To mix a cocktail is to tell a story. Each bottle you pour from has a history, some mundane and some grandiose. And when you combine each ingredient, whether to create a classic of the trade or something new, the finished product inherently takes on life.
Narrative.
The Manhattan, for example. The first time that a bartender plucked the whiskey and the sweet vermouth and the bitters from their shelf, stirred the ingredients over ice, and strained the dull red concoction into a coupe, they inked a page in the bartender canon akin to a novel as indispensable as The Great Gatsby. It’s disputed who that first bartender was, though it seems to be generally accepted knowledge that the first was poured somewhere about the 1860s-1870s in the namesake’s New York City borough. The cocktail mirrors Manhattan’s area code, 212. Two parts whiskey. One part sweet vermouth. Two dashes of bitters. With a cherry on top.
It is staggering, dare I say genius, in its perfect simplicity.
I like to imagine this unknown, shadowy bartender hunched over a glass behind the bar. Some say their name was Black. That they invented this drink in a Broadway bar near Houston Street. I like the sound of that. I glimpse Black’s narrow frame. Clad in black pants, black shirt, black boots: that first, most enduring barkeep uniform. Measuring and writing in the shade of a concoction destined to tower over cocktail history and tradition like the mansions of Daisy and Jay along East and West Egg.
The Martini. While it has become commonplace to call any drink served up in a martini glass “a martini,” it remains the case that the original drink consists of nothing more than gin and dry vermouth, garnished with an olive, or a lemon twist. Like the Manhattan, the Martini has the same two-to-one ratio of gin to dry vermouth as the former’s whiskey to sweet vermouth, and also like the Manhattan, the Martini has an interesting, contentious history. Some say that it dates to San Francisco during the same period—approximately 1860s-1870s—its earliest form taking shape at the Occidental Hotel. Others say that it didn’t show up in its true form until the 1910s at the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York City. In my book, The West Coast claims the birthplace for this one. Though the style has evolved a lot over the years, it seems the case that Prohibition, and the massive illegal production of gin in bathtubs, helped to precipitate the now standardized popularity of Martinis.
Every time that I pour one, I like to think about the huddled masses in dank speakeasies, sipping their firewater gin and illegally imported dry vermouth. Knowing that to make this drink, one cannot help but get caught in that rich historical slipstream that predates them. Knowing that to mix any great cocktail, one cannot help but become part of something larger than themselves.
The classics, like great literature, are by no means restricted to any one country.
The Negroni. One ounce of gin. One ounce of sweet vermouth. One ounce of Campari. An orange rind to garnish. This elegant cocktail was first ordered by a general in the French army by name of Pascal Olivier Count de Negroni, who was born on Corsica, a French territorial island in the Mediterranean, just north of Sardinia and west of the Italian mainland. As the story goes, this general asked another unknown barkeep in Florence to strengthen his Americano using gin rather than soda water. In 1947, Orson Welles, another legendary storyteller, imbibed a Negroni while in Rome filming Black Magic, an adaptation of Alexander Dumas’s Joseph Balsamo. A single Negroni was all it took. He raved about the cocktail, and his voice reached the States, then the rest of the world.
All this is in your glass, in these cocktails, if you look closely enough.
Then there is the Pisco Sour of Peru. The Singapore Sling of Singapore. The Pimm’s Cup of London. The Mojito of Havana. Some countries have even adopted cocktails as their officially declared “National Cocktail,” wrapping them in the dense history of the state. Take the Caipirinha of Brazil. Made with Cachaça, a spirit distilled from fermented sugarcane (that I, by the way, would gladly swap with vodka as a base liquor in America), this delicious cocktail was first created by farmers in the Piracicaba region of São Paolo somewhere about the 19th century. The word itself, Caipirinha, is a diminutive of the word caipira—a noun that refers to the rural, country-dwelling workers who came up with the drink in the first place. Much like the US during Prohibition when the Martini became popularized largely out of sheer necessity, Caipirinhas and their simple ingredients—Cachaça, lime, sugar—were ideal for working-class people to imbibe with what was readily available to them.
