The Chatham Hotel Special is pretty mysterious because it is not altogether clear where the recipe for this cocktail even came from. We had a hard time even finding any mentions of this drink anywhere, so it made it a little difficult to discuss something that doesn’t seem like it really exists. But that didn’t […]
Clearly the Blue Moon is named after the song, right? Nope, and if you run through the other references to blue moons it probably isn’t any of those either. Don’t try to figure it out, just drink it. The first place it is printed in a cocktail book is in Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1917) […]
When I first heard the name of this drink, I was puzzled how one could get a cocktail name from a car’s turn signal. Of course, this is another case wherein the “old timey” speak means something totally different from what it means today. Back at the turn of the 20th century, when this drink […]
If someone handed you a drink and told you it was called a Rattleskull, it would probably make you pause for a second, right? How could you not assume that you are about to drink something with the sole function of delivering blackouts and hangovers. Rum, brandy, and porter is surely no light concoction, but […]
The Blackthorn Cocktail is a real puzzler. It’s an example of another cocktail that has multiple versions, which is not that unusual, but in this case the resource we’re using has the outlying recipe. The name of the cocktail sounds sinister but it’s nothing more than a connection to a berry bush indigenous to the […]
Episode #45 I convinced Jay to come to the Brixton and record the history portion of the show. We sat down and Michael made us a couple of Bebbos. Our book tells us the word comes from an Indian dialect and means “toad”. If that’s true, there better be a reason, however, there is […]
Episode #44 features a popular personality from the cocktail era: Mr. PT Barnum. The name of the cocktail refers to Barnum’s supposed famous saying that a “sucker is born every minute.” But even as we look into this cocktail we can’t verify much of anything and even the attribution of that phrase seems off. Given […]
Initially we all figured that this cocktail history would be a slam dunk. It has a name of a person…it’s named after someone. It has to be easy to find out. We couldn’t have been more wrong. This drink was a complete mystery. Jay could not find any references to it anywhere prior to our […]
Episode #41 takes us once again to New Orleans to sit down with a lesser known yet still classic cocktail, the Arnaud’s Special. In 1918 a French wine merchant, Arnaud Cazanave, moved to New Orleans to open a restaurant, aptly named Arnaud’s, and live the American dream. Unfortunately, in the next year Prohibition threatened […]
Occasionally we will find cocktails where you can see a clear linear progression or evolution. This ain’t one of those. In this episode, we tackle the messy and minty history of the Mint Julep. While there is a pretty standard recipe nowadays for a Mint Julep, its early iterations varied from state to state and […]
