My latest story is up on Details.com. I took a look at Michael Veach's amazing book Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage and wrote about a few of the many bourbon myths he busted.
These include who invented bourbon, why it's called that, what they used to put into it to make it taste older, and more.
Go read the story on Details.com.
In my studies of water in spirits and cocktails, I picked up the book Whisky on the Rocks: Origins of the 'Water of Life' by Stephen and Julie Cribb. The book is about the geography of Scotland and how that influences the water sources for scotch whisky.
It turns out Scotland's geology is pretty varied between very old (2900 million years) and new (60 million years), with large faults that divide the country into different areas, rift valleys, metamorphosed Dalradian rocks, schists, volcanic islands, and more. I don't know what most of those words mean either.
Distilleries in Scotland draw their water from streams, rivers, springs, reservoirs, wells, and other sources. Even within a single distilling city like Dufftown, water comes from several different sources. The water used for scotch whisky seems to be just as varied as the whisky produced there.
One of the most interesting and useful passages in the book (to me), comes from an early page.
The primary source of water is rain, but what happens to rainwater before its arrival at the distillery affects its chemistry and thus the uniqueness of the resulting malt whisky. The rain may end up as a stream or river, in a loch or a reservoir, coming from the rock as deep or shallow boreholes, or as a spring high on a hillside.
If it falls on bare mountains made of crystalline rocks it will flow rapidly downhill as streams. This water has little chance to interact with the underlying rocks and often has a low mineral content. It will be acid and soft.
On the other hand if the strata are more permeable, or have many joints and fractures, the rain will percolate into and through the rock, dissolving it and increasing the water's mineral content. Limestones and sandstones, for example, yield water rich in carbonates or sulphates; such waters will be neutral or slightly alkaline and hard.
'Soft water, through peat, over granite' was the traditional and still oft-quoted view of the best water for distilling. Remarkably, out of the 100 or so single malt whiskies, less than 20 use water that fits this description.
Though the book covers how geography influences the water sources for scotch and the paths it takes to get to the distilleries, it doesn't really get to deep into how that water then influences the distillation and importantly the taste of scotch, noting that it is just one factor along with peat smoke, still shape, and aging that may influence the final product. But of course, that's a big question that I'm researching in my Water Project.
Some facts about water sources for whiskies from the book (keeping in mind it was published in 1998 so it may be out of date):
Those are just a few tidbits from the book, which is only 70 pages but rich with diagrams of the geography of the regions being discussed. It is definitely a geography book rather than a whisky book, and can be a little hard for the novice (me) to parse. That said, I have a feeling that the more I learn about water and its effects on fermentation and distillation, the more I'll refer back to this book.
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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. The research for the project is supported by Bowmore Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.
With its friendly title, subtitle of "Why we Like the Foods We Do," and cover image of a strawberry dripping with cream, it seems that Taste Matters by John Prescott is a light, explanatory science book written for the non-scientist. Not so much.
It is more like a scientific literature review on the physiology of taste and taste preferences, innate and learned; and the bonuses and problems that come with it. It covers how humans have developed physically, emotionally, and culturally to like and dislike certain foods; how sometimes this doesn't work in our favor (now that we don't eat for pure survival) and why; and what we might do about that in terms of food development.
All of these are interesting subjects to be sure, but at the end of the day the book isn't a fun read so much as a small textbook. Which isn't to say I didn't learn a lot from it.
Naturally I was looking through the book with an eye toward drinks. Here are some things I underlined, and some observations I drew from them.
I've mentioned the book Drinking Boston by Stephanie Schorow here on Alcademics twice already, so clearly I've found it useful:
But I haven't given the book a proper write-up yet, so here's this.
The book is a history of drinking in Boston, from the earliest days of the tavern culture in th 1600s right up through today's cocktail renaissance. The first 70 or so pages take us through the taverns of Boston and their crucial role in the American politics and revolution.
Then we take a step back and look at Prohibition, from early movements through to national Prohibition of 1920-1933 and the thriving speakeasy culture. Prohibition takes us another 50 pages. We then look at a history of Boston's beer brewing, its neighborhood bars, and modern cocktail history.
Because the chapters are thematic and not all a linear narrative history, there tends to be some repeated information in different chapters. That's nothing I'll mind on subsequent reads when researching a particular topic, but it was a little annoying when I read the book from beginning to end. No biggie.
The early history of the tavern culture in Boston is done well, but for a more thorough look at this (and of American bar history in general), pick up the wonderful America Walks Into a Bar by Christine Sismondo.
