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The Kentucky Derby is almost upon us—the first Saturday of May—and that means mint julep season is on. While the julep has been the race’s official drink since 1938, the first race was run in 1875, and the drink’s association with it began sometime soon after. And the drink itself goes back centuries earlier. As the song goes, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” The julep was first defined as a sweetened liquid used to cover up something less palatable that you wanted to get past your tongue, typically a nasty health aid. The word and concept originated with the Persian gulab, or rosewater (water infused with rose petals), passing through Arabic, then Latin, and into the Romance languages. Middle English picked it up in the 1600s as something like iulep. ...

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