Monster in a Glass

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 whol...

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...

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...

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 Rattle...

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...

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 explanat...

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...

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...

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 ignore...

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...

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 t...

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...

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...

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 cent...

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 evolu...

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...

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 196...

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 b...

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...

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...

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, A...