Month: January 2025

Esquire’s Best and Worst Cocktails of 1934

Esquire magazine printed an article with the Ten Best Cocktails of 1934 – the year after Prohibition was repealed. They included at the end a list of the Worst cocktails as well.

Esquire’s link to the story is here, but it requires a subscription to view.

DiffordsGuide has the list of best and worst, but not the entire article it comes from.

Here’s the Worst list:

I’ve seen this list in a lot of places online, but never the full article, so I went to the San Francisco Public Library yesterday and took it out of the archives.

I didn’t realize that not only was Esquire huge in size something like 11 x 17 back then, but also had a ton of pages. It was basically a book every month.

January 14, 2025
Heinold’s First and Last Chance Over the Years

I stumbled across this thread on Threads -it’s a history of the wonderful and historic the bar Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon in Oakland’s Jack London Square, as seen through pictures of its front.

If you haven’t been, Heinold’s is a little shack built from the remains of a paddle steamer boat, which opened in 1884 (or 1883, depending on which history you believe). The interior of the tiny bar runs on an extreme slant as the ground beneath it compressed during the 1906 earthquake. The bar is so angled that if you set a full pint of beer on top it will likely pour out of the side – they sometimes offer coasters in a wedge shape like a doorstop so that drinks stay flat! It’s a magic place.

The post was put together by the San Francisco Ghost Signs Mapping Project.

Here are a few pics and I’d recommend you follow the entire thread, it’s great and there are a lot more to see.

January 13, 2025
The Cocktail is the International Alcoholic Esperanto

Here’s a fun excerpt:

The American Mercury 1924-09: Vol 3 Iss 9

CLINICAL NOTES
BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN AND H. L. MENCKEN

The cocktail, once observed George Ade, follows the American flag. That was twenty years ago. The flags of all nations today follow the cocktail. Its fame has spread over the globe, and justly. It has captured the English and the French, the Danes and the Italians. Five o'clock in Piccadilly brings its gin and vermouth and dash of bitters as five o'clock along the grand boulevards brings its iced brandy and gum syrup and dash of Byrth. It is the gift of smiling America to lackadaisical Europe. It is the international alcoholic Esperanto.

January 6, 2025
Make Clear Ice Shell Shot Glasses, Bowls, and Other Shapes
Most of us ice nerds know about making a clear ice sphere shell as pioneered by The Aviary, but you can use the same easy technique to make other shapes.

The technique to make the ice shell for a drink inside a sphere can be found in The Ice Book – and you can also find it in this story in Imbibe Magazine.

Inspired by a video of a Midwestern lady who used the same technique to make covers for ice lanterns in 5-gallon pails, I made some other shapes.

Notes and Tips for making Ice Shell Containers
- Fill a plastic container with water and leave the top off. Freeze for a few hours until you can see a shell forming around the insides.
- The top layer will be thicker than the bottom and sides, so keep that in mind.
- After the first few hours I dipped the container in warm water to loosen it and slid out the shell. I put it back in the freezer outside of the container so that the bottom would freeze faster.
- After the layer is thick enough, poke a hole and let the interior water drain.
- I expanded the holes using a metal stick dipped into hot/boiling water. See below for another method.
For this shot glass below, I used the copper pan bottom to melt off the top of the shape entirely. I think it looks great. The downside is that you loose a lot of the height of the shot glass this way, so this would be best in a taller container.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider purchasing a copy of The Ice Book to help support this blog, thanks!
January 3, 2025