There isn’t a definitive explanation about how the Ford Cocktail got its name, so we get to do a whole lot of speculation on this cocktail. Dating back to at least 1895, it is a little too early to be named after the Henry of car fame. Luckily, there are so many other Ford options to choose from! Based on the timeframe, we explore Malcolm Webster Ford, a track and field athlete with daddy issues and a tragic end. A descendant of Noah and Daniel Webster, he came from a long line of literary talen...
Mar 29, 2015•54 min
I like a cocktail that tells you what it does for you. The Fogcutter lets you know right away, that this drink is going to clear away the cobwebs. How many cocktails can boast that it can make you less foggy? In this episode we take a look at this tropical drink that brings in the titans of tiki, Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber. This mid-20th century cocktail is generally attributed to Vic Bergeron, but saw a good deal of variation on the ingredients as different bartenders gave it their own ...
Mar 28, 2015•53 min
The ingredients of The Flying Dutchman cocktail resemble a cold remedy, so I hope you like citrus! Or have a cold. This drink has orange gin, orange juice, lemon juice for extra Vitamin C, and a couple drops of Angostura bitters for color perhaps? Or digestion? Maybe just for fun? We don’t really know, because this cocktail is short on information about why and how it came to be. This one truly may have been a forgotten cocktail. We take a quick gander at the unusual ingredient that is orange gi...
Mar 27, 2015•1 hr 13 min
This Fish House Punch takes us to all the way back to colonial America and includes stories you probably didn’t learn in elementary school. This punch is truly a monster in a glass, or maybe a goblet, or bowl, or whatever people drank punch out of in the 18th century. Containing nearly all the booze and all the sugar, this surely guaranteed the founding fathers could stay up all night getting trashed while creating a nation. In this episode we discuss the origins of the Fish House Punch in the t...
Mar 26, 2015•57 min
Something about a cocktail named The Filmograph sort of screams early 20th century technology. “Folks! Gather around and see the future of moving pictures. Just a dime will introduce you to the wonders of the Filmograph!” We aren’t exactly sure what a Filmograph was, but it must have been something because we now have a drink named after it. With a lack of references to the drink and some vague information about film publications and projection machines, this one left us with a whole bunch of sp...
Mar 25, 2015•26 sec
If you do a quick search on the internet you will find any number of websites and blogs mentioning the Fairbank Cocktail, or more accurately, the Fairbanks Cocktail. You will also find that most confidently claim that the drink was named after actor Douglass Fairbanks. Occasionally, the voice of reason comes through and points to U.S. Vice President Charles Fairbanks as the origin for this drink. We here at the Black Liver Project try hard to do our research and present information as accurately...
Mar 24, 2015•29 sec
The East India Cocktail was first noted by Harry Johnson who claimed in his book in 1882 that this was a popular drink in among the British in India. It was hard to find any truth behind this, but it certainly sounds imperialistic. As we dive into East India Cocktail we discuss the long European colonial presence in the East, corporate interests evolving into national interests, as well as mutinies and rebellions. Come join us as we explore why this brandy-based cocktail might have been popular ...
Mar 17, 2015•45 min
Mar 11, 2015•2 hr 4 min
Many cocktails got their start in the medicinal realm, and you can often see the transformations over time from cure-all to tasty beverage. So when a drink with a name like the Doctor Cocktail comes along, it is fair to assume that your aches and pains might be relieved from the ingredients. It does have citrus in it, so the Vitamin C might be warding off that pesky scurvy. Other than that, we don’t have much of an idea of how it got the name. It seems to have originated sometime in the 1920s an...
Mar 04, 2015•34 min
The Diki-Diki cocktail sounds just dirty enough to make the 12 year-old boy in you giggle. Grow up! This is a sophisticated podcast. Hee-hee, it sounds like dick. The ingredients are definitely not the usual suspects, featuring the infrequently used grapefruit juice, the Normandy-based apple brandy, Calvados, and finally Swedish Punsch, an arrack-based liqueur. Wait a minute. No gin? No whiskey? No bitters? What kind of a cocktail is this? Unlike most of the cocktails we have covered, we know th...
