Occasionally we will find cocktails where you can see a clear linear progression or evolution. This ain’t one of those. In this episode, we tackle the messy and minty history of the Mint Julep. While there is a pretty standard recipe nowadays for a Mint Julep, its early iterations varied from state to state and bartender to bartender. It might be change from brandy to bourbon or add fruit, or lots of fruit, or in one case ice cream and rosebuds. There was also a whole bunch of different methods ...
Jun 02, 2014•1 hr 32 min
May 21, 2014•2 hr 3 min
Oscar Wilde said, “When good Americans die, they go to Paris”. Not long after, many Americans came to Europe and died in the first World War. When the war ended many Americans stayed in Europe, often the more intellectual set of writers and artists including Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. At the time they were discovering the art and culture of their ancestors and a way of life devoted to experiencing the world’s richness, the United States was collapsing in on itself in a schizophrenic p...
May 16, 2014•1 hr 30 min
The recipe goes essentially unchanged since the days that Jerry Thomas put the recipe in print in 1862. While many might attribute the recipe to Thomas because it shows up in his recipe book, we know that he, like many bartenders, were trying to fill out the books for publication. If you want to find the origin of the cocktail, you will have to look back before Thomas put the recipe down. Mentions of a Knickerbocker cocktail show up on the menu in Peter Bent Brigham’s oyster saloon in Boston, at...
May 06, 2014•1 hr 56 min
When you name a cocktail the Park Avenue, you are telling everyone that this is a rich and swanky drink. There isn’t a whole lot of history on this cocktail, so we take a deep look at one of the ingredients, Pineapple juice. Join us as we explore pineapples, how pineapple juice came to be, and the history of the Dole Company. We also take a quick look at that famous street that the cocktail takes its name from.
Apr 23, 2014•1 hr 34 min
Apr 17, 2014•2 hr
Apr 10, 2014•1 hr 58 min
Putting the word “corpse” in anything you are going to consume is probably a mistake, but Corpse Revivers seem to have weathered any associations with dead stuff. When you look at the name closely you pick up right away that this cocktail is intended to clear out the cobwebs and get you right up out of your grave, er, bed I mean. This one is an old one showing up in newspapers in the mid-19th century as a pick-me-up with a notably unusual name. As we learned with the Old-Fashioned episode, peopl...
Apr 02, 2014•1 hr 40 min
If you asked the average person to name a cocktail, The Cosmopolitan would probably be on the short list. If you asked the average person what was in it, you might not get past vodka in a martini glass with some other stuff. It is a heavily-recognized cocktail for sure, but it is it anything more than a souped-up vodka and cranberry? Join us as we head way, way, back to the 1980s to talk the evolution and disputed origins of this cocktail. We also discuss what cosmopolitan means, the drinks cult...
Mar 24, 2014•1 hr 48 min
You say Blood and Sand and it generates images of a switchblade fight on a beach. The consensus though is that this cocktail is named for the 1922 bullfighting movie starring silent-movie era heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino. Most likely originating from Harry Craddock, it appears in the Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930 first, and not many other places after that. There is no indication as to why Craddock called the cocktail a Blood and Sand, but we dive into the possibilities. Was he a fan of the film,...
Feb 24, 2014•1 hr 53 min
The Rusty Nail sounds like a rough cocktail, something that requires you to get a tetanus shot after you drink it. The ingredients don’t necessarily live up to the harsh name, but I hope you like Scotch! This drink is just Scotch, and the Scotch-based liqueur Drambuie for extra scotchiness and a bit of sweet. This cocktail, which really doesn’t start to appear with its dangerous name until the 1960s, involved a lot of piecing together and chasing legends to get the full story. This is the first ...
Feb 13, 2014•2 hr 6 min
There are a couple of things to note about the Calvados Cocktail. One, it does in fact have Calvados in it so no misdirection there. Two, there is a whole lot of orange-flavor in this one, with orange juice, Cointreau, and orange bitters. I am not sure if the Calvados Cocktail gives you any Vitamin C, but hey, there is no harm in trying it if you want to get tipsy while fighting a cold. An apple brandy, Calvados is only Calvados if it comes from the Normandy region. This French cousin to the Ame...
