Whilst other sections of the bar pride themselves on fine vintages and getting better with age, cocktail making is an art that never stands still, and a successful mixologist not only has a degree to make the classics but also the creative flair to keep inventing new flavours.
This is what makes the art of the cocktail so beautiful and why every cocktail bar not only has the classics and the legends of mixology but is bold enough to experiment with new flavours limited only by invention and the ingredients available to hand.
However, this modern era is not how the cocktail world always was; in the era of The Bon-Vivant’s Companion, cocktails were often about minimalism; only the ingredients needed to bring out the best of a high-quality spirit were used.
Early cocktails like the venerable Old Fashioned (first reference in print 1806) epitomised this approach; there was nowhere for a bourbon to hide amidst the sugar, soda splash, orange twist and Angostura bitters.
However, what happens when such an approach is no longer legal? Cocktails change.
The Creativity Of The Speakeasy
The Volstead Act first took effect in 1920, making it illegal to sell and make alcoholic beverages, kickstarting the beginning of the Prohibition era.
This meant that beers, wines and spirits were illegal, with very strict penalties for those who flouted the law.
Not that this stopped anyone, of course. Doctors started offering prescriptions for alcohol, and bootleggers quickly figured out ways to either make alcohol or remove the legally mandated “denaturants” that made industrial alcohol taste or smell bad.
In any case, all of these spirits were far from the high-quality bourbon that mixology was designed for, or the beautiful imported Caribbean rums that were now in much smaller supply due to relying on dangerous bootlegging runs.
As spirits were largely the only choice for many people still wanting to drink, to the point that 75 per cent of all alcohol sales were distilled spirits (up from 40 per cent in 1919), cocktails changed considerably and kickstarted a new era of creativity.
The entire genre of gin cocktails was brought to the forefront, primarily because gin was the quickest drink to moonshine.
To mask the harsh taste, cocktails became a lot sweeter and a lot more flavoured, as well as featuring less alcohol by volume than traditional classic cocktails.
This was useful in several ways; it helped limit alcohol supplies last longer, masked the taste and also meant that in the sometimes-common event that an underground speakeasy was raided by the police, people could quickly down their drinks and nobody would be the wiser.
Ultimately, the allure of the cocktail and the admission that four-fifths of elected politicians drank led to the repeal of Prohibition laws, but the changes caused by the speakeasy and the cocktails they mixed lasted forever.
Single-malt whiskies took a long time to regain popularity, replaced by blends, which in turn were replaced by white spirits as the cocktail bar saw a revival in the 1980s inspired heavily by classics mixed during Prohibition.
