Back when merchant ships plied the waters between California and South America, Peruvian pisco brandy found favor in bars all over San Francisco, where pisco punch and pisco sours were served day and night.

Nowhere was pisco punch more revered than at a saloon called the Bank Exchange, whose tight-lipped owner took the recipe to his grave in 1926. There it stayed until an enterprising historian reconstructed the drink in the 1970s.

"I have a theory it is compounded of the shavings of cherubs' wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset and fragments of lost epics by dead masters," Rudyard Kipling wrote after sampling the punch in 1889.