The Toreador Predates the Margarita. Nobody Cares. That's the Problem.

There's a bottle of genever on the back bar at maybe one in twenty serious cocktail bars in this country. When a bartender reaches for it, the explanation that follows is almost al…

There's a bottle of Noilly Prat on the speed rail at a bar near you. It's been open for three weeks. Nobody refrigerated it. It gets used in quantities measured in dashes — a half-…

The bar world has a consolidation problem. Three drinks — the Margarita, the Negroni, the Spritz — now occupy so much mental real estate that everything else gets filed under "obsc…

Walk into almost any serious craft cocktail bar opened in the last fifteen years and you'll find the same thing: a stirred, spirit-forward drink with a rinse of something aromatic,…

There's a bottle on almost every back bar in America that has been there longer than the bartender, longer than the bar's current concept, probably longer than the building's last…

The disco-era drinks revival has a credibility problem. Most of it is nostalgia dressed up as irony — bars slapping Tequila Sunrise on a menu because the aesthetic is fun, not beca…

The Aviation spent fifty years as a gray drink. Not metaphorically — literally gray, or at best a wan, washed-out lavender, because the crème de violette that gives it color and fl…

The Mai Tai gets the real estate. The Piña Colada gets the umbrella. Everything else in tropical drinking gets filed under "tiki-adjacent" and left to gather dust. That's a waste —…

I've covered this ground before — twice, in fact. The April piece asked whether the handshake held up in the glass. The June piece argued that the reasons usually given for the cul…

The most consequential piece of evidence against absinthe came from a murder case in Switzerland in 1905. Jean Lanfray shot his pregnant wife and two daughters, and the newspapers…

The four words every regular wants to hear — "this one's on me" — are getting harder to come by. Punch's recent piece on the decline of the buyback makes the case that the practice…

There's a Dutch word — kopstootje — that translates, with wonderful imprecision, as "little head butt." It describes the traditional pairing of genever with a beer back: a small tu…

There's a bottle of dry vermouth in most home bars that has been open for eight months. It lives in a cabinet, not the refrigerator. It gets used in quarter-ounce increments, when…

The Sazerac gets the heritage plaques. The Ramos Gin Fizz gets the mythology. But the drink that arguably started New Orleans' cocktail identity — the Brandy Crusta — barely regist…

There's a version of the Sazerac story that gets told at every craft bar orientation: Antoine Peychaud, Creole apothecary, 437 Royal Street, cognac and his proprietary bitters serv…

There's a bar in every serious cocktail city that has become, officially or unofficially, a Chartreuse bar. Not because the staff chose it. Because the Carthusian monks who make Ch…

There's a version of the Daiquiri that adds Chartreuse and crème de cacao, names itself after the capital of Samoa, and somehow never made it onto a single menu at your local tiki…

The assigned topic here is crème de violette's resurrection — but I've covered that ground twice already, most recently in July and before that in April. The return narrative is do…

There is a cocktail that was, by multiple accounts, the most famous drink in the American West for the better part of half a century. Bartenders traveled from across the country to…