J. Robert Oppenheimer Shook up Some Strange, Strong Martinis. Here’s How to Make One.

The debate over how a Martini should correctly be enjoyed has been raging for decades. Little did we know that one notable scientist had a rather interesting opinion on the matter.

J. Robert Oppenheimer—yes, that Oppenheimer—was apparently famous for his Martinis, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday. The physicist known for creating the atomic bomb would often host gatherings at his home during the Manhattan Project era, where he served his signature drink: four ounces of gin and a dash of vermouth in a chilled glass, the rim dipped in a mix of honey and lime juice, according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which Oppenheimer helped found.

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“He served the most delicious and coldest Martinis,” Pat Sherr, the wife of a lab physicist, said.

Like James Bond, Oppenheimer preferred his Martinis shaken, not stirred. In American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that served as the inspiration for Oppenheimer the film, the authors noted that the scientist would shake his cocktails with “elaborate ceremony,” and he often toasted “to the confusion of our enemies.”

Martini drinkers today may be a bit taken aback by Oppenheimer’s preferred recipe: Four ounces of gin is way more than you’d usually find in a Martini, with the Post noting that most cocktails call for three ounces or less of booze altogether. And with just a dash of vermouth, taken to be about a quarter of an ounce, the physicist’s Martini would have had a bonkers 16-to-1 ratio of gin to vermouth. That’s far more than the 3-to-1 ratio that was standard around World War II, with 4-to-1 and 5-to-1 also being common, according to The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails. (Oppenheimer may have been in elite company, though: President Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently enjoyed a 7-to-1 formulation. But even that seems tame in comparison.)

One potential reason for the whopping amount of gin? The Los Alamos lab was hard to get drinking supplies into, according to the foreign-affairs website War on the Rocks. Or it could have just been that Oppenheimer was a major gin fan. As we’ve been told before, the best way to enjoy a Martini is however you best enjoy a Martini.

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