Category: history
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The Old Fashioned and the Champagne Cocktail are the Same Drink
Well, more or less. In my latest for Food & Wine, I trace the origin of both drinks and how they each deviated from the original Cocktail. Read it here.
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103 Things to Drink in San Francisco, 1855
I am reading the 1855 book Land of Gold, Reality Versus Fiction by Hinton Helper. You can find it online here. It talks a lot of smack about San Francisco and I love it. San Francisco was a brand new city in 1848 when gold was discovered in Sacramento, but by 1855 the population was…
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Did the Original Cocktail Sauce Contain Angostura Bitters?
I am researching Prohibition and a search for “cocktails” in the San Francisco Chronicle turned up a story from 1920 on the origin of the “oyster cocktail” that I think is what today we call “cocktail sauce” that is used more on the shrimp cocktail. (I am a 30+ year vegetarian so I could be…
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50 Year Time Capsule from the Transamerica Pyramid
There’s a new exhibit at the Transamerica Pyramid from a time capsule buried 50 years ago. I checked it out. The building was completed in 1972- the time capsule is from 1974. Before that, from 1853-1959, it was the Montgomery Block that hosted the Bank Exchange Saloon. The Bank Exchange was the home of the…
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The Only Good Alcohol is Made from Wine
I’ve read in other sources that when grain distillation became available in the 1400s and 1500s, it was viewed as a far less healthy alcohol than that distilled from grape wine. The sources I’m thinking of were from Germany, at a time when distilled spirits were still technically medicinal, even if people were dipping into…
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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Esquire magazine printed an article with the Ten Best Cocktails of 1934 – the year after Prohibition was repealed.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…
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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…
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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…
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The Best Drinks Books of 2024
These are some of my favorite cocktails and spirits books I read in 2024. Several of them I blurbed for their authors. There are few more books that were published this year that I haven't read yet, so maybe they'll get on next year's list. My 2023 Best Of List is here, by the way. In…