I would be remiss to not mention the Margarita, a standard so obvious and yet so odd in its history that it feels controversial to even discuss it. This stunning favorite made with two-and-one-half parts tequila, one part triple sec, and three-quarters part lime juice is a creation that many are and have been eager to claim. Some say it was first made in Tijuana. Some say Juárez. Or Baja California. Some, in their audacity, claim that it wasn’t even mixed in Mexico, on that first and most auspicious occasion. These heretics claim that Americans sorted it out for themselves. In San Diego. I call bullshit.
The history of the Margarita exists in a space resembling folklore and folk music. Passed down from ____________ or _____________ and recreated the way that it has always been. No one seems to agree on whom, exactly, first wrote the Margarita down and passed it along on that meandering river that is history, but whomever it was created something that has withstood time and translation. That now takes its place among other anonymously penned artifacts like Dink’s Song or The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
You might be thinking, Wait a minute. The Boy Who Cried Wolf was written by Aesop, or Plenty of folk standards have credited first performers. But the thing to remember here is that it’s never just that person. Aesop is widely credited for a great number of stories: whether he himself invented those stories is another thing entirely. And just because someone picked up a guitar and recorded a tune for the first time does not nullify the generations of people who sang that song to their families and friends long before them.
Even Shakespeare, that incomparable monolith of English literature, is thought, in select circles of scholarship, to have been inaccurately and blanketly credited for plays that might have been written by others like Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere. One very contentious theory even contends that all of Shakespeare’s plays were in fact written by de Vere rather than William.
It’s fun to think about these things because, ultimately, storytelling is not a solitary act. One can create something that is entirely their own, and yet they cannot, because whatever that novel or play or song or recipe is, it cannot escape the things that predate it. The DNA that sits, always, in the fine print. F. Scott Fitzgerald may have written The Great Gatsby, but would The Great Gatsby exist without the work of Edith Wharton, John Keats, or Joseph Conrad? Though it’s romantic to think that great works of art and culture are singular works of solitary geniuses, the reality is that all art is, at least in some sense, communal. All acts of artistic creativity share some iteration of their own unique lineage, and history. They have inspirations. Debts. Always.
This is what I mean by swimming in the slipstream. What I mean by becoming part of something bigger than yourself. Because I firmly believe that when a bartender ponders those myriad bottles on their shelf and in their well, and considers all the classic drinks, they are, in their own way, doing what other artists do when they read the canon of literature or watch the film classics, or listen to the great records, or ponder the great paintings, sculptures, photographs, and architecture. Or deliberate over that long, meticulous process of creating ratatouille. They soak it in. They take what they learn, and they recreate it the best they can. Sometimes, they resurrect it—when a great work has been lost or forgotten. And sometimes, they create something of their own. In so doing, they ink a unique new page in the greater folktale.
As far as accreditation is concerned, however, one can’t help but notice how rare it is for any bartender to be credited for any one cocktail even when some credit is surely due. The more famous the cocktail, the hazier, the more indistinct the bartender who made it becomes. They slip into the background of most of the cocktail origin stories, making room for some larger social history or esteemed dignitary or name of a city. In that sense, this isn’t unlike Aesop. We need some figure like Aesop, some great bartender myth, of Shakespearian clout, to honor with our canon. To take all the credit.
My vote is for Black.
***
To write a cocktail menu is to write a book. If a cocktail menu were a postmodern manuscript, each drink would have a few hundred footnotes; I’m talking Infinite Jest-level footnotes. Here we see each concoction, but the subtext for each includes a history, both personal and cultural. By combining ingredients in one way or another, we must necessarily forge references to other combinations, other cocktails, other stories. We borrow. We steal. And occasionally, we create some singular work of singular genius. Wink.
