The 21st century’s signature cocktail, the everything-in-a-glass “martini,” still pilots the tipsy zeitgeist, but it may be close to passing out.
Just in time, the classics have arrived at the party: fresh, bold and suave.
Tom Collins. Old-Fashioned. Manhattan. Singapore Sling. Gin Rickey. Sidecar.
“The Old-Fashioned has really taken off,” says Tristram “Tram” Nelson, the bar manager at Gaetano’s restaurant in north Denver, as he plays maraca with a stainless-steel shaker full of ice, rum, simple syrup and lime juice early one evening, the voice of Frank Sinatra and the arrangements of Tommy Dorsey rousing the room. “I’ve gotten some young people hooked on them. That makes me very happy.”
At Jax Fish House in LoDo, bar manager Tim Harris has seen it too.
“The younger generation is getting hipper on some of these older cocktails,” he says during a busy night of drink-slinging. “The Manhattan is making a resurgence. We do a lot of Manhattans here.”
The return of the cocktail classics hinges on revolutions in taste – from cuisine to beer to coffee – that have swept the nation during the past few decades, says Gary Regan, the author of “The Joy of Mixology.”
Now, Regan says, it’s the cocktail’s turn. “We are living right in the middle of the second golden age of the cocktail,” he says.
Fittingly, the Museum of the American Cocktail opened this year in New Orleans, the first of its kind. Regan and his wife, Mardee Haidin Regan, along with other self-described “cocktail geeks,” helped launch the museum and work with the nonprofit today.
The first cocktail golden age, when many classic drinks appeared, occurred from about 1870 until 1912, when the nation’s embrace of teetotaling started growing uncomfortably tight. Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, which ratified Prohibition, in 1919.
Prohibition dismantled decades of cocktail craftsmanship, Regan says.
Certain drinks, like martinis and Manhattans, experienced a reprise in the 1950s, but “it was very limited” and “very sophisticated,” says Regan. “The average mom and dad wasn’t doing that.”
“The ’50s and ’60s were more of a get-drunk-quick era, and everybody left drunk,” he says. “If you got drunk that was funny.”
Getting patrons stewed, however, didn’t require much knowledge on the part of bartenders. As a result, their craft languished.
But now, bars and restaurants are investing again in cocktails. They’re stocking their bars with obscure liqueurs, making their own mixers and hiring talent.
“The whole idea of the soda gun and sweet-and-sour mix was for speed and letting unskilled labor make drinks,” says Dale DeGroff, a longtime Manhattan bartender who now writes books and consults. “You could, as a bar owner, skip the whole issue of training your staff. Those days are coming to an end.”
Nelson honors the barkeep’s craft, so he blends custom sweet-and-sour mix out of fresh-squeezed juice, and he lines up martini glasses on the bar and packs them with ice and water. The extra bother makes the glasses downright arctic for their union with cold liquor.
He boils sugar in water to make the simple syrup for drink-enlivening, and he hands Gaetano’s patrons his own menu, a list of libations that were popular at the Tejon Street landmark in the 1940s.
Nelson conjures lime perfume in a glass, anchored with gin – a gimlet. Ask for a daiquiri and you’ll get the 19th-century version (instead of the Technicolor-pile-of-slush account): rum, lime juice, simple syrup. Frigid.
The martini on Nelson’s drink menu comes without cream, chile peppers, or anything smacking of apple. It’s the traditional drink, icy gin grazed with vermouth and decorated with an olive or a lemon twist.
When Nelson isn’t on duty at Gaetano’s, bartenders refer to his stack of notes about how to properly make different drinks.
Notes don’t figure into Lisa Johnson’s red-jacketed evenings behind the bar at The Cruise Room in Denver’s Oxford Hotel, one of the best joints along the Front Range to get a proper drink.
Johnson has tended bar there for 18 years. Ask her for that liquid barometer of the bartender’s talents, the Old-Fashioned, and she drops a sugar cube, a dash of bitters, an orange slice, a cherry, a twist of lemon and a splash of bottled club soda into an old-fashioned glass.
Out comes the muddler, a blunt tool that she uses to mash the potion into a paste. Then bourbon (“Which bourbon would you like?” she asks).
A perfect drink.
And a difficult one to find properly made, says Joe Reilly, a 30-something finance executive from New York City who was out drinking at the Streets of London pub in Denver one recent evening.
At a bar in Wisconsin he once ordered an Old-Fashioned “and it came with brandy and diet 7-Up,” he says. “It was one of the worst moments of my life.”
Reilly sat at a round outdoor table with a motley crew of drinkers, including Denver’s Frank Kelly Rich, the publisher of Modern Drunkard magazine. As Rich inhaled Pall Malls, slugged back pints of beer (“I’ll probably have about a dozen different things to drink tonight”) and trumpeted booze’s virtues, Oliver Sehgal, another financial executive visiting from New York, got all thoughtful on him.
