Jerry Thomas and the Bar-Tender's Guide

Jerry Thomas wrote the first American book of drink recipes. Harry Johnson wrote the first book that told you how to run the bar you poured them in. Between 1862 and 1900 their pages turned a trade handed down by word of mouth into something you could study.

The Professor

Jeremiah P. Thomas was born on 30 October 1830 at Sackets Harbor, on the New York shore of Lake Ontario. He started as a barback in New Haven, went to sea in 1847 or 1848, reached San Francisco in 1849 and tried the gold fields, and came back east in 1851. For the next thirty years he worked behind the most prominent bars in the country: the Planter's House in St. Louis, where he was head bartender, the Metropolitan Hotel in New York, the Occidental in San Francisco, and a string of his own places on Broadway, run with his brother George.

He was, by every account, a performer. Difford's Guide collects the details: diamond cufflinks and stickpins, a custom bar kit said, perhaps, to have cost as much as five thousand dollars, and a season running an American bar at London's Cremorne Gardens that he advertised by dropping leaflets from a hot-air balloon. The nickname the Professor was attached to him later, by the journalist Herbert Asbury in 1928, but it fits the man who treated the bar as a stage.

June 1862

How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant's Companion was published by Dick and Fitzgerald of New York in June 1862, in the second year of the Civil War. The title page also called it The Bar-Tender's Guide, and the book has gone by both names ever since. It was the first of its kind: a book of American mixed drinks, organized into families (cocktails, juleps, sours, punches, cobblers, smashes) and written by a working bartender rather than a housekeeper or a physician.

Its importance is less in what it invented than in what it fixed. Thomas collected what the trade already knew and put it in order, which is why the book was plagiarized almost immediately and why it became, as the Cocktail Kingdom Library puts it, a de facto standard for the American bar. A second edition in 1876 added the Collins, the Fizz and the Improved Cocktail. A third appeared in 1887, two years after his death, and was probably assembled by the publisher without him. The 1887 edition is the one that includes the Martinez, which has caused a century of confusion about whether Thomas had anything to do with that drink.

The Blue Blazer

Of all the recipes in the book, Thomas claimed only two as his own, and one of them is the Blue Blazer. The instructions are simple and alarming. Put a measure of Scotch whisky and the same of boiling water together in one of two silver-plated mugs, set it alight, and pour the burning liquid from mug to mug four or five times so that it forms a long stream of blue flame. Sweeten with sugar, finish with lemon peel and serve in a small glass.

The usual origin story has a customer, often described as a miner, asking for something strong enough to warm him through, and Thomas inventing the drink on the spot in a San Francisco saloon. Some tellings put it at the El Dorado, others at the Occidental. The Oxford Companion records that Thomas called the drink solely his own in a lost second book of 1863, adds that this might not be strictly true, and notes that bartenders at New York's St. Nicholas Hotel were setting their toddies alight at about the same time. Treat the anecdote as a good story. The recipe is the documented part.

A rival with a different book

Harry Johnson was born in Prussia in 1845 and, by his own account, was left ashore in San Francisco in 1862 after a shipboard injury. He opened a bar in Chicago in 1868, lost it in the 1871 fire, managed a large bar staff at Philadelphia's Grand Exposition Hotel in 1876 and arrived in New York in 1878, where he worked at Delmonico's before running his own places on the Bowery. The Oxford Companion notes, with some care, that Johnson's accounts of his own life were unreliable, and that no surviving copy of the 1869 manual he claimed to have written matches his description of it.

What has been found is the 1882 edition. The Library of Congress scan on the Internet Archive shows a 189-page book printed in New York by Samisch and Goldmann: Harry Johnson's New and Improved Bartender's Manual, printed in English and German, with fifty thousand copies run off. The 1888 revision would carry the first recipe printed under the name Martini, but the recipes are not why the book matters. Twenty-four pages of the 1882 edition tell the reader how to manage and operate a bar: how to treat staff, how to keep the place clean, how to handle customers and money. By the 1900 edition that section had grown to 157 pages.

The trade becomes a profession

Punch's survey of bar manuals draws the distinction cleanly. Thomas wrote a recipe book, and every recipe book since follows his template: drinks grouped by family, notes on tools and technique, a few jokes. Johnson wrote a manual, and the manual is a different instrument. It assumes that bartending is a career with standards that can be taught, that a bar has procedures, and that the person behind it is responsible for more than the glass in front of them. The New York Sun called Johnson the Dean Emeritus of his profession in 1910.

Thomas did not get to see any of this settle. He lost his money in stock speculation, moved to smaller rooms, worked for others, and by 1885 his flamboyant style had gone out of fashion next to quieter technicians. He died in New York on 14 December 1885 and is buried at Woodlawn. His family earned nothing from the later editions. Johnson left bartending around 1890 to work as a consultant and died in Berlin in 1930.

Their books outlived them both. When Dale DeGroff was asked to build a classic cocktail program for the Rainbow Room in the late 1980s, he was told to find a copy of Thomas.

Folklore and fact

Fact: the 1862 publication date, the 1876 and 1887 editions, the 1882 Johnson printing and its management chapter are documented in the books themselves and in library records. Folklore: the Blue Blazer anecdote, the rival's championship belt, the 1869 manual that sold ten thousand copies, and the story of Thomas hurling a bowl of Tom and Jerry across Johnson's bar. Those live in later retellings, not in the period record.

Sources

• Thomas, Jerry. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, David Wondrich, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-83
• Jerry Thomas. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/2882/people/jerry-thomas
• Johnson, Harry. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, Anistatia R. Miller and Jared M. Brown, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-63
• Harry Johnson's new and improved bartender's manual, 1882. Internet Archive, from the Library of Congress. https://archive.org/details/harryjohnsonsnew00john
• Is the Era of the Bar Manual Over? Punch, Andrew Amelinckx, 2014. https://punchdrink.com/articles/is-the-era-of-the-bar-manual-over/
• Jerry Thomas. Cocktail Kingdom Library, undated. https://library.cocktailkingdom.com/exh.figures.thomas_jerry.html
• Blue Blazer. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, David Wondrich, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-260
• Harry Johnson. Cocktail Kingdom Library, undated. https://library.cocktailkingdom.com/exh.figures.johnson_harry.html
• Classic: Martinez. Australian Bartender, Amy Spanton, 2013. https://australianbartender.com.au/2013/04/17/classic-martinez/