Because of my familiarity with the earlier information, I was most excited for the brewing history, the era of the big nightclubs in the 1940s, the Great Molasses Flood, some of the modern bartenders' history, and the new characters and events of which I was previously unaware. After I put the book down, my Amazon Wish List grew by about 8 books on subjects inspired by this reading.
I think that no matter your interest level in different historical eras or aspects of bars, bartenders, or drinks, you'll find new information in Drinking Boston to add to it and to inspire further reading.
The Deans of Drink by Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown is a biography of bartenders Harry Johnson and Harry Craddock.
Harry Johnson is famous for his book, Harry Johnson's New and Improved Bartender's Manual from 1882. (Apparently there was also an 1860 that nobody can seem to find.) Johnson worked as a bartender in San Francisco, Chicago, Ne York, and Philadelphia.
Harry Craddock was a London bartender and author of the Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930. You can read all about him in this previous post on the matter.
The Two Deans details the lives of these bartenders, but also others including "The Only William" Schmidt, Ada Coleman, William J Tarling, and more. Thus the lives of these bartenders are put in context with the times in which they lived and worked - the German influence on American bartending; the effects of US Prohibition; women in bartending, and the other important bars of the day.
Beyond the text, the authors offer up several illustrations and cocktail menus, list recipes for important cocktails in the books, and for each Harry have a section of "liquid tributes" to these bartenders and their creations by some of today's top mixologists.
My favorite parts of the book, though, are at the end of each section, where the authors list the addresses and information about the bars in New York and London where these guys worked, and what is there now. That way after reading, you can visit all the sites (several of them are still there) you've just read about.
While not nearly as thorough as David Wondrich's biographical information and cocktail archeology in Imbibe, for example, this book provides an important look at what happened to American and ex-patriot bartending in the years after Thomas through the 1940s.
In January I flew to London for an event to celebrate the life and career of Harry Craddock, author of the Savoy Cocktail Book. The event was sponsored by Plymouth Gin, which is mentioned by name many times throughout the Savoy.
The tour was attended by Plymouth's distiller Sean Harrison, the top London bartenders, and a few special folks flown in from around Europe. Just a few of the bartenders presernt were Ago Perrone, Alex Kratena, Esther Medina, Gareth Evans, Geoffrey Cannilao, Stuart McCluskey, and Nick Strangeway. They helped bring over Erik Ellestad from San Francisco; probably the only person to make every cocktail in the Savoy.
American Bar head bartender Erik Lorincz came up with the idea initially, and he was joined by former Savoy head bartenders Peter Dorelli, Salim Khoury, and Victor Gower. Gower had actually met Craddock. To study Craddock's life, they enlisted Anistatia Miller, co-author of the just-released book The Deans of Drink that is about both Craddock and Harry Johnson. Max Warner, on his last day as brand ambassador for Plymouth, helped lead the show.
We began at the recently-discovered grave site of Harry Craddock. Craddock died at age 87 in 1963, unfortunately poor despite a life of fame as a bartender. We toasted to him, took a picture, then piled in to vintage cars from around 1930 (when the Savoy came out) to hit a few spots where Craddock worked.
Craddock was born in 1875 in England, but moved to the US in 1897. He worked there at some of the most popular bars including the Holland House, Hoffman House, and Knickerbocker. He was said to have mixed the last pre-Prohibition cocktail in the USA.
He left the US after Prohibition and never returned, though he may have made drinks off the coast of New York on a boat (where it was legal) for millionaires at one time.
The American Bar at the Savoy Hotel
In the early 1900s, despite having "American Bars" (usually denoting the use of ice and serving the fashionable cocktails of the US), the drinking scene was reportedly quite bad. So Craddock's entrance onto the London cocktail scene was a big deal, and everyone loved his American accent.
The Savoy had two female bartenders on staff, including the famous Ada Coleman, creator of the Hanky Panky cocktail. According to Miller, Craddock basically got Colemand and another female bartender booted from their positions at the bar, as he didn't believe woman should be doing that job. (They didn't have Speed Rack in 1921.) Craddock took the Head Bartender position in 1925.
Craddock became super famous in his job at the Savoy. In 1927, Madam Tussaud's even had his figure in the famous wax museum. That same year, the American Bar at the Savoy was redorated in the Art Deco style. When the did this renovation, Craddock was permitted to bury a cocktail shaker containing his creation the White Lady cocktail in the walls of the bar.
