The practical tips on bar management and good business practice in Johnson's book seem very much sharper when one reads Thomas' complaint in print that someone named Johnson had taken over a lapsed lease on a thriving venue.
Thomas, who reportedly started his career at the El Dorado in San Francisco in and certainly jumped ship there as a sailor during that year , and worked in Virginia City, Nevada, as well as the Rockies, was very much a creature of the wild west saloon. But these saloons weren't all the swing-door and sawdust emporia seen in Westerns.
Some, like the El Dorado, were elaborate, fantastical places, decked out in expensive art, antiques, opulent fabrics and mirrors. They offered everything from gambling to live music to ladies of the night some, just like in the westerns, had a brothel upstairs — essentially, anything that could most easily separate a tired and emotional miner from his bag of gold dust.
Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the US surfed a wave of phenomenal wealth, transformed by gold booms, oil booms and the coming of the railroad. The new rich sought places to mingle and spend their money, so grand hotels and clubs sprang up to accommodate them, places like the Astor House, the Hoffman House, the Manhattan Club, the Jockey Club and the Metropolitan Hotel.
American bartenders, and their skill at combining drinks, managing orders and sliding completed mixes down the bar, were famous: even when the theatrical method of mixing drinks by throwing gave way to the more efficient shaker, their shaking attracted awe-struck comments from overseas visitors.
The Manhattan is a product of this period, most likely created at some point during the s although, sadly, the story which attributes it to a banquet attended by Winston Churchill's mother in is not correct: others credit it, less excitingly, to a man named Black. During this era, too, one finds luxurious drinks like the champagne cocktail becoming popular, while bourbon distiller James E. Towards the end of the century, American-style grand hotels and clubs, complete with American bars, began to open in London, Paris, Rome and summer resorts such as the South of France.
American bartenders arrived to run many of their bars, although the bar at London's Savoy was staffed for some time by a British woman, Ada Coleman.
The Bronx cocktail , probably created by either a Joseph S. Sormani who owned a restaurant called the Bronx or by Johnnie Solon, bartender at the Manhattan hotel, was a product of this era. Its innovation? In the USA, cocktails were so established that Heublein an ancestor of Diageo , was producing bottled Club Cocktails — among them Martinis and Manhattans — and selling them by the case as early as Even the First World War did not dent the thirst for cocktails.
With gallows humour, someone named the French 75 cocktail for a large artillery gun used in the trenches of the war. Yet clouds were gathering. The combination of a spirits-based drinking culture where men often worked away from home for months at a time with America's puritan heritage was not generating pretty results. Dives like those where — according to Herbert Asbury — bartender Gallus Mag kept pickled ears behind the bar, or punters were entertained by minute long headbutting sessions, damaged the image of the drinks industry, and alcohol undoubtedly caused huge harm to individuals and the families they supported.
Saloons offered free lunches, which could lure in the unsuspecting worker to spend his wages on booze rather than feeding the family and functioned as a mecca for violence and prostitution. All the kinds of tales which were being told about absinthe in France at the time were attached to spirits by the campaigning Women's Christian Temperance Union, and in an attempt to cure the nation's drink problem, American senators signed the Volstead Act , prohibiting recreational consumption of alcohol.
In , America embarked on 'the noble experiment', and those distilleries which could not switch over to production of 'medicinal' alcohols shut down.
Most skilled bartenders left the country — Harry Craddock came to the Savoy bar this way — and many headed to Cuba, to which luxuriously outfitted ferries would transport American citizens for weekends of drinking and debauchery. At the beginning of the century, Cuba had given the world the Daiquiri , the iconic blend of rum, sugar and citrus which reached America via Admiral Lucius W. Johnson around Although a combination which had probably existed, like the Brazilian caipirinha, since time immemorial, it was almost certainly named, codified and brought to a wider public by an American mining engineer, Jennings Cox.
It was originally served tall, over cracked ice. The Mojito adds mint and later in its evolution soda to the classic sour trinity and may in fact predate the daiquiri.
At the original Floridita, bartender Constante Ribailagua Vert would later create the Hemingway Daiquiri for the heavy-drinking writer. Trained by some of the best the US had to offer, Cuban bartenders took their craft so seriously that by they had set up the Club de Cantineros Barmen's Association. Those who chose not to ship out of the USA altogether and set up residence in Europe turned for booze and entertainment to the wonderful world of the speakeasy, beautifully designed venues which combined, bar restaurant and club in one.
Although firmly illegal — and often shut down — these places drew women as well as men, unlike the old saloons which had been, but for the odd hooker, all male spaces.
These underground venues were often decorated more luxuriously by far than their legal predecessors, and featured elaborate systems to conceal all signs of boozing within seconds of the alarm being raised. The Stork Club offered silver leather, torch singers and chanteuses; Jack and Charlie's Puncheon Club later the 21 Club had a secret wine cellar concealed behind a wall, located under the house next door and opened only by inserting a skewer into a tiny hole in the bricks.
The Prohibition era, however, was not kind to cocktails. It made economic sense to smuggle in good quality Scotch, yet Capone and his ilk were not really interested in bootlegging volumes of vermouth or bitters. Long, fully stocked back bars would take time to clear away if a venue was raided. So most decent places served drinks by the bottle. Although the better speakeasies used smuggled spirits, there was plenty of toxic home-made hooch around. The taste of alcohol, which had been central to mixed drinks, understandably receded from centre stage and drinks such as the Alexander , which was possibly created for the birthday party of a Phoebe Snow, began their ascent.
When Prohibition was repealed in , cocktails embarked on their long and distinguished career on the silver screen. Cocktails performed a helpful cinematic function of giving the characters something to do with their hands while they talked , but this did not diminish their impact.
In a world mired in first Depression then world war, they became synonymous with glamour. In Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt , a Louisiana native who had made some money bootlegging rum during Prohibition, opened a bar called Don's Beachcomber in Hollywood, decorated it in a tropical vein and began to offer up rum based cocktails.
How good is your grasp of what cocktails Americans are drinking in ? Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Root Beer. Blood Orange.
Suggestions Clear Search Results. Close Menu Would you like to change your language? Please choose your language: English French German. The hospitality industry has taken a giant leap forward in relearning knowledge on the subject over the past years, and most professional and informed bartenders now understand a cocktail to be something made of spirit, water, sugar and bitters.
In fact, some bars already do. Sign up for the best of Food Republic, delivered to your inbox Tuesday and Thursday. Home Recipes Drink Travel. Food Republic March 6, The next most common source of alcohol in Prohibition was alcohol cooked up in illegal stills, producing what came to be called moonshine. By the end of Prohibition, the Prohibition Bureau was seizing nearly a quarter-million illegal stills each year.
The homemade alcohol of this era was harsh. It was almost never barrel-aged and most moonshiners would try to mimic flavors by mixing in some suspect ingredients. They found they could simulate bourbon by adding dead rats or rotten meat to the moonshine and letting it sit for a few days. With few alternatives, these dubious versions of familiar spirits were nonetheless in high demand.
Bootleggers much preferred to trade in spirits than in beer or wine because a bottle of bootleg gin or whiskey could fetch a far higher price than a bottle of beer or wine. Prior to Prohibition, distilled spirits accounted for less than 40 percent of the alcohol consumed in America. To make the hard liquor palatable, drinkers and bartenders mixed in various ingredients that were flavored and often sweet.
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