However pink the drinks, cocktail making has historically been a man’s job—but that didn’t stop some exceptional women from trying to break the mould. We owe a special salute to Ada “Coley” Coleman, probably the most famous female bartender and mixologist of all time, renowned for throwing rip-roaring parties, hanging out with celebs, and inventing a cocktail with a particularly saucy name.

In the late 1800s when Coleman began her career, very few women stood behind the bar. A federal list from 1895 showed that compared to the 55,000 men working in bartending at the time, there were only 147 women mixing cocktails in the United States. Coleman was based in London, where views on female bartenders may have been more liberal for the time—but she was still a pioneer there, one whose enviable skills soon put her at the very pinnacle of her trade.

In 1899, when she was just 24, Coleman took up a position at the elegant Claridge’s Hotel in London, serving beverages to the some of the most sophisticated drinkers in town. There, Coleman made her first ever cocktail, a Manhattan. Obviously displaying a knack for mixing drinks, she was soon transferred to the swanky Savoy Hotel in London, where she found herself swizzling cocktails for the rich and famous behind the hotel’s “American Bar.”

There, Coleman’s energetic and friendly nature won favor with the bar’s patrons, who fondly started calling her “Coley.” Her artful approach to mixing, her creativity in devising new drinks, and her ability to charm her guests, meant that by 1903 Coleman was named the head bartender at the Savoy—a position that had never before, and has not since, belonged to a woman.

During this golden period, Coleman served up drinks to stars and writers like Charlie Chaplin, Mark Twain and Marlene Dietrich. And as if having to charm guests during the day wasn’t enough, she was renowned for her hospitality after hours, when she held lavish parties at home. She also invented her most memorable contribution during this time, a cocktail named the Hanky Panky. In America, the phrase is a cheeky reference to sexual goings-on, and in the United Kingdom, it means “magic” or “witchcraft”—both of which added obvious appeal to the already tasty concoction.

In an interview with the Daily Express in 1925, Coleman recounted how the drink was named, when she first made it for one of her regulars, a comedy actor and musician named Charles Hawtrey:

The late Charles Hawtrey…was one of the best judges of cocktails that I knew. Some years ago, when he was overworking, he used to come into the bar and say, “Coley, I am tired. Give me something with a bit of punch in it.” It was for him that I spent hours experimenting until I had invented a new cocktail. The next time he came in, I told him I had a new drink for him. He sipped it, and, draining the glass, he said, “By Jove! That is the real hanky-panky!” And Hanky-Panky it has been called ever since.

The drink, made with a heady combination of gin, sweet vermouth, and Fernet-Branca, with a rind of orange marinating in the mix, is still on the menu at the Savoy, in memory of Coleman’s influence there.

But in 1925 when she was 51, she gave up her position as head bartender, and left the American Bar. Some paint this event as little more than a change of hands, but others hint that Coleman’s famous successor, Harry Craddock, was not in favor of having women behind the bar. That might explain why Coleman, as well as another woman who bartended at the Savoy, were dismissed from the drinks counter entirely.

Coleman later found employ in the hotel’s flower shop. Whether or not it was her choice to leave her former position, that job must have seemed a far cry from the exciting bustle and high society fraternizing at the American Bar, where she had once ruled the roost.

As with plenty of women who first made significant headway in men’s jobs during an era that didn’t favor their success, Ada Coleman’s name is, sadly, little known today. She enjoys far less fame than her successor, the charismatic Harry Craddock, who is now immortalized in a wax statue at Madame Tussauds.

So next time you drink a Hanky Panky, why not raise your glass to “Coley,” to spread the name and renew the fame of this impressive female mixologist.