Though the bar has been renovated since then, the shaker has never been found.
In 1928, the hotel announced that Craddock had collected 2000 cocktail recipes, both originals and ones from other places. Over 1000 of these were published in the Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930.
The Cafe Royal
Craddock never worked at the Cafe Royal, but it did play a part in his history. The Grill Room there had just been restored to its former glory - the room is a hall or mirrors with gold frames and accents, and red furniture. They specialize in champagne and caviar. According the the website:
It is in this very room that Oscar Wilde fell in love with Lord Alfred Douglas, Aubrey Beardsley debated with Whistler, David Bowie retired Ziggy Stardust and Mick Jagger, the Beatles and Elizabeth Taylor danced the night away.
They do not mention that it was from this bar that the Cafe Royal Cocktail Book was launched in 1937. (The book is significant in that it is the first cocktail book anywhere to include a bunch of recipes with tequila- and Margarita by another name is found in its pages.) The book was not actually a list of original recipes invented at the bar, but was a book of recipes from the United Kingdom Bartenders Guild.
Craddock was the co-founder and first president of the guild, along with Cafe Royal's head bartender. Thus our visit.
The Dorchester
While Craddock was still employed at the Savoy, luxury hotel The Dorchester was renovated in 1938, and they asked Craddock to bury a cocktail shaker with drinks in the walls there also. In this shaker, Craddock put vials containing a Martini, Manhattan, and White Lady, along with recipes and a scroll. When the bar was rebuilt in 1979, they found this shaker and its contents.
The next year, Craddock left the Savoy after nearly 20 years and went to work at The Dorchester.
Though previously there hadn't been much evidence that Craddock had actually worked at the Dorchester, former Savoy bartender Salim Khoury was given a letter written by Craddock to one of his favorite Savoy customers (who didn't live in London) informing him of his move to the new hotel.
Since this hotel was recent and built of reinforced concrete, it became one of London's safest buildings during the Second World War. Though we don't know for sure that he served them, Winston Churchill stayed at the Dorchester and so did Dwight D Eisenhower. Given Churchill's fondness for booze, the two probably got together.
Though Craddock worked at the Dorchester until 1947, he still opened one more bar; a place called Brown's Hotel in 1951.
A Third Burial
Though our town didn't visit that spot, we returned to the Savoy for a final moment. Cocktails were mixed up and poured into vials. The vials were put into a shaker and sealed. And that shaker was buried in a wall in the Savoy Hotel in tribute to Harry Craddock.
As Max Warner said, Craddock didn't get a grand funeral, but he certainly deserves a grand day of remembrance.
Thank you to Erik, Anistatia, Max, everyone else who helped put on the day, and to Plymouth Gin for making it all happen.
Today's post is an excerpt from the new book Craft Cocktails at Home: Offbeat Techniques, Contemporary Crowd-Pleasers, and Classics Hacked with Science by Kevin Liu.
The book is heavy on the science, which is awesome.
And you can download the Kindle version for free Thursday, February 28 - Saturday, March 2.
Liu gave me permission to reprint a huge section on water, which is below. Thanks Kevin!
Transform Tap Water into Magical Alpine Fairy-Water
STOP. Walk over to your sink, pour yourself a glass of water straight from the tap. Taste it. Does it taste delicious? Like fairies extracted dew out of fresh mountain grasses and carried the droplets in tiny hydrophobic blankets to your glass? Then skip this section. You have no reason to start messing around with your water.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) actually maintains more stringent requirements for tap water than the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) imposes for bottled water, so if your tap water ain’t broke, you might do more harm than good trying to fix it. BUT if your tap water—like mine—tastes like you’re licking a cast iron skillet with every sip, read on and I’ll show you how to recreate alpine fairy-water out of normal tap.
Myth: Water should taste like nothing.
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to you, but bottled water manufacturers are lying to you. They promote the myth that bottled water is “pure” and that pure water, free from im“pure”-ities, tastes better.
Ask anyone who’s spent time in a chemistry lab: distilled water tastes nasty. It suffers from two major problems: (1) when air is removed from water, it tastes “flat” and (2) completely deionized and demineralized water is much more able to react with its environment, so it quickly picks up the taste of whatever it’s touching: typically plastic or the chemicals on paper cups (gross).
It’s not surprising that the most delicious waters in the world all contain signifi-cant amounts of minerals and oxygen. Consider what happens in nature: rain falls on a fairy-mountain. Let’s assume it’s pure at this point. As the water runs down alpine mountain fairy-streams, it passes over rocks and picks up dissolved minerals like calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium. And since oxygen is lighter than carbon dioxide, more oxygen gets dissolved in water than carbon dioxide at high fairy-altitudes.
