Sellers include young and older women, blue-collar workers, street hustlers and the underemployed. To give themselves an edge, some sellers even make home deliveries.

Their customers are teenagers, men and women arriving home after a day at work, and young adults who have made it a staple of the party scene. The drinks can also be found in neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens but have been ubiquitous this summer in Harlem and Washington Heights.

“It’s definitely a summer drink, and I try to serve them as cold as possible,” said a regular nutcracker seller, a man in his early 30s who goes by the name of Kool-Aid and asked that his full name not be published. “It’s a fruity drink, so you don’t have to sip it with your face all scrunched up; you feel really nice without getting totally bombed out.”

The man said he made six gallons at a time in a big plastic water cooler jug, mixing 160-proof Devil’s Springs vodka, 151-proof Bacardi 151 rum, Amaretto, whatever sweet liqueur he had on hand and a variety of juices depending on the desired flavor, including cranberry, mango, pineapple and peach nectar.

The juice and liquor typically cost him about $300, he said. He also spends about $85 on plastic bottles and sealable caps.

For each $200 or $300 he spends, he said, he makes about $700 in profit.

To distinguish their drinks from others, some nutcracker sellers use various colored caps and infuse the drink with fruit or Jolly Ranchers. Kool-Aid said he added liquor-soaked fruit salad.

People in the neighborhood said they had no idea how nutcracker caught on. But local legend has it that the original nutcracker was created 10 or so years ago at a Chinese restaurant on the border of the Upper West Side and Harlem, where bartenders hid their hands below the counter as they mixed the drink. When people asked what was in it, the bartenders refused to say. The story goes that at some point the bartenders started allowing customers to leave with their drinks, and soon people started dissecting the recipe and making their own.