Feb 10, 2014•35 min
While the recipe for Rob Roy cocktail is pretty standard today, it wasn’t always that way. Variations occur from the earliest appearances in cocktail books and continue on pretty much throughout the 20th century. So how do we get to a standard for a drink often referred to as a Scotch Manhattan? We discuss this mystery and the origins of this cocktail in the late 1800s, where Rob Roy seemed to be a pretty popular name for all kinds of things like hats, plaids, racing horses, an operetta, and of ...
Jan 30, 2014•2 hr 15 min
The Pimm’s Cup is obviously a cup, right? I mean it is in the name. So why was it advertised as “the original gin sling?” Or is it actually a punch? Is Pimm’s No. 1 a cup? Or is Pimm’s Cup a cup? And just what are cups, punches, and slings? All these questions will be answered, and not answered as we explore this simple, yet complicated drink. You may want to take notes on this one to follow along. There isn’t a whole lot to this drink, so the focus of this episode is on the origins. Digging thr...
Jan 21, 2014•2 hr 9 min
In this episode we delve into the concept of extinct cocktail ingredients. It’s hard to put your finger on these dearly departed until you discover by happenstance, as I did, that you can’t complete the recipe. I stumbled into this circumstance by choosing the Amarosa Cocktail, another classic cocktail in the pantheon of aged beverages, but when I surveyed the list of ingredients there was one, Amaro Cora, that Michael said he didn’t have. When that happens I take it upon myself to acquire the m...
Jan 13, 2014•1 hr 14 min
Was there ever any doubt that at some point in history there would be a cocktail with the name Hanky Panky, when cocktails so often have the reputation of leading to lascivious funny business? Whether the name was a reference to the cause, prevention, or embodiment of sexual activity, or completely unrelated is not totally clear. We explore the different uses of the term over time, and one of the stories behind the creation of the cocktail to see if we can nail down the intention of the name. We...
Jan 06, 2014•1 hr 41 min
When it comes to consistency, the Horse’s Neck cocktail has a whole big lack of it. This cocktail started off with no booze in it, and then added really any booze you had on hand. As time went on, it was sometimes alcoholic, sometimes not. Sometimes it had alternate names like Horse’s Neck Highball, Stiff Horse’s Neck, Horse’s Neck with a Kick, or even Horse’s Collar. The only real consistency was that it had ginger ale in it, and a lemon peel in it. If you order one nowadays, the end of the pee...
Jan 01, 2014•1 hr 39 min
Likely a drink from Britain or its colonies in the early 1920s this drink comes in two versions, curled with curacao or straight with Grand Marnier. Despite looking hard for the nature of the name, we couldn't find a direct connection with the drink. We trained our focus upon the idea of Satan, it's origins and how the idea of the king of the underworld evolved over 4 millenia.
Dec 13, 2013•1 hr 58 min
For a pink drink that is nothing more than a glass of gin with Angostura bitters, Pink Gin wins the award for being the simplest cocktail with the most obvious name. With so few ingredients, it can’t be that strong though, right? Don’t let the color fool you, it is nothing more than a glass of gin with a few more dashes of booze. For flavor. Pink Gin is commonly known as a tradition of British Royal Navy officers, but did it actually start there? Join us this episode as we explore this drink’s p...
Nov 19, 2013•1 hr 44 min
The Bloody Mary is another one of those cocktails that people have been fighting over for nearly a century. Because of its age and popularity it surely is a classic, but I think part of its popularity has been earned by its shock value. I think it's the kind of drink people suggest to elicit "ewws" but because it's actually good, it has stuck around as more than just a joke. Capping it off with a name deserving of a horror show, you have a classic with some staying power. The drink has two origi...
Nov 12, 2013•1 hr 5 min
The Singapore Sling has a bit of a tricky history to piece out. Most recipes nowadays have pineapple juice, and attribute the Singapore Sling recipe to the Raffles Hotel in 1915. While some evidence points in that general direction, it is hard to confirm. What muddies the waters is changing ingredients from reference to reference, bouncing between simple gin sling-based recipes to something that resembles a tropical drink. For additional confusion, sometimes it is a Singapore Sling, sometimes a ...
