The library
Where drinks came from, told from the record. Where the record runs out and the stories begin, we say so.
The age of punch · 1632 to 1850
Two centuries before anyone wrote down the word cocktail, sailors of the English East India trade were sharing a bowl of spirit, citrus, sugar and water. This is where mixed drinks begin.
5 min read · 4 sources
From elixir to cocktail · 1690 to 1880
In 1806 a New York newspaper defined the cocktail as spirits, sugar, water and bitters. The bitters came from the apothecary, and three bottles from three continents still sit on every serious bar.
5 min read · 5 sources
Drinks along the trade routes · 1800 to 2010
Sugar cane, grapes, grain and soda water traveled the trade routes long before the cocktail did. Seven drinks from seven countries show how a spirit becomes a habit: caipirinha, pisco sour, highball, somaek, poncha, spritz and michelada.
7 min read · 17 sources
The professional bar · 1830 to 1900
In 1862 a showman from Sackets Harbor published the first American book of drink recipes. Twenty years later a Prussian rival wrote the first manual on how to run a bar. Between them they made bartending a profession.
5 min read · 9 sources
The Sazerac's long road · 1834 to 2008
A pharmacist's bitters, a coffee house named for a cognac, a switch to rye, an absinthe ban and a local substitute: the Sazerac is the city's drink by law since 2008, and its story is half record and half legend.
6 min read · 10 sources
The vermouth age · 1860 to 1910
When Italian and French vermouth reached American bars in the decades after the Civil War, the cocktail changed shape. The Manhattan came first, the Martinez followed, and the Martini spent fifty years getting drier.
5 min read · 5 sources
The grand hotel bar · 1893 to 1939
Between the 1890s and the 1930s the grand hotel bar became the cocktail's finishing school: the Waldorf's brass rail, the Savoy under Ada Coleman and Harry Craddock, the Ritz in Paris, the Long Bar at Raffles.
6 min read · 11 sources
Prohibition · 1920 to 1933
When the United States went dry in 1920, its bartenders did not stop working. They moved. Paris, London and above all Havana took them in, and the cocktail came home thirteen years later speaking rum and French.
6 min read · 7 sources
The tiki era · 1934 to 1980
A Hollywood bar in 1934, an Oakland rival, a Mai Tai with two fathers and a Puerto Rican hotel drink: the tropical cocktail was an American invention, and the people whose islands it borrowed have something to say about it.
6 min read · 9 sources
The revival · 1987 to 2015
In the late 1980s a New York bartender was told to find a copy of Jerry Thomas. By 2005 New York had a hidden bar with house rules, a gin temple in SoHo and a generation that squeezed its own juice. How the classics came back.
6 min read · 10 sources