Jim Meehan, writer, educator, and bartender, famously dubbed the last thirty years, the "Platinum Age of Cocktails," an epithet that captures both the ongoing influence of the current craft cocktail movement that began in the early 90s and pays homage to the 19th century’s Golden Age of Cocktails.

This movement has painstakingly revived historic recipes and given birth to countless riffs on the classics. High-end cocktails bars have sprouted up even in the smallest towns over the past thirty years, and bartenders mix drinks with the same attention to ingredients as displayed by celebrity chefs. Indeed, the professionalization of bartending is yet another result of the craft cocktail movement, as are modern-day speakeasies and the home bar. During the pandemic lockdown, home bar carts flew off the shelves as we all tried to add a little ritual (and alcohol) to our run on days.

Modern technology has ensured the movement is a global one. But what about The cocktail’s rich history? The stories and folklore that make cocktailing so meaningful today?

Americans are credited with inventing the modern, classic cocktail, but the art of mixing drinks stretches back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who mixed their wine with water.

In ancient Greece, it was considered civilized to dilute wine with water (or snow when it got cold). But it was also believed only barbarians drank the stuff unmixed. While there is evidence that Hippocrates thought that wine was part of a healthy diet, he also had concerns that undiluted wine could have negative effects. The Romans also liked the practice. Their fancy aqueducts were great for transporting water, but the water was often stagnant. Mixing the water with wine killed some of the potentially harmful bacteria.

But the art of mixing water and wine rarely involved distilling and creating a spirit. There is evidence of distilled beverages being used in Asia in the early 600s and possibly in India much earlier than that, but zero indication of distillation in Greco-Roman antiquity. It’s not until European Middle Ages when we find various breakthroughs and the spread of technology and the widespread mixing of spirits with water and bitters.

How we got from the Middle Ages to naming the drink “cocktail” and coming up with an hour of the day to celebrate it, is over a thousand years of perfecting the art of preparing, inventing, and serving mixed drinks.

Medicinal Spirits

The earliest cocktails made with distilled spirits were not consumed for pleasure but strictly used for medicinal purposes. These precursors to the cocktail as we know it today were essentially herbal liqueurs, pungent alcoholic elixirs flavored with botanicals and usually sweetened. They were barely drinkable and often made with ingredients and materials not fit for consumption.

Alchemists in the Middle Ages distilled wine into a strong liquor that was similar to brandy called aqua vitae, or water of life. Both medieval alchemists and physicians respected distilling for its ability to preserve herbs, fruit, flowers, and meat and believed the preservation qualities of distilling could be used to find an elixir of life that would delay aging, sickness, death, and maybe even provide immortality. They were known to distill just about anything from solids to blood (!) and often distilled many times over. Medical thought at the time was dominated by the Greek concept of balancing “humours” in the body (hot/cold and wet/dry), and aqua vitae gave you a warming feeling that often had an instant effect on both the mind and body.

Though originally an Italian specialty, distilling alchemists and physicians were eventually common all over the continent. By the time grain distilling can into play in the fourteenth century, it was much cheaper for northern Europe to produce spirits than by boiling down wines from the south.

One such example is James IV of Scotland. Quite the Renaissance man, James spoke eight languages and had many intellectual pursuits, including a strong interest in alchemy. In 1494, it is noted that he ordered eight bolls of malt to make Aqua Vitae from Brother John Cor of Lindores Abbey. This is the first written evidence of distillation of scotch whisky. The spirit would have been infused with plants and herbs grown locally as well as with exotic spices brought back from Europe. James went on to hire an in-house alchemist and start a laboratory with a huge supply of aqua vitae, then later established the Royal College of Surgeons where barber-surgeons and midwives used aqua vitae as an anesthetic.

Even with the advantage of being able to distill more cheaply using grain, it would be another century or so before the public embraced recreational drinking.

Punch came sloshing into the story just as people started drinking for pleasure at the beginning of the 17th century.