There is a way in which I can trace not only a larger cultural and world history through the lens of cocktails, but my own history too. I remember the first one I ever made, an astoundingly awful combination of cheap gin and fruit punch. Rudimentary, I know, but so is a chef’s first grilled cheese or a painter’s paint-by-numbers. I think I was fifteen at the time—passing around the large jug that this drink was shaken in with other teenagers in a field after midnight in the large suburban neighborhood where I grew up. The next that my mind jumps to was a first attempt at Lemon Drops at my first real bartending job. I used Drambuie in place of Triple Sec, and I mistakenly used salt rather than sugar on the rim. Three out of four were sent back, but one person at the table liked my take better than the original. The variation “reminded them of a Salty Dog,” and they kept ordering it that same way after. I can’t claim any ingenuity there. But this was when I began to realize that this is more or less how new cocktails are made. It begins with imitation, then moves to alteration, and if you are lucky, eventually reaches some distinct form of reinvention.
Or you just plain screw it up, and somebody happens to like it.
I can recall my first Vieux Carré, a classic cocktail named for the French Quarter in New Orleans. This one opened a lot of creative doors. Although it is a more complicated cocktail than something like a Negroni, it follows a similar proportionality. One ounce of whiskey. One ounce of cognac. One ounce of sweet vermouth. Then a bar spoon of Benedictine. Two dashes of bitters (Peychaud’s and Angostura). Orange peel garnish. This thing is the Mona Lisa of cocktails in my opinion. The Beloved of drinks. The complex flavors swirled like strange magic upon my palate, and I felt like I had just watched The Godfather for the first time.
Suddenly, I was recommending it to patrons and friends and family alike. And each time I attempted to mix something new, there was always that distinguishable parentage of the Vieux Carré tucked in there, its outline hazy, to be sure, but visible nonetheless through the contours of every glass that I peered into.
The people who taught me to make this incomparable drink are greats of the trade. These were the folks who schooled me when I made the climb from small-town bartender to major city mixologist. This wasn’t an easy ascent. My history, until then, dated back to the mentorship of other great bartenders in Bellingham, but the drinks that we made in a college town weren’t the same as what I was expected to concoct with ease and precision in Seattle. I knew how to make Cosmopolitans and Manhattans and Lemon Drops, and I knew how to make every saccharine clone of a shot that any undergraduate will ever order, but I could only stare blankly when I was tasked with mixing a Vieux Carré. Or a Sazerac. Or a Corpse Reviver… #2.
One day, a bartender from down the street stopped in and asked me for The Last Word— and part of me fumbled mentally as to whether we had been in some kind of argument. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. But just as the bookworm sometimes nods with all sincerity when someone cites a canonical novel that they’ve never but should’ve by now read, I simply croaked “Of course!” and then hustled over to my new mentors, anxious to skim the SparkNotes.
The Last Word, as I soon learned, is a cocktail that every Seattle bartender has a duty to know. It originated in the Detroit Athletic Club in Prohibition-era Detroit, as the story goes. But this cocktail was, also, for a long time, lost like some great, forgotten manuscript—after World War Two, it fell out of common knowledge and popular culture. It disappeared from cocktail menus. Perhaps those who had first loved it were gone. And, as fate had it, none of them, or at least precious few of them, passed the recipe down.
But like some committed anchorite toiling in the depths of a monastery, Murray Stenson, then a bartender at Zig Zag Café in downtown Seattle, unearthed the lost recipe in a 1951 copy of Ted Saucier’s cocktail recipe book entitled Bottoms Up! And when he wrote his menu, with classic standards and reinventions abundant, The Last Word was present in the pages. (I like to think that the cocktail was the last one on the menu—but perhaps that is a bit too on the nose.)
The cocktail was a hit. It caught fire in Seattle, where its popularity, and its history, spread across the country to bigger names and bigger cities. Murray had cemented his place in the canon forever. Ask any bartender working in Seattle if they know the name Murray. But really, you don’t have to. He might as well be the mayor of the Seattle bartending scene. He’s our Patron Saint of Lost Cocktails.
