The New Craft of the Cocktail Everything You Need to Know

to Think Like a Master Mixologist, with 500 Recipes

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Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Random

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark

Originally published in hardcover in the United States in a slightly different form, by

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936112.

ISBN 9781984823571
Ebook ISBN 9781984823588

Illustrations by Steven Noble

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 INTRODUCTION: THE NEW MILLENNIUM

PART ONE

THE CRAFT OF THE COCKTAIL

PART TWO

COCKTAILS AND BAR TALES

PART THREE

RESOURCES
TOOLS AND BOOKS
CLASSES AND SEMINARS
SPIRIT, WINE, AND COCKTAIL COMPETITIONS
NEWSLETTERS AND BLOGS
SPIRITS, FRUITS, MIXERS, JUICES, AND GARNISHES

MEASURES
MIXING TERMS AND TECHNIQUES
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SPECIAL THANKS
INDEX
 INTRODUCTION

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

B. E. Rock and B. E. Windows were the two companies I worked for from
1985 through 2001. They operated two renowned restaurants that were also
the two highest restaurants in the world at the time: the Rainbow Room at
the top of 30 Rock and Windows on the World on top of the World Trade
Center. In 1999, we lost the Rainbow Room in an unsuccessful negotiation
with Jerry Speyer of Tishman Speyer. Two years later, in 2001, we lost
Windows on the World in a catastrophe that changed the United States more
than any single event since the Civil War.
Timing is everything. When the first edition of The Craft of the Cocktail
was released in 2002, the timing was so right and so wrong. The 9/11
attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and in the sky over Pennsylvania
hit like a thunderbolt, turning our world upside down overnight. Life as we
knew it ceased: professions were put on hold, entire sectors of the economy
were frozen, no one was sure what the future would bring. It was a time of
trauma and stark fear. The sudden downturn had a huge impact on the
hospitality and entertainment industry. For me, it marked the end of a
sixteen-year episode. For America, it was the beginning of an era with an
uncertain future.
With the approach of the new millennium came the promise of a
cocktail resurgence. I assured young career bartenders and anyone in the
press who would listen, that the recognition and notoriety of the star chefs
of the 1990s would be enjoyed by new bartenders of the early aughts.
Mixologists broke new ground and worked the craft with creativity,
achieving successes not seen since the late nineteenth century. This would
be the era of the star bartender—complete with the rewards and the pitfalls
that the movers and shakers of the culinary revolution had already
experienced.
On the evening of September 10, 2001, I was at Windows on the World
hosting a session in a series we called Spirits in the Skybox, presented in
the Skybox, a member’s lounge that overlooked the main bar. My session
included a hands-on class in tequila cocktails and a tasting of different
expressions. At the end of the session we all felt a bit buzzed and needed
some food. I had friends who had attended the class, and I asked the
evening manager whether he had a table in the main bar large enough for
the party to grow if needed. I was supplying the fuel, Veuve Clicquot
Champagne, our Windows on the World special cuvée, to keep things light
and airy. We dined and then danced to the music put on by a wonderful
woman DJ and stayed ’til closing. The check I signed that night, along with
thousands of papers and documents, would be swept away by the prevailing
westerly winds and scattered from New York Harbor to neighborhoods in
Brooklyn. The Baum Family was contacted by residents of Brooklyn who
recovered papers from Joe Baum’s archives in their backyards.
Our losses at Windows that day were heavy. We had booked a large
breakfast event with two hundred guests. When the plane struck the North
Tower, only a few of the client organizers were present, but a full
complement of service staff—seventy-three Windows staff members—were
setting up for the breakfast. Above the point of impact, they were unable to
escape the building. The lives lost at Windows on the World that sunny
Tuesday morning were among the 2,753 lives lost in the Twin Towers. It
will take generations to recover from the loss.