2. The Punch Bowl

Punch is back in vogue, and its popularity today is another manifestation of the craft cocktail movement and the desire to harken back to the classics. I’m not talking about the bright pink stuff we drank from 30-gallon trash cans back in college, though punch is always a communal drink, then and now. The punch of history is a simple combination of distilled spirits, citrus juice, sugar, water, and a little spice. In other words, something strong, weak, sweet, sour, plus a little kick.

Indeed, punch is considered the original cocktail. For two hundred years, between 1630-1830, absolutely everyone indulged in the so-called “flowing bowl.”

Its history is linked to India where British sailors in the 17th century turned to a local drink made with a palm-based spirit, aka rum, because their beer tended to spoil in the tropical heat. David Wondrich in his book, Punch, elaborates the tale:

“Punch began in the British East India trade, as far as we can tell. Records are pretty spotty about this sort of thing, but English sailors ran out of beer and they ran out of wine, and you can’t have a boat full of English people without something to drink. So, some bright spark had the idea, what if we made artificial wine out of spirits. Once they got to East Asia and South Asia everyone there was drinking spirits; spirits were widely available - Batavia arrack from Indonesia and coconut arrack in India, and somebody said, okay let’s take that and turn it back into wine, and how do you do that? You put the acidity back in that’s been distilled out, so you use lemon juice; you sweeten it to balance that - they liked sweet wines back then - and I think, most importantly almost, is you dilute it back, you put the water back in, so you end up with something that’s about the strength of wine. You can make this artificial wine with things that were on the shelf, that will keep forever or are locally available and it’s delicious. This starts in the early 1600s with these British merchants.”

For a long time, punch was the stuff of sailors, of lechery, and brawling. Eventually, though, sailors brought it back to England, the continent, and the North American colonies, and by the end of the century, punch was taken up by the upper class and intellectuals in punch bars. The ingredients—spirits, tea, citrus, sugar, nutmeg—were mostly imported and expensive. A three-quart punch bowl would cost half a week’s living wage, and punch bowls became the new “it” accessory to acquire and show off.

Punch went out of fashion in the 19th century during the Victorian era when drinking preferences shifted. Industrialization and new types of work meant people didn’t have as much time to sit around drinking from a huge bowl of punch over a prolonged period and so people started drinking less and for shorter periods of time. This, combined with new technological advances, individual, customized drinks became popular.

One such innovation was ice.

3. Ice Age

Cocktails made with ice are a relatively recent concoction.

Until the nineteenth century, ice was as precious and expensive as jewels, a rare treat for the wealthy. Emperors and kings displayed heaps of it. Thomas Jefferson saw ice houses in Europe and built one at Monticello, George Washington followed suit at Mount Vernon. Ice was considered lavish, and since it was simply a byproduct of winter, clean ice was hard to find. So much so, Europeans used to trek to the Alps to get it and haul it back on donkeys.

Then, in 1805, an American named Frederic Tudor began to harvest blocks of ice from New England’s lakes. Known as the “Ice King, he would go on to ship nearly 12,000 tons of ice halfway around the globe and 52,000 tons to 28 cities in the U.S. On an interesting side note, Tudor even harvested from Walden Pond, and Henry David Thoreau, himself, observed and wrote about the noisy, dangerous scene.

Tudor was convinced he’d create a thirst people never knew they had—a cold drink on a hot day—and set his sights first on the Caribean and cities like New Orleans. When the major liners refused to ship such unusual cargo, he put down $5,000 in seed money (quite a lot back in the early nineteenth century) to buy his own ship. It was not an easy sell, but relentless to get rich on ice, Tudor traveled around the country and convinced barkeeps to offer chilled drinks at the same price as regular drinks—to see which would become more popular. He also taught restaurants how to make ice cream, and reached out to doctors and hospitals to convince them that ice was the perfect way to cool feverish patients. Thanks to those efforts, plus a new horse plow harvesting invention, Tudor found success and gained a monopoly on the exploding nineteenth-century ice trade.

