The Picon Punch is the drink of the Basque hotels — the boardinghouses that fed and housed Basque sheepherders across Nevada, California, and Idaho from the 1890s onward. It is not a punch. It is one drink, in one glass, served to one person, and it has been made the same way for well over a century: grenadine in the bottom, a bitter orange amaro over it, soda to lengthen, and a float of brandy on top that you are supposed to meet on the first sip. In 2025 Nevada made it the official state drink. I have never had one outside a Basque restaurant and I am not convinced you should.
By 1900 a printed recipe for it had already reached Boothby's American Bar-Tender.
The Boardinghouse Drink
Basque immigrants came to California for the gold and arrived after it was gone, so they took the work that was available and went into sheep. The boardinghouses followed — the ostatuak, family-run hotels where herders coming off a season in the mountains could get a bed, a long table, and a drink in a language they spoke. The Picon Punch was that drink. The commonly cited origin is a Basque boardinghouse in North Beach, San Francisco, around 1899, and by 1900 a printed recipe had reached William Boothby's The World's Drinks and How to Mix Them. Amer Picon had been shipping west since roughly 1893, so the timing works.
What is unusual is how little it moved after that. Most drinks of that vintage were rewritten by Prohibition, then rewritten again by the 1970s. The Picon Punch was insulated because it never left the community that made it — it stayed a house drink at a specific kind of restaurant, and the people ordering it knew what it was supposed to taste like. Nevada's 2025 designation is a piece of legislative affection for that history, not a sign the drink broke out. Order one in a bar that is not Basque and you will mostly get a blank look.
The Spec
Four things and a twist, built in the glass in a fixed order. A quarter ounce of grenadine goes in first and mostly stays at the bottom — and it should be real pomegranate grenadine, because at this dose the red-syrup-flavoured kind is the only sweetness in the glass. An ounce and a half of Amer Picon goes over it. Soda lengthens it to about four ounces total. Then half an ounce of brandy is floated on the surface, and the lemon twist is expressed over that float. The order is the recipe. Stir it all together and you have made something perfectly pleasant that is not a Picon Punch.
You almost certainly cannot buy Amer Picon
This is the drink's real problem and there is no polite way around it. Gaétan Picon created Amer Picon in Algeria in 1837 as a quinine-and-orange bitter for French soldiers. It has not been distributed in the United States since roughly 2000, because it contains calamus root, which the FDA does not approve. The bottle sold in France today is also not the bottle the boardinghouses used — it was reformulated downward to 21% ABV, and people who remember the old 39% version say so loudly. So even a suitcase bottle from Paris is a substitution.
What to use instead
Torani Amer is the closest, and not by accident — the Torani family made it in San Francisco specifically for the Basque communities that could no longer get Picon. If you can find it, use it, and use it at the same measure. Amaro CioCiaro is the widely available fallback: orange-forward, gentian-bitter, a little sweeter, and it makes a recognisable drink. Picon Vasco is a newer Spanish attempt at the same target. All three land in slightly different places, and none of them are wrong, because the reference bottle is gone.
The float is not decoration
Pour the brandy gently over the back of a bar spoon so it sits on the soda rather than mixing in. The first sip is then mostly brandy and expressed lemon oil, warm and aromatic, before the bitter orange underneath arrives. Two or three sips in, the layers have collapsed on their own and the rest of the glass drinks as one thing. That arc is the entire point of the serve, and it is why the build order matters more here than in almost any other highball.
Bottom Line
This is a bitter, low-sweetness, faintly medicinal drink that tastes like the nineteenth century, and it does not care whether you enjoy it. I like it enormously, with the caveat that the version I can actually make is a version built on a substitute for a liqueur I have never tasted at full strength. If you get to a Basque hotel in Winnemucca or Bakersfield, order it there and stop reading recipes. Otherwise: Torani Amer, and a heavy hand with the lemon.