The Suffering Bastard is a wartime hangover cure with a real battlefield pedigree. It was created in 1942 by Joe Scialom, head bartender at the Long Bar of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, to revive British and Allied officers — many of them nursing hangovers on the eve of the desert campaigns around El Alamein. Equal parts gin and brandy, sharpened with lime and Angostura and lengthened with ginger beer, it is tiki-adjacent rather than tropical: a hot-climate restorative that the postwar tiki bars happily adopted.
The classic hair of the dog — a drink mixed less for pleasure than for resurrection.
History
Joe Scialom was a polyglot Egyptian-born bartender who ran the bar at Shepheard's, Cairo's grandest hotel, during the Second World War. As the story goes, he invented the Suffering Bastard in 1942 as a cure for hungover officers, and demand grew so fierce that — by some accounts — batches were sent out toward the front. The name is bar slang softened for print; "bastard" here means a sufferer, not an insult.
Scialom's life reads like a novel: he later worked for the Hilton chain around the world and ended his career in New York. The drink outlived the war, and its cousins — the Dying Bastard and the Dead Bastard, which pile on additional spirits — keep the joke going. Note that some later sources swap the brandy for bourbon; the gin-and-brandy version is the one tied to Scialom's original.
The Spec
Equal parts gin and brandy, a squeeze of lime, a good dose of Angostura, all built over ice and topped with cold ginger beer.
Gin and brandy together
The twin base is what makes the drink. Gin brings botanical lift and brandy brings round, grapey weight; neither alone gives the Suffering Bastard its odd, comforting balance. Use a London Dry gin and a decent Cognac or brandy.
Ginger beer, not ginger ale
Spicy ginger beer does far more work here than sweet ginger ale — it adds heat and bite that play against the Angostura. If all you have is ginger ale, add an extra dash of bitters and a little more lime to compensate.
The bastard family
Order a Dying Bastard and you add rum; a Dead Bastard piles on rum and bourbon besides. They're escalations of the same idea — and, true to the joke, escalating cures for escalating mornings.
Bottom Line
The Suffering Bastard is a spicy, restorative long drink with one of the best origin stories in the book. Use real ginger beer, keep the gin-and-brandy base, and don't be shy with the Angostura.