The blocks of ice — enormous, and crystal-clear — were themselves a marvel and a curiosity. Alice Lascelles, author of Ten Cocktails: The Art of Convivial Drinking, “When a single 12 x 18-inch block went on display in a London shop window on the Strand in 1845, it caused a sensation.”

Commercial ice production revolutionized not only the way we consumed cocktails but the way we made them. Fresh New England ice was delivered to bars by horse-drawn carts from insulated central warehouses so that even in the hottest summer months and people started getting used to it, expecting it, and calling for it in their drinks. The American drinking public came to prefer and demand individual drinks made to order, rather than drink communally out of bowls. Punch became old-fashioned. By the turn of the 20th century, nearly every family, grocer, and barkeep in America had an icebox.

On the other side of the counter, ice transformed the bartending world and helped foster the Golden Age of Cocktails. First, once the blocks of ice reached the bar, they had to be butchered, cut into useable pieces. This required a whole new set of tools to master: ice picks (both single and multi-pronged), ice shavers, icebreakers, ice axes, ice scoops, ice bags, ice mallets. Then, along came the shaker and the strainer to achieve a chilled drink with the perfect balance of ingredients and proper dilution. Part of the flair of the cocktail was how cold you could serve it. There was a mountain of shaved ice on top of juleps, cobblers, and other drinks of the day. Metal cups would frost over, showing the drinker just how cold their beverage was. Furthermore, sugar couldn’t dissolve properly in an ice-cold beverage, so bartenders created simple syrups to sweeten their cocktails and had to memorize and master tens of recipes.

Foreign visitors were amazed by America’s clean water and ice. They were also amazed by the bar scene and the theater of it all. Soon, American bars popped up in Europe, most notably the American Bar at the Savoy in London, where world leaders, famous writers, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, plus Hollywood’s elite all partook in this new and exciting cocktail scene.

4. Why “Cocktail”?

The word cocktail first appears in print 1798 in London’s Morning Post and Gazetteer and in an 1803 Amherst, New Hampshire publication Farmer’s Cabinet. But it’s when the word shows up in Balance and Columbian Repository, a federalist newspaper in Hudson, New York, in 1806 that we encounter its mention within today’s context.

In the paper, an editor replies to the question ‘What is a cocktail?’ as follows:

‘A cock-tail, then, is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind—sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a Democratic candidate: because, a person having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else.'”

There are oodles of theories as to the etymology of the word cocktail, some of which aren’t that plausible and none are verifiable. Here are some of the more popular stories:

An Aztec noble ordered his daughter, named XOchitil, to serve a mixed drink to a guest, and her name entered language corrupted as “cocktail.”
Innkeeper, Betsy Flanagan, lost her husband in the American Revolution and had a deep hatred of the English. So, she stole some chickens from a neighboring English poultry farmer, served up the chicken to her American and French guests, then decorated the drinks with a tail from the end of the chickens. So impressed with her guile, and having consumed a number of bracers, one customer exclaimed “Here’s to the divine liquor which is as delicious to the palate, as the cock’s tails are beautiful to the eye.”
During the Colonial period, tavern keepers stored their spirits in casks. When the casks got near empty, the dregs, or tailings, would be mixed together into one barrel and sold at a reduced price—poured from the spigot, which was referred to as the cock. Patrons wanting this cheaper alcohol would come in asking for ‘cock tailings.’
In New Orleans, an apothecary by the name of Peychaud (of bitters fame) served a mixed brandy drink in a French eggcup. Eventually, the drink was named coquetier, the French term for an eggcup. Peychaud’s guests shortened the name to ‘cocktay,’ and eventually, it became ‘cocktail.'”
In a Mexican tavern, English sailors noticed that the mixed drinks were stirred with the root of a plant known as cola de gallo, or in English, “cock’s tail.”

