Bar Craft, Tasting & Labels

Where it started

Mixing spirits with sugar, water and bitters is older than the word for it. The name and the formula first appear together in print in Hudson, New York, in 1806, when a local newspaper defined the Cock-Tail as a stimulating liquor of spirits, sugar, water and bitters.¹ The iced Cocktail is first mentioned in print in New York in 1840.²

In June 1862 the New York firm of Dick & Fitzgerald published Jerry Thomas's Bar-Tender's Guide, also known as How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant's Companion.³ The Smithsonian Libraries call it the first recipe book for mixed drinks published in the United States.⁴ Thomas sorted his drinks into classes: cobblers, cocktails, fixes, juleps, punches, sours, slings, smashes and toddies. Only two of the drinks were his own inventions, the flaming Blue Blazer and the Japanese Cocktail.³ In 1948 David Embury, a New York tax attorney who never worked in the drinks trade, published The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks and built it around six basic drinks.⁵

The trade organized itself after the Second World War. The International Bartenders Association was established in Torquay, England, on 24 February 1951 by seven national guilds.⁶ Its first official cocktail list, 50 drinks, was approved in 1961.⁷ The modern revival that brought fresh juice and stirred drinks back to bars, the cocktail renaissance, runs from roughly 2004 through 2019.⁸

Where and how it's made

Four skills sit under this hub.

How to taste it

Taste a cocktail the way you taste a spirit: look, smell, then sip. A balanced drink is one where sweet, sour, bitter and strong are in harmony, with none dominating or masking the others.¹⁴ If a sour tastes flat, it usually wants more citrus; if a stirred drink tastes hot, it usually wants more stirring. Pairings: salted nuts with a highball, olives with a Martini, sharp cheddar with a Manhattan.