In this episode we take a look at the Brooklyn cocktail, which looks to be the product of Jack Grohusko from the early part of the 20th century. Most cocktails take some wondering and digging and guessing in order to figure out why a bartender gave it a particular name. With the Brooklyn, we go […]
Oscar Wilde said, “When good Americans die, they go to Paris”. Not long after, many Americans came to Europe and died in the first World War. When the war ended many Americans stayed in Europe, often the more intellectual set of writers and artists including Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. At the time they were […]
Putting the word “corpse” in anything you are going to consume is probably a mistake, but Corpse Revivers seem to have weathered any associations with dead stuff. When you look at the name closely you pick up right away that this cocktail is intended to clear out the cobwebs and get you right up out […]
You say Blood and Sand and it generates images of a switchblade fight on a beach. The consensus though is that this cocktail is named for the 1922 bullfighting movie starring silent-movie era heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino. Most likely originating from Harry Craddock, it appears in the Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930 first, and not many other […]
While the recipe for Rob Roy cocktail is pretty standard today, it wasn’t always that way. Variations occur from the earliest appearances in cocktail books and continue on pretty much throughout the 20th century. So how do we get to a standard for a drink often referred to as a Scotch Manhattan? We discuss this […]
Was there ever any doubt that at some point in history there would be a cocktail with the name Hanky Panky, when cocktails so often have the reputation of leading to lascivious funny business? Whether the name was a reference to the cause, prevention, or embodiment of sexual activity, or completely unrelated is not […]
The story of the Algonquin Cocktail is truly a fascinating, confusing, and possibly widely misattributed one. I had heard this story before and loved learning about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Roundtable. In 1919 a group of writers, actors and intellectuals began to frequent the Algonquin for lunch every day. They were known as the Algonquin […]
Most accounts say the Negroni is based on the Americano, with Campari as the featured ingredient in all of its bitter, bright red glory. The Negroni is what happens when the Americano gets more American, and by that I mean dumping the soda and adding more booze. Unfortunately, gaps in the timeline and sparse written evidence […]
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 […]
We’re kicking off the series with the cocktail that I think of as THE cocktail of cocktails…the Manhattan. At the front of the show, Mr. Jason Kruse, our researcher, and I sat and discussed what he discovered while tracking down the origins of the Manhattan. First of all, the Manhattan’s claim to fame as the […]