After nineteen months of trauma, New Yorkers were still reeling but
determined to find a path back to some sense of normalcy. As we began
shifting into recovery mode, the fall season of 2003 exploded across the
city: the bars and restaurants were back in business and then some. We were
damned if terrorists were going to change our lifestyle, and we celebrated
the holidays with a vengeance. With my book The Craft of the Cocktail as
my passport, I went on the road, doing events around the country and in the
United Kingdom, even taking a consulting job as the cocktail director for a
small but influential London-based company called the Match Bar Group.
The cocktail bar business went into overdrive, its reawakening fueled by
chat rooms that attracted aficionados from around the world, hungry for
information about craft cocktails. London, New York, San Francisco,
Portland, Seattle, and Sidney all had small communities of influential
bartenders and bar owners involved daily in conversations. One chat room
called DrinkBoy.com was the experiment of a project supervisor at
Microsoft named Robert Hess, whose avocation was fine cocktails. He
facilitated conversations with bartenders around the world, who shared
recipes, techniques, products, and other resources. Debates over history and
lore erupted in message-board threads that lasted for days at a time. Gurus
of this online world emerged, including Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh, whose
influential 2004 book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails inspired
spirits producers to revisit the spirits and bitters products lost during
Prohibition.
It was the beginning of a bull market for spirits, with companies large
and small releasing premium and ultra-premium whiskey/y brands, tequila
brands, and vodka brands. Grey Goose, an ultra-premium vodka brand on
the market for a mere seven years, was purchased from Sidney Frank
Importing Co. by Bacardi Limited for more than 2 billion dollars! Bitters,
the defining ingredient of the cocktail category, were in the dead-letter box
after Prohibition. But during the craft cocktail movement, they came
roaring back, with more than a hundred brands producing several hundred
flavors.
The cocktail community found an historical oracle in Dr. David
Wondrich. A former college professor turned drinks writer for Esquire
magazine, Wondrich wrote two books before publishing his seminal
volume, Imbibe!, in 2007, a tour de force of drinks history, where real
historical facts are typically as rare as dinosaur tracks. In 2010, Wondrich
authored Punch, another volume of drinks history that changed the bar
business. Punch was a deep dive into the birth of the spirit-based punch
tradition that fueled high-society imbibing for 250 years, eventually
becoming the blueprint for the cocktail itself. Craft bartenders around the
world began serving classic shrub-based punches from the eighteenth
century.
Meanwhile, The Craft of the Cocktail, my how-to book, was racking up
printing after printing as bright young people leaving their business and
professional studies to become bartenders began using it as their textbook.
There must have been parents all over America gunning for this guy Dale
DeGroff, whose book turned their son or daughter away from a real career
for what—bartending!
Yes, indeed, it was starting to look as if there might be something to the
notion that bartending could be a real profession again. Corporations that
operated luxury hotel and restaurant brands realized that they needed
beverage specialists with a broad knowledge of cocktails, spirits, wines,
beers, teas, and coffees across cultures from the West to the East. The
earnings ceiling for bartenders with these special skills was raised, and “the
beverage specialist” became an emerging profession.
Large drinks companies that bet heavily on the rebirth of the cocktail
and won big wanted to ensure that it was more than a flash in the pan. They
put their dollars into the trade and invested in programs and events like
Seagram’s School of Spirits and Cocktails, Tales of the Cocktail,
BarSmarts, World Class, and Bacardi Legacy. They dedicated themselves to
the proposition that an educated consumer would reap huge returns in sales,
and they invested in advertorials, researched and written by leading drinks
writers like F. Paul Pacult, Dave Broom, and many others. They brought the
consumer into the distilleries of Kentucky and the peat bogs and the barley
malting floors of Scotland. I propose that the investment paid—and
continues to pay—substantial dividends.
The drinks companies are not the only winners. Libbey glass and many
smaller china and glass suppliers have prospered. The growth in just one
glass category—the cocktail glass in all its iterations—from 1990 to 2018,
is vast.
Today, the cocktail seems to be everywhere, but most importantly, it is
back in its rightful place in the thick of American cultural and culinary life.
It is hard to thrill at the heights that the new millennium is taking the craft
cocktail without looking back at how this unique American culinary art
evolved for over two hundred years, a craft that we almost lost in the early
days of the twentieth century with the “big mistake”—Prohibition.
THE NICK & NORA GLASS
When we reopened the Rainbow Room in 1987, I needed a retro-style
cocktail glass. Joe Baum sent me to Minners Designs, a venerable old
house supplying china and glass to hotels and restaurants in New York
for decades but sadly no longer in business. I described the glass I
needed with a reference to The Thin Man movies: “Not the V shape,
but a small bowl on a stem—the glass Nick and Nora Charles used
when they made martinis.” They referred me to their catalog of vintage
items, with the disclaimer that they had discontinued many models,
and because others were out of stock, new molds would have to be
constructed.

Once I found the “Little Martini” glass in the catalog, that was it! We
made the molds and used the glass for the lost cocktails with tradition
at the Promenade Bar. Each time I ordered the glass, I called it the
“Nick & Nora.” In the new millennium, the china and glass company
Steelite International bought some of the old Minners Designs catalog
items, including the Little Martini; you will now find it described in their
catalog as the Nick & Nora glass. Then, in 2005, Audrey Saunders used
the Nick & Nora glass at New York’s legendary Pegu Club, and within a
few years the glass was adopted by craft bars around the world; today,
even Libbey glass produces a version of the Nick & Nora.