David Wondrich sets the record straight with his extensive research and offers up the only theory supported by the evidence. The most likely origin of the word cocktail comes from the association of ginger and the act of “cocking tails.” More precisely, in a text published in 1785 called A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose, the author makes an entry defining “figging,” a practice employed by a merchant selling a horse to get the best price for the animal, particularly if the beast was old and broken down. In order to liven the horse up, said merchant might insert a piece of spicy ginger into the posterior of the animal, which would cause the tail to perk up at a jaunty angle—a sure sign of a healthy, spirited horse. In his book, Grose goes on to mention that the phrase is, “used figuratively for encouraging or spiriting one up.” It’s not difficult to imagine how ‘cocktail’ became associated with the mixture of spirits, sugar, and bitters that we know and love today.

Perhaps not the most delicate explanation, but at least it’s more accurate.

5. The Origins of Cocktail Hour

The cocktail hour must not be confused with happy hour.

Happy hour is used by bars and nightclubs to reduce prices as an inducement to stay longer and derives from the cocktail hour tradition that preceded it. The name happy hour was first used aboard US Navy ships to designate the scheduled time for on-board entertainment; an article in the Saturday Evening Post about life in the military introduced it into the public lexicon.

Cocktail hour is altogether a much more refined social ritual. Its origins are a bit murky, but a couple of plausible explanations stand out.

Surprisingly, the cocktail hour most likely has its roots during Prohibition (1920-1933) when the eighteenth amendment legally prevented the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States. A 20th-century pre-game emerged with friends meeting at home or speakeasies to imbibe in secret before going out to jazz clubs or to dinner where alcohol could not be served. For these law-breaking citizens, it was an hour to imbibe before going out in public.

A 1958 New York Times article echoes this idea and dates the institutionalization of cocktail hour in American life precisely to Dec. 5, 1933, when the 21st Amendment made alcohol legal again. Cocktails “and the late-afternoon hour devoted to them,” the article explained, were a direct result of the Prohibition-era practice of disguising the flavor of bathtub gin and other spirits with fruit juices.

Cocktail historian, Stephen Visakay, adds that since New York hotels were already serving tea at 5 o'clock in the early twentieth century, "it was a short leap to the 5 o'clock cocktail hour” after Prohibition was repealed. This was especially true in England which did not enact Prohibition laws.

Yet another story credits the dawn of the cocktail hour to St. Louis socialite, Clara Bells Walsh. Walsh’s 1917 cocktail party was so infamous that it was written about as far away as Washington State in the Tacoma Times. At the party, she brazenly swapped low alcohol punches and claret cups for Sazeracs and Clover Leafs, updating the tradition of the informal afternoon tea. No longer the drinks of seedy dance halls, cocktails were now something any woman could enjoy without reproach.

Clara Bell Walsh’s party helped to promote the image of the sophisticated woman as a cocktail drinker and possibly inspired the feminist (and drinking) flapper girls of the Prohibition era.

Hollywood stars of the 20s and 30s such as Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn also popularized cocktails and help institutionalize cocktail hour. They were often shown enjoying martinis in sophisticated clubs.

By the 1950s, the tradition of cocktail hour had spread from city hotels and clubs to the suburbs. It was common for working men to come home from work and enjoy a cocktail at their home bar.

Edible Austin’s A Brief History of the American Cocktail describes it this way:

“Without the convenience of the corner tavern or neighborhood pub, we saw the rise of the home bartender and an explosion of gear catering toward that emerging market. Whereas cocktail manuals from before Prohibition were sparse guidebooks for working professionals, those that emerged afterward were lush with detailed descriptions and images.”

Then, between 1969-1989, the cocktail fell into what is now referred to as the Dark Ages.

This 2020 New York Times article, speaks to the temporary demise of the cocktail and its finest hour:

“It’s hard to say when it ended, but the tech boom was one assassin. Cocktail hour fell away as we became more relentlessly obsessed with achievement, productivity, parenthood and above all the understanding that 5 o’clock was really still the middle of the day.

As we know, the craft cocktail movement broke open in the 1990s and shows no sign of slowing down. On the other hand, perhaps we have all learned to slow down a touch as a result of a year-long lockdown.

What will you be mixing up next?