Collins

John Collins was a headwaiter at Limmer’s Hotel and Coffee House on Conduit Street in London and is credited with the invention of the Collins. Limmer’s Hotel is mentioned in Reminiscences of Captain Gronow … Being Anecdotes of the Camp, the Court, and the Clubs, at the Close of the Last War with France, written in 1814, and was clearly open for most of the nineteenth century, but it is unclear when John Collins worked at Limmer’s. An early mention of the drink in print, possibly the first, was in the Australasian Newspaper from Victoria, Australia on February 24, 1865. This was in reference to “that most angelic of drinks for a hot climate—a John Collins (a mixture of soda water, gin, sugar, lemon, and ice).”