Quotes from Gary Regan

Craddock is also credited with saying that the best way to drink a cocktail is "quickly, while it's laughing at you!

Simple Sours contain a base liquor, citrus juice, and a nonalcoholic sweetening agent, such as simple syrup, grenadine, or orgeat syrup.

Speakeasy bartenders used fruit juices, sometimes from canned fruit, as well as ginger ale, cream, honey, corn syrup, maple syrup, and even ice cream to make palatable the harsh flavors of spirits that Mencken described as "rye whiskey in which rats have drowned, Bourbon contaminated with arsenic and ptomaines, corn fresh from the still, gin that is three fourths turpentine, and rum rejected as too corrosive by the West Indian embalmers

Enhanced Sours call for a spirit, citrus juice, a sweetening agent of any kind, plus vermouth or any other aromatized or fortified wine.

Crockett wrote that Martinis were the most popular pre–World War I cocktail at the Waldorf, with the Manhattan running second

New Orleans Sours call for a base spirit, citrus juice, and an orange-flavored liqueur.

The American bartender of the 'Gay Nineties' was an institution. His fame spread to the four corners of the globe, and visitors to our shores from the continent bowed before his skill in concocting tempting mixtures of 'liquid lightening.' He was and still is in a class by himself. We may go to Europe for our chefs, but Europe comes to us for its bartenders," wrote W. C. Whitfield in his 1939 book Just Cocktails.

At some point close to the year 1800, somebody created the world's first cocktail.

In the United States, the demand for well-constructed mixed drinks grew steadily during the latter half of the nineteenth century until, in the 1890s, the Golden Age of Cocktails arrived. It would last right up to the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, but don't think for a moment that every bar in America was serving masterfully mixed drinks.

A]ccording to Hell's Best Friend, by Jan Holden, if you were unfortunate enough to order a Manhattan at the Humboldt in Grays Harbor, Washington, the owner, Fred Hewett (who apparently didn't much care for anyone who drank cocktails), would pour a mixture of whiskey, gin, rum, brandy, aquavit, and bitters into a beer mug, top it up with beer, and stir it with his finger before handing it to you.

Certain dives on New York City's Bowery offered as much as you could drink from a rubber hose connected to a liquor barrel until you had to stop to take a breath; this would set you back a mere three cents. For two cents more, however, certain places would provide a shot of whiskey and a woman to go with it.

Violence was not uncommon in nineteenth-century bars. Customers at the Tiger Saloon in Eureka, Nevada, bore witness to a knife fight between "Hog-Eyed" Mary Irwin and "Bulldog" Kate Miller, and the owner of a joint in lower Manhattan, Gallus Mag, not only bit the ears off customers who got out of control but she also kept the trophies in jars of alcohol on display behind the bar.

The people who went to watch men butting heads at New Orleans' Buffalo Bill House would likely have felt out of place at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which opened in the 1890s on the site where the Empire State Building now stands. The bar at the old Waldorf Astoria was the scene of the sort of decadence we often associate with the decade that became known as the Gay Nineties.

Colonel William F. Cody, otherwise known as "Buffalo Bill," was also a regular at the old Waldorf Astoria, and he was well known for never refusing a drink on another man's tab—when asked, he would say, "Sir, you speak the language of my tribe.

Ten cocktails are contained in the recipe section of Thomas's 1862 book, and all of them contain bitters. Indeed, it would be decades before anyone dared give the name cocktail to a drink made without this ingredient.

The majority of the drinks popular at the turn of the nineteenth century were, by and large, sweeter than they would become over the next twenty years. Something else happened, though, in the last decades of the 1800s. Something momentous. Something that left us with a range of drinks that must now be considered the capos of the cocktail family: Vermouth became popular among the cocktailian bartenders of America.

There can be no doubt that vermouth changed the face of mixed drinks in the twentieth century. The Manhattan, the Martini, and the Rob Roy might be considered to be the Triple Crown of cocktails, and you can't make one of them without vermouth.

The serious bartenders of the 1800s gave us the mixed-drink bases with which cocktailians still work today. The masters of the craft during the first century of cocktails formulated sours and the majority of other categorized drinks, and they learned to use liqueurs and other sweetening agents as substitutes for simple syrup. These barkeeps understood the importance of bitters, and they knew that balance was the key to any well-constructed drink.

The Drunk's Blue Book, written by Norman Anthony and O. Soglow in 1933, for instance, details what the authors call the Drunk's Code: Free lunch. Free speech. Free cheers. Five-day week. Every third drink on the house. Lower curbstones. Overstuffed gutters. More lampposts. Rubber nightsticks and rolling pins. More keyholes for every door. More farmers' daughters. Colder ice. Two cocktails for a quarter. Bigger and better beers.

By the time the 1940s arrived, Americans had been introduced to the Bloody Mary. Vodka was being made in the States, though not many people knew much about it until around the middle of the decade, when Jack Morgan, the owner of the Cock and Bull Tavern in Los Angeles and an executive from the company that was making Smirnoff vodka, got together to create the Moscow Mule. Vodka would never look back.

The Margarita (this page) had been around since the thirties, forties, or fifties, depending on whose story you believe, but tequila didn't really catch on in this country until the Swinging Sixties arrived, when hippies and would-be hippies alike heard a rumor that the spirit might act as a hallucinogen. By the seventies all bartenders knew how to fix a mean Margarita,

By the mid-1980s the health craze had swept the country, and the cocktail scene was all but dead.

Bartenders revolted against the elevator-music drinks of their elders and created noisier potions of their own. This phenomenon was exactly what was needed to make potential cocktailians rethink their craft.

Dale is the man who mentored Audrey Saunders, who went on to open The Pegu Club in New York—one of the world's most renowned craft cocktail bars. Audrey has given birth to such delicious potions as the Gin-Gin Mule and the Old Cuban, both cocktails that have become global phenomena. DeGroff and Saunders have a lot to answer for.