A Spirited Revival

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Spearheaded by a new generation of mixologists and a tasty array of boutique spirits, the classic cocktail is back with a passion.

YOU WOULDN’T KNOW IT BY LOOKING AT a drink menu today, but prior to these halcyon days of boutique spirits and organic infusions was a dark age for the cocktail: an age when drinks named for lewd public acts usurped the menu space once reserved for the martini and the Manhattan; an age when we weren’t taking our drinking cues from sophisticated gadabouts like Jay Gatsby—not to mention those slickly sinister ad men on Mad Men—but rather from the oafish fraternity brothers in Animal House. Even James Bond didn’t have the good sense to ask for his martini to be stirred. But then something changed. Some time around the end of the last century, we remembered how to enjoy a well-made drink. And we realized what we’d been missing. Here we present an ode to the cocktail. Raise a glass.

“A GLASS OF COCKTAI L”

The history of the cocktail is, perhaps appropriately, somewhat difficult to piece together. As a result, today’s cocktail aficionadoes tend to use Occam’s Razor when trying to divine the origins of the drink.“We disprove and eliminate everything we can to see what options are still on the board,” says Charles Joly, chief mixologist at the Chicago lounge The Drawing Room.

We do know a couple things for certain. The first use of the word ‘cocktail’ occurred on April 28, 1803, when a New Hampshire paper called The Farmer’s Cabinet used it in a humor piece: A bon vivant’s faux diary entry makes reference to “a glass of cocktail— excellent for the head.” It was never clear, however, what exactly went into said cocktail.

Greater specificity came three years later, in the May 6, 1806 issue of the Hudson, New York,magazine The Balance and Columbian Repository. An editor, responding to a letter from a reader, wrote: “A cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time it fuddles the head.”

But why call it a cocktail? There are enough theories about that to fuddle one’s head as well. One has it that an American tavern owner kept alcohol in a ceramic rooster. When patrons wanted a round they simply patted its tail. Another claims that cock-tail, a term used for mixed-breed horses, migrated over to the realm of mixed drinks. Like most tales told by a suspiciously sincere and charismatic tippler, half the fun lies in wondering how much of what you’re hearing is true.

A TIME OF TRANSITION

The art of the cocktail took a decided step backward after World War II, as Americans, desperate to escape the trauma of that conflict, found nothing quite as desirable as the status quo. “America shifted focus in the fifties,” says Joly. “TV dinners seemed great. Americans developed bland palettes.”

This was around the same time that vodka, which would go on to outsell both whiskey and gin in the U.S., began its ascendency, one aided by, of all things, Prohibition. “Coming out of Prohibition, you could put fermented grain in a still and have vodka tomorrow,” says Joly. “Whiskey needs at least two years in a barrel.” The general flattening of the American palette also gave vodka an edge over a more dynamic spirit like gin. “The American palette was primed for [vodka’s] lightness,” says Joly. “We developed a fear of flavor.”

A NEW GOLDEN AGE

It’s not that Americans lost their taste buds altogether; the popularity of shows like The French Chef in the early sixties spoke to a national craving for the finer things. But nobody seemed overly concerned with reviving the cocktail.

“In 1987, you couldn’t find a cocktail menu in New York,” says Dale DeGroff. This comes as a shock to anyone who knows how difficult it is to throw an olive in most American cities these days and have it land more than 100 meters from a martini menu. Those of us who are happy about this proliferation of well-crafted drinks have DeGroff to thank.

As a bartender for New York’s famed Rainbow Room in the late eighties, DeGroff took a gourmet approach to mixing drinks, incorporating culinary techniques from the kitchen and updating his menu throughout the year to capitalize on seasonal ingredients. Today, such practices are almost common. In 1987, they were unheard of.

But for all this cocktail innovation, the rule has always been to honor the past when contemplating the future. “You have to understand the classics if you want to build on them,” says Brian Miller, bartender at New York cocktail bar Death & Company.

This expansion on the classics has been helped, in no small measure, by the people doing the drinking.

“People are savvier about cocktails,” says Miller, “especially with all the blogs and people writing about cocktails now. People are demanding more from their drinks.”

Miller makes an essential point: It is easier than ever to be an aficionado, not just of cocktails but of anything. To keep up, Charles Joly incorporates subtle touches like edible flowers and baby horseradish spears, which he buys from an organic farm in Ohio, in his drinks.

There are also more premium artisanal spirits on the market than ever before. Just as micro-brewed beer has enjoyed a renaissance during the past decade, so too have smaller, independently produced gins and rums and bourbons. Of course, as anyone who has ever confronted the disturbing proliferation of apple-tinis can tell you, newer is not necessarily better.

“It’s like a hit song,” says Miller. “You want something that’s going to endure.”

Dale DeGroff has faith that those looking back on the cocktail’s current moment will see it that way.

“This is a new golden age, without a doubt,” he says. “There are more culinary possibilities now than there have been since the 19th century.”

The best bartenders are constantly making connections between what’s happening now and what was happening during the cocktail’s last golden age, as if they have responsibility to both live up to and expand upon what came before.

“The cocktail is so rooted in our culture,” says DeGroff. “It’s an individualistic drink for an individualistic society. We had ingredients coming from the old world and from the new world and we threw them all in a drink. The cocktail is almost a metaphor for us because America is such a blend of people. It’s almost poetry.”