The Bloody Mary: Two Fathers, Four Names and a Disputed Birth
Most cocktails with a contested origin have one strong claim and a few opportunists. The Bloody Mary is unusual in having two serious claimants who were both, in…
Category: Cocktail Guides
Classic cocktails and bar practice, explained from the list Meyboom Brasserie poured.
The Aperol Spritz: An Old Drink Sold on a New Ratio
Everybody knows the recipe: three parts prosecco, two parts Aperol, one part soda. It is on the bottle, on the posters and in every bar in Europe. It…
The Espresso Martini: A 1983 Order That Took Forty Years to Land
It is not a martini, it was not called one for its first decade, and the celebrity anecdote everybody repeats about its invention is disputed by the inventor’s…
The Old Fashioned Is Not a Cocktail. It Is the Definition of One.
The name sounds like nostalgia and it is actually a complaint. In the late nineteenth century, drinkers who wanted whiskey, sugar and bitters — and not the elaborate…
Spirit-Forward Cocktails: The Family With Nowhere to Hide
Some cocktails are built to transform a spirit. This family is built to present one. There is no citrus to brighten it, no syrup to round it off…
The Cuba Libre: A Rum and Coke With a Contested Birth Certificate
It is two ingredients from a corner shop and a wedge of lime, and it has a better founding legend than almost any cocktail in the canon. It…
The Highball: The Simplest Drink and the Easiest to Ruin
Two ingredients, no technique, nothing to hide behind. The highball is the most-ordered drink in almost every bar and the one nobody writes about, on the apparent grounds…
The Clover Club: A Pre-Prohibition Drink Most Bars Get Wrong
Pink, foamed and faintly ridiculous-looking, the Clover Club spent most of the twentieth century as a punchline — the drink a certain kind of drinker would not be…
The Sour: The Template Behind Half the Cocktails You Know
There are only so many ideas in a cocktail list. Learn one of them and a great many drinks stop being individual recipes to memorise and start being…
The French 75: A Cocktail Named After an Artillery Gun
Most cocktails are named after a person, a place or an ingredient. This one is named after a field gun, on the grounds that drinking it felt like…