The Mai Tai Feud Never Got Resolved. It Got Marketed.

I've spent a lot of issues here arguing that bars ignore a deep bench of forgotten drinks in favor of the same five trends. David Wondrich just made the opposite case, and he's not…

A drink named for a death notice should have a tidy origin story. It doesn't. The Obituary Cocktail — gin, dry vermouth, a whisper of absinthe, a lemon twist — disappeared from New…

Order a Pisco Sour in Lima and one in Santiago and you are not drinking variations on a theme. You are drinking two different regulatory philosophies that happen to share a label.…

Every few months a trade outlet publishes a list reminding bartenders that the canon has more than five drinks in it. Good. The problem isn't that these lists exist — it's that mos…

Walk into almost any bar pouring a Mai Tai tonight and the orgeat behind the counter is more likely to have come out of a plastic pump bottle than a blender. That's not a shortage…

Open TikTok and search "Negroni Sbagliato" and you'll land on a page built entirely around one meme format — bartenders miming the gesture, captioning it with a pop culture referen…

Five years ago, nobody outside the Alps was reaching for génépy. Now it's turning up as a backbar staple, standing in for Chartreuse in everything from White Negronis to Whiskey So…

Tell someone there's a bitter liqueur made with artichoke and watch their face do the math. It sounds like a dare, not a drink. That reaction — equal parts curiosity and suspicion…

I wrote about clarified milk punch's 18th-century pedigree back in July and made the case that it's the oldest "modern" technique behind the bar — curdle the milk, strain the curds…

Every whiskey roundup eventually says the same thing: "beyond the Manhattan and Old-Fashioned." Punch's latest roundup of easy whiskey cocktails says exactly that, then lists a Fer…

Ask ten bartenders what falernum is and you'll get ten different answers, and at least three of them will be arguing with each other by the second round. Syrup. Liqueur. Cordial. P…

There's a version of cocktail history that gets repeated so often it calms into fact: Henry C. Ramos invented a drink at his Imperial Cabinet Saloon in New Orleans in 1888 so punis…

Chartreuse gets the cult treatment — allocation lists, secondary-market markups, bartenders rationing it like it's rationing them. Meanwhile a whole family of Alpine bitters sits o…

Kira Ellington named a cocktail after a Phish song, then had to invent a drink to fit the name. What she landed on was a carrot-and-mezcal sour held together by gentian liqueur — a…

There's a bottle of Batavia arrack behind some bars — usually dusty, usually shelved next to the falernum, usually explained to customers as "kind of like rum." That explanation is…

Negroni Week comes around every year, and bars respond by putting the same four riffs on their menus. The Sbagliato. The White Negroni. Something with mezcal. Something with a fanc…

There's a drink called the Toreador — tequila, apricot liqueur, lime juice, simple syrup — that has been sitting in the shadow of the Margarita for decades. Punch reports that in A…

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-…