A short history of the cocktail

The bowl that came first

Mixed drinks are older than the word cocktail. In the seventeenth century, English sailors and East India Company traders brought punch back to Europe: a large bowl of spirit, citrus, sugar, water and spice, shared by everyone at the table. Accounts of the name differ; the version most often repeated connects it to a word for "five" in an Indian language, for the five ingredients.

The name matters less than the structure. Punch set out the skeleton every later drink would use — spirit, sour, sweet, dilution, aroma — and around the turn of the nineteenth century that skeleton shrank from the bowl into a single glass. Planter's Punch still carries the shape of the older format.

A definition in print, 1806

In May 1806, a newspaper in Hudson, New York, The Balance, and Columbian Repository, answered a reader who wanted to know what a cock-tail was. The editor replied that it was a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters, and added that it was vulgarly called a bittered sling. This is the earliest clear definition known. The word itself is older: it turns up in a London newspaper in 1798 and in an American one in 1803, in both cases with no explanation attached.

Two things are worth keeping from that paragraph. First, it describes one specific drink rather than a whole category: spirit, sugar, water, bitters. The Old Fashioned is still exactly that. Second, only later did "cocktail" swallow the name of the entire category of mixed drinks. Where the literal cock's tail came from, accounts differ, and no explanation has ever been settled.

The American bar and its first manuals

In 1862 Jerry Thomas published How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon Vivant's Companion, generally regarded as the first bartender's guide published in the United States.

What surprises a modern reader is how small the cocktail chapter is. Punches, juleps, cobblers, sours, slings, toddies, flips and smashes each get their own section, separated by method and ingredients, and "cocktails" account for about a dozen recipes. Harry Johnson's manual of 1882 went further, covering not only recipes but how to run a bar and keep a station in order. Between them, these books turned an oral craft into text that could travel and be copied.

Ice becomes an industry

The real difference between an American bar and a European one was ice. In 1806 the Boston merchant Frederic Tudor shipped New England lake ice to Martinique in the Caribbean. By the 1820s a horse-drawn ice cutter had brought harvesting costs down sharply, and natural ice travelled along trade routes to New Orleans, Havana and as far as Calcutta.

Only with reliable ice do stirring, shaking, crushed ice and a chilled glass become routine. The mound of crushed ice on a Mint Julep is the clearest evidence of that trade. Once artificial refrigeration spread late in the century, ice stopped being a luxury and became infrastructure. For what ice does to a drink, see stirring and shaking.

The golden age

Roughly from the 1860s to the First World War runs the period later called the golden age. One catalyst was European aromatised wine: vermouth became a fixture behind American bars in these decades and brought a sweetness and a herbal depth that had not been there before. The Martinez and the Manhattan both sit on that hinge. Their exact origins are disputed, but the family resemblance is plain, and as the proportions dried out and the bitters thinned, the Dry Martini emerged.

New Orleans developed its own line. The Sazerac began on French brandy — the name comes from a cognac house — before moving to rye, with local Peychaud's bitters and a rinse of absinthe. The Brandy Crusta of the 1850s, with its sugared rim and long lemon peel, is often described as an ancestor of sour-family drinks such as the Sidecar. The Whiskey Sour, the John Collins and the Champagne Cocktail all took their settled form in the same decades. European hotels began hanging up "American Bar" signs, while Italy took bitterness as a subject in its own right and left behind the Americano, and just after the war the Negroni.

Prohibition, and the bartenders who left

National prohibition came into force in the United States in January 1920 and was repealed in December 1933. Drinking did not stop; it moved underground.

What changed history was the movement of people. Many American bartenders went abroad and took their craft to London, Paris and Havana. Harry Craddock worked at the American Bar of the Savoy in London and in 1930 published The Savoy Cocktail Book, some 750 recipes that have stayed in print ever since; the Corpse Reviver #2 and the White Lady travel on the strength of that book. American bars in Paris flourished too, and both the French 75 and the Sidecar attached themselves to the city in this period, with the details disputed.

Cuba was closer. Havana became a destination for American travellers, and the Daiquiri and the Mojito were poured there in quantity; the frozen Daiquiri of the Floridita, and the unsweetened version now known as the Hemingway Special, date from those years. Earlier still, the Singapore Sling had emerged at the Raffles Hotel, although no reliable record of the original recipe survives.

Invented tropics

Shortly after repeal, a new kind of bar appeared on the American west coast. Don the Beachcomber opened in Hollywood in the 1930s and Trader Vic followed in Oakland: rum, citrus, syrups and spices built into layered drinks, served among bamboo, masks and extravagant vessels, staging a South Seas that corresponded to nowhere. Recipes were treated as trade secrets and ingredients often labelled in code.

The style peaked after the war. The Mai Tai is the best known: Trader Vic placed its creation in Oakland in 1944, the Don the Beachcomber side claimed an earlier version, and accounts differ. The Pina Colada is most often traced to 1950s Puerto Rico. Both were later reduced to bottled syrup, and have only been taken seriously again in the past twenty years.

The long middle: mixes and shortcuts

From the 1950s onward, craft gave way to speed. Vodka grew quickly after the war and by the mid-1970s was the best-selling spirit in the United States. Bottled sour mix replaced fresh lemons, concentrated syrup replaced sugar, and colouring did the rest.

The Moscow Mule and the Screwdriver belong to that turn and are no worse for it. The loss was elsewhere: most golden-age recipes survived as names only, and what arrived in the glass had little to do with them.

The revival

The turn began in the 1980s, in two places at once. In London, Dick Bradsell had been writing new drinks since mid-decade with a small, exact hand; the Bramble and the Espresso Martini are his. In New York, Dale DeGroff rebuilt the list at the Rainbow Room from 1987, bringing fresh juice and nineteenth-century recipes back behind the bar together. The Cosmopolitan took shape in the same city at the end of that decade — the version most often cited is Toby Cecchini's, though accounts differ — and a television series made it the emblem of the 1990s.

Over the next twenty years the revival turned into archaeology. Old manuals were reprinted and read closely, researchers compared newspapers and recipe books, and lost drinks went back onto lists. The Last Word is the standard example: it began in Detroit early in the twentieth century, appeared in a 1951 recipe collection, then all but vanished until a Seattle bartender revived it in the mid-2000s. The Martinez returned by the same route. Milk & Honey, which opened in New York in 1999, demonstrated something else: quiet, rules and precision are themselves a style.

After recovery came invention. Naked and Famous was created at Death & Co in New York in 2011, an equal-parts salute to the Last Word, and became a modern classic within a few years. A bar today holds two things at once: two centuries of documents, and more ingredients than at any point in that history.

Where to go next

• Cocktail families: reading a drinks list by structure rather than by name.
• Home bar basics: starting from a handful of bottles.
• Bitters and vermouth and aromatised wines: the fourth ingredient of the 1806 definition, and the bottle that made the golden age possible.
• Flavour tags: the vocabulary this site uses to describe a drink.