Gimlet Cocktail: the libertarian’s delight
It seems that the better known a cocktail is, the more it resists the constricts of a recipe—as Jimmy Durante used to say, “everybody wants to get into the act.” A few of the most famous don’t even adhere to a canonical list of ingredients—for example, the Martini, which Camper English recently described as “a set of variables and constants,” rather than a single drink.
The Gimlet carries this free-for-all to an extreme. Read more 
The Silver Cocktail
The Silver Cocktail is a Prohibition-era cross between the Martinez and the Martini. Truly old-style, at equal parts gin and vermouth, it seems to reside comfortably on its own branch of the Martini family tree. Read more
What color is the Blue Moon Cocktail?
Quick! What color is the Blue Moon Cocktail?
It’s blue, right? It’s called the Blue Moon.
Yes and no. As it turns out, the original Blue Moon was… red. Read more
Mixing with Fernet Branca—the Hanky Panky Cocktail
I have no idea where I first came across the Hanky Panky, nor why I thought it would be a good idea to try a drink with such an off-putting, cutesy name (it turns out there’s a Prohibition-era story there), and made with Fernet-Branca, an ingredient with what Paul Clarke described in a recent Imbibe article as a “caustic reputation.” Read more
Aviation Cocktail
The history of the Aviation Cocktail is a tale of neglect and abuse, rehabilitation and redemption, and even controversy. Sort of like Cinderella with politics. I love these cocktails with stories. Read more
Leap Year Cocktail
I’m one of those people who is fascinated by cosmic markers like solstices and equinoxes. It’s hard to explain—I guess it’s sort of a feeling of being in the presence of greatness. Or cosmic forces. Or something. At the very least, it’s an excuse to celebrate. I set out to identify a solstice cocktail for the onset of the summer season, and I was astonished to find that there are no classics that address these auspicious dates. Inexplicable. Read more
The Campden Cocktail
The Campden Cocktail has been around at least since Prohibition, but has been generally disregarded. I first encountered it in Robert Grimes’s Straight Up or on the Rocks, but I can find nothing about its history other than its 1930 appearance in The Savoy Cocktail Book. It is rarely included in drink listings. Curious (and suspicious) at this neglect, I mixed some up. Read more
Twentieth Century Cocktail
The Twentieth Century Cocktail, according to lore, is a celebration of Henry Dreyfuss’s gorgeously Art Deco Hudson locomotive, introduced in 1938 to power the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited cross-country passenger trains. The story is a little dodgy, as the cocktail’s formula was published in the 1937 Café Royal Bar Book, a year before the engine’s introduction, but Read more