“I think it’s simmering right now, I think it’s close to a tipping point,” says Sehgal, a fan of Sidecars and Greyhounds who co-owns a bar in Manhattan. “I think we’re trying to regain the excellence of the bar. Good conversation, good friends, and good drinks. The cocktail hour is not just about getting drunk.”
“Yes it is!” admonishes Rich.
It seems they both are right.
Drinking whatever is handy for the sole purpose of inebriation is an ancient and popular pursuit that isn’t anywhere near last call.
But boutique booze occupies rows of aisles at most decent liquor stores anymore, and the chic drinks aren’t pitchers of kamikazes or platters of fruity “shooters,” they’re vodka concoctions called martinis.
While they bear little resemblance to the classic martini, they do suggest – if only by glassware alone – a certain elegance and sophistication lacking from an Alabama Slammer sloshing around in a plastic cup.
“Way back when they were doing Sex on the Beach,” says Johnson at The Cruise Room. “They are more mature drinkers now.”
Increasingly, too, people are choosing liquor rather than beer, although suds remains at the head of the table when it comes to alcohol consumption.
“Spirit consumption is definitely on the rise,” says Shawn Kelly, public relations director for the Distilled Spirits Council, the liquor industry’s trade organization.
Liquor sales were up about 4 percent between 2003 and 2004, and they rose in most categories, including vodka, rum, tequila and scotch, she says. At the same time, beer consumption has fallen.
“We equate that to the resurgence of the cocktail culture,” she says. “With the classic cocktails, people are drinking better. They are using fresh lemon juice, fresh lime juice, more seasonal ingredients. Mint is obviously a big deal now (because of mojitos), but also using kumquats or tangerines, making your own sour mix, which goes back to the way cocktails used to be made, pre-prohibition, when it was an art form. It’s definitely coming back in the United States.”
The beginning of a shift from the “martini” smorgasbord isn’t lost on the executives at the gourmet kitchen company Williams-Sonoma.
While all things martini still reign, classic cocktails are “definitely something we see as a growing category,” says Sheila Middleton, manager of food development for the company.
Williams-Sonoma already makes all-natural mixes for cosmopolitans, lemon drops, and appletinis. The products, she says, experienced “tremendous growth.”
People spend $50 and up for their bottles of vodka, she says, and they don’t want to sully the hooch with anything artificial or cheap, like corn syrup.
Now Williams-Sonoma is looking at mixes for classic cocktails, although she would not reveal which drinks the company is considering.
The Negroni? This early-1900s classic, made with the bitter aperitif Campari, probably won’t make the Williams-Sonoma mix list anytime soon.
Sweet still rules the cocktail world, and the Negroni revels in a mouth-puckering astrigency instead.
But just before the 2 a.m. closing time one recent evening at the High Street Speakeasy in Denver’s Cole neighborhood, a bitter-friendly reporter announces to the bartender Caitlin Kreck that he would like a Negroni.
“Oh, Jeff is going to love this,” she says.
Jeff Quimby favors classic cocktails, she says, and the Negroni is one of his special friends.
She beckoned Quimby, 27, a neighborhood guy who loves the bar so much he – like Kreck – volunteers to tend the bar now and again.
“He wants a Negroni,” she says.
Quimby’s eyes widen. His face contorts into something suggestive of alarm. Or is it shock?
“Yes!” shouts the tall, bespectacled mechanical engineer, now grinning. “Yes!”
He raises his hands before the reporter, and the reporter lifts his too.
High five.
“A Negroni!”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
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They’re back
Four classic cocktail recipes
Old-fashioned
Pendennis Club, Louisville, Ky., 1880s
Ingredients
2 ounces bourbon
3 dashes Angostura bitters
1 teaspoon bar sugar
2 orange slices
2 Maraschino cherries
Water or soda
Directions
Mull carefully in the bottom of an Old-Fashioned glass the sugar, Angostura, one orange, one cherry, and a splash of soda. Remove the orange rind and add bourbon, ice, and soda or water. Garnish with a fresh orange slice and a cherry.
Tom Collins
Limmer’s Old House, London, 19th century
Ingredients
1 1/2 ounces gin
3/4 ounces fresh lemon juice
1 ounce simple syrup
4 ounces club soda
Directions
Shake the first three ingredients with ice and strain into a Collins glass. Garnish with a flag.
Singapore Sling
Raffles Hotel, Singapore, 1915
Ingredients
1 1/2 ounces gin
1/2 ounce Cherry Herring (a cherry liqueur
1/4 ounce Cointreau
1/4 ounce Benedictine
2 ounces pineapple juice
Dash of Angostura bitters
1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
Directions
Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a highball glass. Garnish with orange slice and cherry. Top with soda.
Manhattan
The Manhattan Club, New York, 1874
Ingredients
2 ounces blended whiskey
1 ounce Italian sweet vermouth
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Directions
Pour ingredients over ice and stir as you would a martini. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry. Note: If you prefer a dry Manhattan, use dry vermouth and garnish with a lemon peel.
From kingcocktail.com
