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 […]
Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares. If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars. — Ernest Hemingway 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 […]
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. The Cuba Libre is essentially a rum and Coke with lime juice added. I had no idea […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