These facts are not lost on bottled water manufacturers. Read the fine print on your favorite plastic hydration source, and notice how many of them contain minerals in addition to water. Most natural spring waters contain anywhere from 50 to 300 mg/l of stuff other than water, known in the industry as “total dissolved solids,” or TDS. Any water with TDS over 250 can be marketed as “mineral water” in the United States.
The United Kingdom even requires bottled water to contain minerals –
“under the UK Bottled Waters Regulations 2007 any bottled water that has been softened or desalinated must contain a minimum of 60 mg/L cal-cium hardness.”
When you start dealing with the mass production of water, consistent quality becomes a concern. It’s often easier for industry types to totally distill water and add minerals back into it rather than design filtration processes to produce a specific water profile. This process is called remineralization (more on this later).
Myth: All bottled waters taste the same.
In 2001, ABC’s Good Morning America program conducted a blind taste test of tap versus bottled waters. Of the four waters tasted, 45% (the largest group) preferred New York City tap water over bottled brands.
But what if ABC just got lucky? Tap water can taste great if it comes from a good source and has been properly treated. But it can also easily pick up off tastes along the way from the reservoir to the faucet. New York tap water might start off great at the treatment facility, but the pipes at your house might be contributing metallic or organic off-flavors. Gross.
Fast forward ten years. In 2009, the investigative journalism organization Mother Jones ran a piece on Fiji bottled water that examined everything about the product from the socio-economic impact the product has had on the small island of Fiji to the brand’s claims that each plastic bottle actually reduces car-bon footprint.
As part of the research for the article, editor Jen Quraishi conducted a taste test of popular bottled waters using 10 tasters. The results? Volvic mineral water, Whole Foods Electrolyte Water, and unfiltered San Francisco tap came in 1-2-3, out of ten contenders.
Then, in 2011, the online current affairs Magazine Slate conducted their own blind taste-test of the four most popular bottled waters in the the United States. In their test, not only could the 11-member tasting panel easily differentiate between bottlings, they all clearly disliked tap water and there was a clear win-ner at the end of the experiment: SmartWater.
Reverse Engineering the Best-Tasting Waters
I took a look at how each of the bottled waters that dominated these two taste tests are made and made a startling discovery. Both the Whole Foods and SmartWater brands unabashedly admit they contain nothing more than puri-fied tap water, remineralized with a blend of minerals.
Luckily for me, inquisitive internet-dwellers had already taken the liberty of contacting both Glaceau (the makers of SmartWater) and Whole Foods to as-certain their mineral formulas. Glaceau happily obliged, as did Whole Foods, though the Whole Foods rep cited a total 3000 ppm mineral content that seemed totally off. So I bought a bottle of each and checked the numbers. Here’s all the available data, combined:
Homemade Electrolyte (Fairy) Water
1 L Tap Water
10 g Homemade Electrolyte Concentrate (below)
Use a reverse osmosis or ZeroWater® filter to produce zero TDS water. Distilled should work too. If in doubt, test your “0 TDS water” with a TDS meter. Add the homemade electrolyte concentrate and shake violently.
Homemade Electrolyte Concentrate
1 L Tap Water
1.50 g Magnesium Chloride
1.00 g Sodium Bicarbonate
1.00 g Calcium Chloride
Use a reverse osmosis or ZeroWater® filter to produce zero TDS water. Com-bine. The mixture will stay cloudy for a while after you add the minerals, though it should clear up in time.
Notes:
• Use this concentrate so you don’t have to measure out 10 mg of minerals at a time. That would be annoying.
• Sodium bicarbonate is nothing more than baking soda. Potassium bicar-bonate can be substituted for people who are sensitive to sodium. Potas-sium bicarbonate is available through beer and wine homebrew stores.
• Calcium chloride is used both for beer/winemaking and in modernist cooking. Visit retailers who specialize in those ingredients for purchasing options.
• Magnesium Chloride is available as a dietary supplement. One product I found contained 66.5 mg per 2.5 ml serving, which means you would need 5.7 mL or just over a tsp per liter of water to make Electrolyte Concentrate.
• Avoid mineral tablets, as these contain binders and anti-caking agents that can affect flavor.
What Makes Water Taste Good?