Nov 05, 2013•1 hr 57 min
The story of the Algonquin Cocktail is truly a fascinating, confusing, and possibly widely misattributed one. I had heard this story before and loved learning about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Roundtable. In 1919 a group of writers, actors and intellectuals began to frequent the Algonquin for lunch every day. They were known as the Algonquin Round Table or later, The Vicious Circle. These artists were the intellectual elite of their day. They became a social group that partied together in t...
Oct 29, 2013•1 hr 5 min
With this episode, we're going back to the front of the book to a cocktail we've done previously, but as we continue the mission to convert all of the previous episodes to the new format, we learn a lot more about these bygone beverages and have a ton of fun in the process. The name alone fills one with excitement. What is it? It sounds jungley, or rather it sounds like a name given by Europeans for something coming from Africa. Is it a drink favored by big game hunters of the 1920’s? Is it a dr...
Oct 22, 2013•1 hr 12 min
Grog sounds like the name of a caveman, but if you have any knowledge of the drink it might drum up images of being on a pirate ship. With good reason too. In the early incarnation you drank your watered-down 18th century rum from Admiral Vernon and you got back to work. Maybe a little more sober than you wanted. Like most drinks with simple ingredients and a long history, they evolve. More ingredients are available, bartenders get creative, and people start wanting their grog with a little umbr...
Oct 14, 2013•1 hr 19 min
Most accounts say the Negroni is based on the Americano, with Campari as the featured ingredient in all of its bitter, bright red glory. The Negroni is what happens when the Americano gets more American, and by that I mean dumping the soda and adding more booze. Unfortunately, gaps in the timeline and sparse written evidence make it difficult to have a nice clean evolutionary trail from the Americano to the Negroni. We have the invention of Campari in 1860 and the appearance of the Americano in ...
Oct 02, 2013•2 hr 6 min
To say that the Sazerac Cocktail is synonymous with New Orleans would probably be an understatement. It is a cultural icon, a sense of pride, and its importance to the city can’t be denied. It also has one hell of a messy history. Really messy. For real, it almost broke us trying to piece it together. There are all sorts of stories as to how it came about, but it is difficult to pull out the truth from half-truths from legends from mistakes from deliberate lies. The Sazerac is a cocktail where t...
Sep 27, 2013•1 hr 49 min
In this episode we dive into the history of champagne. We've had champagne in cocktails before, though not often, but this is the first drink that features champagne specifically by name. What better cocktail to discuss the background of the bubbly. Champagne comes from the Champagne region in France. The wine is fermented and bottled but then the weather turns cold and prematurely stops the fermentation. Once the weather warms up again, the fermentation kicks in again in the bottle. It's this o...
Sep 12, 2013•1 hr 15 min
Cocktails are all about crafting, sipping, and enjoying the experience. To many, creating a cocktail is equivalent to cooking a fine meal. Raw ingredients carefully mixed to generate a taste that is to be savored, to be discussed for the nuances of the flavors and the way the ingredients play off one another. And then we have the Long Island Iced Tea! This monster of a drink features all the booze with about 1 ounce each of five different liquors, and just 2 ounces of those pesky non-alcoholic i...
Sep 11, 2013•1 hr 42 min
The Moscow Mule shows up in very few cocktail books for something that seems to be one of the most popular cocktails ever. This one was exciting because got some new ingredients to talk about with Vodka and Ginger Beer. Vodka as an ingredient has not shown up in many episodes, mostly due to how little the liquor was used in cocktails up to the 1950s. Supposedly, the Moscow Mule turned this around and made vodka popular. Not so fast, we have some thoughts about how true this is. A first for us, t...
Sep 09, 2013•2 hr 5 min
The Old-Fashioned Cocktail is probably one of the most famous cocktails ever, so you are almost not a cocktail bar nowadays if you don’t have some version on your menu. Researching the Old-Fashioned was a daunting idea at first, if for no other reason than being called something as non-descript as old fashioned. We can assume that it is probably referring to something very old, and in this case it turned out to be the true, original cocktail. The first, the prime, the archetype, the Elder cockta...
Aug 28, 2013•1 hr 57 min