Feb 23, 2015•33 min
So having done the Mint Julep, what more is there to say about derbies? We take a look at the Derby Cocktail which poses a few problems when trying to talk history about it. First, there are numerous recipes for Derby Cocktails, and none seem to be related to the others. Second, derby could be referring to any number of things like the Kentucky Derby, derby races, derby hats, Derby, England, or the Derby restaurant. So which is it? All and none! The many derbies generally have a common source th...
Feb 11, 2015•32 min
The Delicious Sour. I like a cocktail that tells you all you need to know right in the name. Sours are a family of cocktail going back a long way, with notable features of putting a lime or lemon peel in the glass and an egg white. We also dive into the life of William “The Only William” Schmidt, a bartender who some call the “godfather of mixology.” Acrobatic bartending feats, cranking out on-the-fly cocktails on a near daily basis, and creating cocktails with ten or more ingredients may have e...
Jan 27, 2015•1 hr 8 min
The Whiskey Sour is, er, well, whiskey with sour stuff in it. Sooo, good-bye? Just kidding, when there is nothing to talk about, we make something to talk about. This is another really, really old cocktail that is simple and has stayed relatively consistent with the ingredients until current day. It is definitely not the first sour out there, but it appears to have won the survival of the sour fittest contest against the brandy and gin sours. Join us as we explore this staple of the cocktail wor...
Jan 22, 2015•1 hr 42 min
The Curacao Punch is generally attributed to Harry Johnson, and if you spell it the correct way of “Curacao” it is the earliest it shows up in a recipe book. However, if you spell it “Curacoa” then Jerry Thomas printed it first in his recipe book. I thought he might have just spelled it wrong, but mentions of “Curacoa Punch” show up in newspapers and books as early as the 1830s, and a recipe shows up in a periodical from the 1840s. In our experience, it probably was around even before this. With...
Jan 20, 2015•1 hr 5 min
As we proceed with the forgotten cocktails, I’ve noticed that it’s more difficult to squeeze the interesting background out of them. Often it’s just a couple of words smashed together and attributed to a new recipe. In this episode’s cocktail it’s an attribution made in honor of a personality that I consider less than the cocktail inventor. The cocktail is named after the Italian-Sardinian general of the Crimean War. He was a dashing European fellow, Alfonso Ferrero Marmora, climbing the ladder ...
Jan 14, 2015•1 hr 14 min
We are going to go out on a limb and say that the Communist Cocktail is probably named after Communists. Nothing states it definitively, but…Communist. This drink calls for Cherry Bounce in the original recipe, an old cordial made from sour cherries, the pits, sugar and spices. Cherry Bounce: the 19th century’s answer to Kool-Aid! It is a relative of Cherry Brandy, and Cherry Heering, used in most recipes now. The red color of Cherry Bounce or Cherry Heering is probably the reason it ended up wi...
Jan 06, 2015•1 hr 31 min
In this episode we take a look at the Brooklyn cocktail, which looks to be the product of Jack Grohusko from the early part of the 20th century. Most cocktails take some wondering and digging and guessing in order to figure out why a bartender gave it a particular name. With the Brooklyn, we go out on a limb here and say that it is probably named after the borough in New York. Sometimes it is not worth overthinking. There is no indication as to why it is called the Brooklyn though. Was this a si...
Dec 30, 2014•30 min
The Blue Paradise, like many cocktails with blue in the name, is not blue. The ingredients must be blue then, right? Nope, purple, red and brown and we can pretty much guarantee that the mixing of these colors do not make blue either. This non-blue drink is credited to a Belgian bartender by the name of Emil Bauwens, of Bar Saint-James in Brussels, showing up first in the cocktail book Livre de Cocktails (1949) and really nowhere else. A name like Blue Paradise conjures images of beaches, palm t...
Dec 23, 2014•29 min
The Coffee Cocktail is unusual in that it does not contain any coffee in it, and if you go by the strict rules of what makes a cocktail, it isn’t that either. Jerry Thomas, who seems to be the first person to write the recipe down, calls it a “misnomer” because of the lack of coffee and bitters. He attributes the name to an appearance that sure looks a hell of a lot like coffee, and this seems to be backed up by others sources. Could the name also be a reference a cocktail you drink in the morni...
Dec 15, 2014•41 min
The Chatham Hotel Special is pretty mysterious because it is not altogether clear where the recipe for this cocktail even came from. We had a hard time even finding any mentions of this drink anywhere, so it made it a little difficult to discuss something that doesn't seem like it really exists. But that didn't stop us from talking about this cocktail that resembles a heavy dessert. There isn't a tremendous amount of information on the history of the hotel either. We had a name of a place at lea...