With the exception of magnesium, all of the ions listed in the table above ap-pear in significant amounts in human saliva. However, our saliva’s composition doesn’t at all mirror the ratios presented here. Beyond this simple observation I can only speculate as to why this particular blend of minerals in this concentra-tion tastes especially good.
One possible explanation may lie in total dissolved solids. I found the following information on a forum post at Home-Barista.com. It quotes the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s (SCAA) Water Quality Handbook:
The test methodology was blind tasting by six tasters at the SCAA Lab in Long Beach. From page 31:
“In a tasting conducted by the Technical Standards Committee of the SCAA, coffee was brewed with different levels of TDS to determine if significant flavor differences existed and how much difference actually existed. ... The same cof-fee, grind, and brewer were used and the same standard combination of miner-als was used. The only difference was the concentration of the minerals in the brewing water. The first tasting was conducted using three water samples: one contained TDS at a level of 45 mg/L, one at 150 mg/L, and one at 450 mg/L. The coffee that was brewed with 150 mg/L water was chosen as far superior by all who judged the coffee.
A second tasting was conducted using 125 mg/L, 150 mg/L, and 175 mg/L samples to determine if minor variations in water quality would have an effect on flavor and extraction. The minor changes in the TDS of water were unani-mously discernible by the panel. Acid and body balances were perceived to be off at both 125 mg/L and 175 mg/L TDS, and the 150 mg/L TDS brew was rated superior.”So the coffee geeks seem to observe that the level of total dissolved solids is more important than anything else, with no concern as to which solids are actu-ally present. This didn’t make sense to me, so I reached out to a chemical engineer to find out more:
Joe McDermott on the Taste Chemistry of Water
Joe is a chemical engineer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.
We got in touch because I heard your research area was in water. Tell me about that.
Sort of—I’m a chemical engineer by trade and my PhD thesis in Chemistry focused on colloidal particles in aqueous systems (the study of tiny stuff dis-persed in liquids). So I know a little bit about water chemistry, but it’s really exciting to be talking about it from the perspective of taste.
You’ve read through my ideas about making water taste better—what’s your professional opinion?
What makes water taste good is a really interesting question. From my under-standing of taste receptors, our taste buds are only set up to accept very specific tastes, like sodium chloride for salt or acids for sour.
I think you’re right that mineral content is important, but I’m not sure why from a taste perspective. My gut instinct is that the cation portion of the min-eral (the positively charged half) has less to do with taste than the anion side. If you look at the periodic table, a lot of the commonly found mineral cations show up really close to each other. There aren’t that many chemical reactions I can think of where Ca+ can’t simply be replaced with Mg+, for example.
Anions, on the other hand, can vary greatly in structure and complexity. They’re often structured organic molecules. Think about MSG—monosodium glutamate. The anion half is glutamic acid, an important amino acid that serves as a neurotransmitter and has the chemical formula C5H9NO4.
Why do you think ion concentration is important?
I work in a world where I need to know how much dissolved ionic material there is in a solution. It matters a lot more than the total dissolve mass because when ions dissolve in water, they change the charge of the water itself, which then changes how particles dispersed in the water behave. In the lab, we deion-ize our water to ensure. But if we get really good deionized water and let it sit out on the counter, it will measure out to 5.6 pH (relatively acidic). That’s be-cause atmospheric CO2 dissolves really readily in water.
So, does that mean that most water will turn acidic if it’s left out for a long time?
I haven’t tested this in the lab, but I would think so. In fact, that’s probably one reason why you see sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) or other bicarbonate minerals added to bottle water. Bicarbonates act as a pH buffer—that is, they make it so that it would require more CO2 to dissolve in the water before it actually became acidic. Think of it as insurance for nice-tasting water.
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Here are some rules of thumb for how we perceive acidities found in the normal range for waters.
Buy Craft Cocktails at Home: Offbeat Techniques, Contemporary Crowd-Pleasers, and Classics Hacked with Science by Kevin Liu on Amazon.com.
When was grenadine first used in cocktails? I thought this would be a simple question to answer, but not so much. Along the way to figuring this out, I've had to split up this one blog post into several.
First we'll look at the cocktail books from 1862 - 1930 and see where grenadine is called for in recipes. Then we'll try to draw some conclusions from that. And then we'll look into what the grenadine that bartenders were using really was: made from fresh pomegranate or artificially-flavored?
So let's get busy.
From Nowhere to Everywhere
In Jerry Thomas' How to Mix Drinks, the first bartenders' guide from 1862, he calls for raspberry and strawberry syrups throughout, plus shrubs made from cherries and white currants, but I don't see any pomegranate.
