Monster in a Glass

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...

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...

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.

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 Roy...

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...

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 r...

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.  Thes...

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 f...

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 ingred...

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 Americ...

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...

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 ferme...

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...

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...

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...

When we did this episode originally we focused on the Hemingway Daiquiri. In our book "Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails" there is a La Floridita Daiquiri, which apparently was also served at Hemingway's favorite hangout in Cuba, but then we needed to look into the origin of daiquiris in general. Basically a daiquiri is rum, sugar and lime juice and lots of cracked ice. Once again, here is a...

I learned a lot this episode. With this mixed drink I learned more about Cuba, Coca-Cola, the Spanish American War and the Cuban Revolution and I learned that the standard rum and Coke originally had a different name. [caption id="attachment_906" align="alignright" width="300"] Cuban Revolutionaries in Tampa.[/caption] The Cuba Libre is essentially a rum and Coke with lime juice added. I had no id...

As we have been doing these cocktails for a while, we have come to recognize several scenarios in how cocktails get their name, how their ingredients evolve and how they become popular. The Aviation follows one of these patterns so exquisitely that it serves as a perfect example to demonstrate how a cocktail with a popular name evolves into a winner. Jay started his research with information every...

This is an amazing episode. Since we recorded it, I've flipped it back and forth in my mind considering the content. My position on the  Gimlet story has changed since I first heard it, but I'm still astounded by how it all comes together. Jason started be describing how he located the recipe first in Patrick Gavin Duffy's book, The Official Mixer's Manual  and then verified that it was also in th...

The Martini is another one of those cocktails that is legendary in the world of classic cocktails. It's so major that the glass it is served in is a symbolic archetype for cocktail round the world. That's huge. Many other drinks try to borrow some of that presence through -tini association. The problem is that it's kind of hard to figure out just what a Martini is. As Jason unfolded the story of t...

The first thing I learned about this cocktail is that when you tell the story of the Margarita you have to tell the story of tequila.  Because tequila was virtually unheard of prior to the 1930s, there are no mixed drinks using it in the time period when most cocktails would earn their classification as classics. The first form of tequila is the beverage pulque, derived from the mashed and ferment...

This episode was really great to create.  There is a ton of post WWI information that we learned and some surprising technological developments we learned of from that time.  But not only that, we had a lot of fun and tried a really great, truly classic cocktail. Jason nailed the origins of this drink pretty succinctly.  This drink is often attributed to Paris barman Harry McElhone, as he was esse...

The Tom Collins got me. The Tom Collins is another one of the old classics that is still around today and because it has been around so long...the history has become muddled and essentially lost.  Jason found the earliest recorded instance of the recipe was a version in Australia called the John Collins.  Now, traditionally there is a difference between the John Collins, made with Holland gin, and...

I think this episode is a great example of what we mean when we say “…history through cocktails”.  It would be easy to think that every cocktail origin story is precise and worthy of storytime.  As it turns out, we’re pretty excited when we discover a cocktail that is directly and causally correlated to a particular event.  Most cocktails might be created in honor of a person or thing, but just as...

We're kicking off the series with the cocktail that I think of as THE cocktail of cocktails...the Manhattan . At the front of the show, Mr. Jason Kruse, our researcher, and I sat and discussed what he discovered while tracking down the origins of the Manhattan. First of all, the Manhattan's claim to fame as the longest unchanged cocktail stands up to the available information. The first version we...