started banging his head against the wall in frustration. Some stories just say he got so drunk he banged into the wall, but either way, Harvey. Wall. Banger. The end.
From there the cocktail puttered along until sometime in the 1960s when a marketing director for a liquor importer came up with a tagline and a cartoon for the cocktail in an attempt to boost Galliano sales. By the 70s it was one of the most popular cocktails in the country.
However, there are a few problems with this story. First of all, a surfer from Manhattan beach going all the way to Sunset Boulevard for a fancy screwdriver is hard to believe. Also, cocktail historians haven’t been able to find any written record of a competition surfer named Tom Harvey.
Not only that, but Antone is also supposedly responsible for creating a bunch of other well-known cocktails like the Rusty Nail, the White Russian, the Kamakazi, and the Freddie Fudpucker; and some people say he was actually taking credit for cocktails he didn’t actually create himself. While he was quoted many times in newspapers about some of his most famous drinks, he never even mentioned the Harvey Wallbanger in print until the early 1970s, some 20 years after he supposedly invented it.
Also, in addition to owning the Blackwatch bar in Hollywood, Antone also worked for both Galliano and Smirnoff Vodka as a corporate mixologist. So, the more likely story is that there never was a real surfer, it was just a story concocted by a marketing department to go along with a cocktail that a corporate mixologist either created himself or stole from another bartender.
Either way, by the end of 1969 the cartoon mascot for the Harvey Wallbanger was everywhere. On pop art posters, bumper stickers, buttons, t-shirts, and mugs. According to David Wondrich, with the Harvey mascot “to blaze the way, Antone’s simple—even dopey—drink would go on to be the first drink created by a consultant to actually take the nation by storm.”
Thanks to this ad campaign, Galliano became the number one most imported liqueur in the 70s, exporting 500,000 cases a year to the U.S.