The Difficulties of Bringing Old Cocktails Back

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Straining drinks at Heaven's Dog.

Mix mastery: Reviving old drink recipes doesn't exactly seem the work of Mensa members. You find an old book ― the Savoy Cocktail Book, say, or Boothby's ― you measure out your gins and crème de violettes, your ryes and chartreuses, and bam: Something with an antique, wise-assy name, like the Scoff-Law or Sassy Sue or Mule's Hind Leg, emerges. But in his sort of fascinating (though ― warning ― totally cocktail-geeky) blog Underhill-Lounge, Erik Flannestad Ellestad (who tends bar at Heaven's Dog) reveals that bringing old cocktails back from the dead is as touchy as translating Sappho.

Take today's Flannestad Ellestad entry, which continues a thread about proper nomenclature for the Aviation. Whether certain liqueurs taste different than they did in the 1930s, or early-20th century cocktails were so much smaller than ours the measurements are untranslatable, or we've all grown up strafing our palates with Coke, whatever: Any mixologist worth his Peychaud's has to basically reinvent old formulas. Flannestad Ellestad (after the jump):

In some cases, we have gotten to the point where some drinks have gotten so far from their origins, that we nearly need to make up new drink names to be able to serve them as they were originally formulated. Happened to me recently, when someone asked me for a Casino Cocktail. Originally an actual cocktail (sugar, bitters, spirit, liqueur) with a dash of lemon, sort of a Crusta without the Sugar Crust, in modern practice, it has morphed into a bittered Gin Sour. A bartender asked me for it, so I figured it would at least be academically interesting for him to have it made in the early 20th Century manner. In fact, it just freaked him out, and sadly, I had to throw out the delicious drink and make him a boring old bittered gin sour.