Nov 25, 2014•1 hr 6 min
We made it to 50 classic cocktails!! This is one of the lost COVID episodes and the final episode to be reproduced to replace an older version that didn't follow our usual format. This was done remotely with the usual team and a special guest Kristen Burton to give her input on the colonial aspects of the story we tell. The tasting team however was three of our regular cast of characters in a whole new Ward Eight bar post-pandemic. This all swirls around the Stone Fence, a colonial classic which...
Nov 19, 2014•3 hr 23 min•Ep. 50
Clearly the Blue Moon is named after the song, right? Nope, and if you run through the other references to blue moons it probably isn’t any of those either. Don’t try to figure it out, just drink it. The first place it is printed in a cocktail book is in Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1917) by Hugo R. Ensslin. However, it may have actually been the work of Joel Rinaldo, a proprietor of a Bohemian café during the early 1900s. Rumor has it that the Blue Moon was sort of a signature drink in this haven ...
Nov 04, 2014•1 hr 37 min
When I first heard the name of this drink, I was puzzled how one could get a cocktail name from a car's turn signal. Of course, this is another case wherein the "old timey" speak means something totally different from what it means today. Back at the turn of the 20th century, when this drink became popular, blinkers were the blinders horses wore to keep them looking forward and it also was a slang term for black eye...both of which might be good ways to describe what the drink might do to you. B...
Oct 06, 2014•57 min
If someone handed you a drink and told you it was called a Rattleskull, it would probably make you pause for a second, right? How could you not assume that you are about to drink something with the sole function of delivering blackouts and hangovers. Rum, brandy, and porter is surely no light concoction, but the name might be scarier than it actually is. Everything you find online about the Rattleskull lists this as an American colonial drink. Yay! History! Except there isn’t really any direct e...
Sep 17, 2014•1 hr 43 min
The Blackthorn Cocktail is a real puzzler. It's an example of another cocktail that has multiple versions, which is not that unusual, but in this case the resource we're using has the outlying recipe. The name of the cocktail sounds sinister but it's nothing more than a connection to a berry bush indigenous to the British Isles...a plant festooned with small plum-flavored berries commonly used to make a liqueur called sloe gin. Learning that I was excited because...plums...YUM! But in our book, ...
Sep 08, 2014•1 hr
Episode #45 I convinced Jay to come to the Brixton and record the history portion of the show. We sat down and Michael made us a couple of Bebbos . Our book tells us the word comes from an Indian dialect and means “toad”. If that’s true, there better be a reason, however, there is none we can find. Even if it’s a mistaken translation from bebdo (which means “drunk”), there needs to be an explanation why we’re delving into Konkani to name cocktails. Otherwise, it could be an African word or an It...
Aug 07, 2014•33 min
Episode #44 features a popular personality from the cocktail era: Mr. PT Barnum. The name of the cocktail refers to Barnum's supposed famous saying that a "sucker is born every minute." But even as we look into this cocktail we can't verify much of anything and even the attribution of that phrase seems off. Given that Barnum was a temperance speaker from 1850 to his death, an attribution from him directly seems unlikely. We doubt he was making cocktails or ordering cocktails for himself or anyon...
Jul 01, 2014•52 min
Initially we all figured that this cocktail history would be a slam dunk. It has a name of a person...it's named after someone. It has to be easy to find out. We couldn't have been more wrong. This drink was a complete mystery. Jay could not find any references to it anywhere prior to our source book from 2009. So we couldn't find the source...and from there we couldn't identify the origin of the name. Looking at the name Barbara West itself, we searched for Barbara Wests of note. There is a Bar...
Jun 24, 2014•4 min
Jun 16, 2014•1 hr 43 min
Episode #41 takes us once again to New Orleans to sit down with a lesser known yet still classic cocktail, the Arnaud’s Special. In 1918 a French wine merchant, Arnaud Cazanave, moved to New Orleans to open a restaurant, aptly named Arnaud’s, and live the American dream. Unfortunately, in the next year Prohibition threatened to end that dream. With everything on the line, Arnaud basically ignored the law and continued serving alcohol at his establishment in secret rooms or in coffee cups. He was...
Jun 11, 2014•1 hr
