Category: cocktails
-
Don’t Drink and Send Telegrams – and Other Advice from 100 Years of Cocktail Etiquette Books
My first story for Food & Wine just went live. I took advice from 95 years of cocktail etiquette books, beginning in 1930 and ending with the publication of How to Be a Better Drinker last week [amazon] [bookshop]. I had fun going through my cocktail book collection to find other etiquette books, including The…
-
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Esquire magazine printed an article with the Ten Best Cocktails of 1934 – the year after Prohibition was repealed.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…
-
The Cocktail is the International Alcoholic Esperanto
Here’s a fun excerpt: The American Mercury 1924-09: Vol 3 Iss 9 CLINICAL NOTESBY 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…
-
From Salad in a Glass to Centrifuge: A Cocktail Evolution
This story was originally published on AlcoholProfessor.com. From Salad in a Glass to Centrifuge: A Cocktail Evolution Recently I was thinking about the early years of the craft cocktail renaissance, and how many of the drinks were quite… chunky. And I realized that we can track a lot of the progression in bartending via the…
-
Thirty Four New Drink Books for Fall 2024
Update 2: Now this list is up to 34 books Update 1: Detailed reviews of many of these books in my story for AlcoholProfessor are here. Citrus: A World History A Forager's Guide to Wild Drinks: Ferments, infusions and thirst-quenchers for every season Sicilian Cocktails: Contemporary Island Mixology Flavor Lab Creations: A Physicist’s Guide…
-
The Gibson is a New York Drink Gone Big in San Francisco
It was believed that the Gibson cocktail was created in San Francisco. In this 2008 blog post I cited what David Wondrich told us on a tour. The information is repeated in the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails: But now new information has come to light. Martin Doudoroff shared information from a tweet on…
-
The Five Best Drink Books of 2023
This year I read more than 40 books, mostly about drinks. My top five favorites are below. This list is not actually the best drink books of the year, but my favorites. (And my favorite technically came out in 2022.) I wrote the title for SEO! What I want out of drink books is new…
-
Dots are So Hot Right Now
I hadn’t noticed just how many different ways bartenders were incorporating the same basic shape until I saw them all together on the menu at the bistro Causwells in San Francisco. “This whole menu I just gravitated to circles,” says Elmer Mejicanos, beverage director and managing partner. “I should have called it the circle menu.”…