Still, the trial was no joke. With Prohibition less than a decade away, the forces for and against alcohol were at each other’s wet and dry throats. The temperance crusade had long targeted prominent politicians, with some success. Back in the 1870s, first lady “Lemonade” Lucy Hayes persuaded her husband Rutherford to ban booze from the White House. As Roosevelt biographer Kathleen Dalton puts it, “Drinking was the abortion issue of T.R.’s day.” A politician had to decide whether to be pro-high life or antilibation. By portraying himself as a man who enjoyed drinks in abstemious moderation, T.R. managed a straddle of Clintonian sophistication: He may have sipped the occasional Mint Julep, but he didn't inhale them.

Roosevelt testified that in the years since he had left the White House he had put only two Mint Juleps to his lips. One, he said, was at the St. Louis Country Club, where he took only a couple of sips. The St. Louis Post Dispatch teasingly accused T.R. of perjury. After all, the Juleps made by the country club’s bartender, Tom Bullock, were just too good for anyone to taste and put aside. “To believe that a red-blooded man, and a true Colonel at that, ever stopped with just a part of one of those refreshments,” the paper editorialized, “is to strain credulity too far.”

But perhaps, just perhaps, the Julep T.R. sampled at the club simply disappointed. Bullock penned a bar book titled “The Ideal Bartender” (whose preface was written by a club member, one George Herbert Walker). Though his recipe for “Mint Julep, Kentucky style” was correct, it was a rather basic affair — sugar, mint, ice and bourbon — hardly the elaborate concoction Roosevelt had come to savor in his White House days.

During the Colonel’s administration, from 1901 to 1909, White House steward Henry Pinckney was in charge of the Juleps. When he sensed that T.R. had built up a thirst, he was off to the mint patch, which, according to a Washington Post account from 1913, was on the White House grounds “back of the executive offices, behind a lattice-work house, where they hang the clothes to dry.”