Ages of the Cocktail

The Archaic Age (1783 - 1830)

The archaic period included punches, toddies and slings concocted of brandy, gin or whiskey sweetened with sugar and mixed by hand with a utensil known as a toddy stick.

The Baroque Age (1830 - 1885)

In 1862, Jerry Thomas’ bar manual became the first book to offer recipes for cocktails and their precursors, including punches, juleps, slings and flips. During this age, ice became commonplace, and the demand for individual drinks rather than communal ones arose, along with the use of garnishes and imported liqueurs from France and Holland, and bartenders learned to use new tools including the ice pick, the shaker, and the long handled spoon. In addition to cutting ice, barmen also made their own bitters, syrups and cordials, which they learned through years of apprenticeship, and served wearing white coats and gloves.

The Classic Age (1885 - 1920)

Around 1885, the gaudy baroque age gave way to the classic age, what together would be, the golden age of the cocktail. The classic age was one during which drinks became refined and simplified, though type of glassware proliferated. Brandy fell out of favor as whiskey came to predominate. Meanwhile, dry vermouth began to compete with the regularity of sweet vermouth: ingredients essential to the Manhattan, the Martinez, and, its younger more famous sibling, the Martini. Despite the simplicity of these classic age drinks, the first decades of the 20th century also found the cocktail expanding to include fresh juices and grenadine. By 1920 almost every technique and ingredient used by current mixologists was already in use.

The Dark Age for Cocktails: Prohibition (1919 - 1933)

As bar doors shuttered sending drinker and cocktails underground, the bartender’s skills lacked an audience and cocktails suffered for taste and design. Bartenders who were unable to maintain posts in country clubs retire or headed abroad to places like Britain and Cuba, bringing the taste for cocktails to an international audience. By the time of the appeal of Prohibition, the art of mixology had all but disappeared in the United States.

Quality remained low during the Depression and WWII, and the bartender’s major skill became masking bad-tasting spirits with sugary liqueurs and fruit juices. While new cocktails did come out of Europe and the Caribbean, a cultural shift toward commonality and convenience-based consumerism made presweetened and artificially flavored mix-ins popular, while the popularity of cocktail parties eclipsed any movement toward an appreciation for mixology as art.

The Renaissance of Mixology - The Platinum Age (1991 -

As customers’ palates became more adventurous, so did their interest in worldly cuisines and began offering signature cocktails, food pairings, and the use of fresh ingredients, including herbs, spices and chilies. Mixology at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries has diversified into several approaches and philosophies:

• Pre-repeal revivalists are know for their attachment to Jerry Thomas and the dress, decor and language surrounding the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
• Neoclassics work to update old classics using new techniques.
• The farm-to-glass movement privileges fresh and seasonal ingredients and is popular in places with especially long growing seasons such as the West Coast.
• Liquid locavores stress the importance of locality in the provenance of their spirits, flourishing in places where multiple local distilleries allow for craft cocktails to be created from locally produced liquors.
• Home brewers, in addition to the movement to brewing beers and distilling at home, include bars that create their own bitters, infusions and fortified wines.
• Minimalists, in stark contrast to the baroque period’s cocktail extravagance, work to keep their cocktails down to five ingredients or fewer.
• Faux tropicalists seek to revive once classic cocktails using fresh citrus and homemade syrups.