The Last Word. If you don’t already know the recipe, here it is: One part gin. One part lime juice. One part green Chartreuse. One part maraschino liqueur. It is sweet and bitter. Tart and pungent. It cleanses the palate, as its distinctness tends to completely strip away whatever else you had this year, leaving nothing but the distinct magnificence of this pale green drink, along with your thoughts.
I did a lot of this, for a while. Making the classics that I had never heard of before. Tasting them. Perfecting them. Then, once I knew what I was doing a little better, I riffed a bit here and there. Swapped one ingredient for another. Used a different style of bitters. Or type of amaro. Imitation. Alteration. Soon, this became something vaguely my own. Soon, it was not just alteration. It was reinvention. I would slyly mention to other bartenders that some recipe on our latest menu that I had come up with was like a cross between a Paper Plane and a Sidecar in the same way that aspiring auteurs will claim the clear influence of Godard and Fellini, aspiring authors Baldwin and Woolf. Perhaps I was overstating my ability or the quality of my art, but I sure as hell was aiming for greatness.
It was around this time that I likewise began to take writing more seriously. I would toil in cafes for hours before shifts and lock myself in my apartment on my days off. I would slowly pick away at stories and essays. Before work, I would create. While at work, I would create. And this, in addition to the fine people I have met that work in this field, is I think the reason that I’ve bartended for so long. My creative impulse finds a way out behind a bar in the same way as when I am in front of my laptop. Or when I pick up my guitar. Or when I go to the grocery store and consider what to make for dinner. Perhaps it’s not that everything is art, but that anything can be art. If you love it enough.
I loved bartending. I still do. I always will. I love the stories and history. I love dive bars and lounges and subterranean speakeasies. I love the different styles of bartending and craft and personality. I love the way in which your own story can become like an illustration or a Wallace footnote when you decide to step behind the rail and join the trade. If you’re lucky, and if you’re talented, like Murray Stenson was and is, you might even catch lightning in a bottle. You might get engraved on medallions and carried around in the pockets of Seattle bartenders. You might even become worthy of your own cocktail scroll. Your own take on this familiar, though ever-changing, story. This mixological slipstream.
I like to think I have made my mark in this tale in small but meaningful ways. I imagine what my character might be like if it were mentioned in circles of those that knew me, after I’m gone. If it were passed down and rehashed and retold. I had the nickname Hurricane. I was fast behind a bar—but I broke a lot of glassware. And if a customer was out of line, watch out: my specialty was dealing with the assholes. But I had my calm, serene eye also. And even when I was destructive, from above, hopefully, I was beautiful, sometimes, too. Though I know that, even if I am remembered in such ways, this will pass just the same into the chest of our great bartender storyteller from whom all miscellaneous inventions must one day defer. To Black!
A narrator to rival Aesop.
A fabled bartender auteur.
Black on black in dress, with the face of countless restless people.
Toiling in the shadows. Unearthing forgotten cocktail manifestos.
There were cocktails from those days. Things that I wrote down—most that I didn’t. But one always sticks out in my head more than all the rest. It was two parts gin—bathtub gin if it is available. One half part Orgeat. One quarter part lemon juice. Combine this in a shaker with a fistful of overripe avocado and shake it like hell with ice. Then shake it some more. More. More. Strain into a rocks glass. Top with soda water. Garnish with a cucumber peel. My humble nod to the greats of cocktails and novels alike, my subtle gesture to The Great Gatsby, I called this one The Green Light.
Stephen Haines is an MFA graduate of Western Washington University and the former managing editor of Bellingham Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Los Angeles Review, Epoch Press, Hypertext Magazine, Grim & Gilded, Pacifica Literary Review, Rathalla Review, Sidereal, Olit, Thin Air, Adelaide, Creative Colloquy, Bright Flash, and Bellingham Review.
Featured Artwork:
Layered Chiayi (嘉義)
L. Acadia is a lit professor at National Taiwan University with photography published or forthcoming in Autostraddle, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Reservoir Road Literary Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Sycamore Review (featured artist), and Tree and Stone Magazine.
Twitter and Instagram: @acadialogue