Fifty years later in Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930, I counted about 100 drinks that call for grenadine. Many of those say "raspberry syrup or grenadine" so it seems one had replaced the other. Let's see what happened in between.
A Review of Grenadine in Cocktail Books 1862 - 1930
In Harry Johnson's Bartender's Manual from 1882, his list of required syrups at the bar do not include grenadine but white gum, raspberry, pineapple, lemon, strawberry, orange, orchard, rock candy, and orgeat syrups.
The Modern Bartenders' Guide by O.H. Byron from 1884 lists recipes for cordials and syrups, concentrated fruit syrups, and fruit brandies: none of them list pomegranate or grenadine.
In The Flowing Bowl (1891) by The "Only" William, I don't see any grenadine or pomegranate recipes, but several have raspberry syrup, including the Violet Fizz, the Knickerbocker, and the Pineapple Julep.
So far, the first grenadine recipe I see in a cocktail book comes from Cocktail Boothby's American Bar-Tender, from 1891. In the body of the text, it is only mentioned once, and not even in a cocktail, but in "Turkish Harem Sherbet." However, stay tuned for more information that comes from a later edition.
In Modern American Drinks by George Kappler (1895), The Bosom Caresser is made with raspberry syrup, egg, brandy, and milk. In later books, the ingredient changes.
This book shows grenadine beginning to creep into cocktails. Specifically:
Meanwhile, in France, grenadine was all the rage in Louis Fouquet's Bariana from 1896. His recipes include:
I also don't see any grenadine in Mixicologist by C.F. Lawlor (1895).
Stuart's Fancy Drink and How to Mix Them (1902) also lists many recipes for syrups and liqueurs, but no grenadine.
A brief look through Recipes of American and Other Iced Drinks by Charlie Paul (1902) didn't reveal any grenadine either.
Back to Cocktail Bill Boothby's American Bar-Tender. In an addendum of the 1908 edition of the book are several typed pages with new cocktails (apparently collected from contact with other bartenders), and here we find some grenadine.
After this point, grenadine really takes off.
In Drinks by Jacques Straub (1914) we find a ton of grenadine drinks:
The book lists raspberry syrup in other drinks separately. The Knickerbocker lists the drink with raspberry syrup.
In Hugo R. Ensslin's Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1916-1917) we also have a ton of grenadine drinks. Clearly grenadine was well-established at this point. Drinks that include grenadine in the book are: Beauty Spot, Clover Leaf Cocktail, Daiguiri [sic] Cocktail, Hugo Bracer, "Have a Heart" Cocktail, Jack Rose Cocktail, Littlest Rebel Cocktail, Millionaire Cocktail I, New York Cocktail, Oppenheim Cocktail, President Cocktail, Pollyanna Cocktail, Pinky Cocktail, Royal Smile Cocktail, Santiago Cocktail (same as the 'Daiguiri"), September Morn, Saxon Cocktail, Twin Six Cocktail, Wallick's Special, Apricot Cooler, Lone Tree Cooler, Picon Highball, California Lemonade, American Rum Punch, Bacardi Rum Punch, Pineapple Punch, Hugo Rickey, Applejack Sour, Fireman's Sour, Knickerbein, Pousse Cafe, Wild Eye Rose.
Some interesting things about this book:
In Cocktails: How To Mix Them by Robert Vermeire (1922), which was published in London, we see grenadine drinks such as the Chinese Cocktail, Club Cocktail, Daiquiri (the same Bacardi Cocktail-Daiquiri reversal is present here), Dempsey Cocktail, Depth Bomb, Gloom Raiser, Luigi Cocktail, Millionaire, Monkey Gland, R.A.C. Cocktail, Monkey Gland Cocktail, "75" Cocktail, Tipperary, Trocadero, Ward Eight Cocktail, and Whiz-Bang. That's just the cocktails- there are also coolers, juleps, sangarees, etc.
In Barflies and Cocktails by Harry and Wynn (published in Paris in 1927), we again see lots of grenadine in the recipes. Below are some notes.
And that brings us to the Savoy Cocktail Book from London in 1930. Some notes:
In the next post in this series, we'll look at some conclusions from this literature review.
For the month of December I'll be looking at the pomegranate and its use in cocktails, including in grenadine and in PAMA pomegranate liqueur, the sponsor of the project. Check out the information developed just for bartenders at PamaPros.com.
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