No one can agree on the identity of the first person to take a ground beef patty, fry it up and stick it between two pieces of bread. Like the discovery of the DNA double helix or the invention of the airplane, it was most likely a case of spontaneous generation—the idea springing forth, fully formed, from the brains of cooks across the country like so many beefy Minervas, around the end of the 19th century.

It was inevitable: Beef as a commodity was gaining popularity and widespread distribution—thanks to Chicago and the birth of the industrial meat market—and ground beef was the poor man’s entry point to the world of bovine delights. Urbanization was fitting people to a scheduled, standardized nine-to-five mold, transforming what had once been the largest meal of the day into the lunch break as we know it today. And the hamburger steak, a fried beef-and onion patty eaten on its own with knife and fork (often known now as a Salisbury steak), had arrived on a wave of German immigration and was sweeping the nation alongside its elongated brother, the frankfurter.

Today, the hamburger’s reputation lives between two very different worlds: fast-food comfort— the Ronald McDonald dream that pairs burgers, apple pie and baseball in a holy trinity of good clean American fun—and the late-night, beer-sodden tavern, where a greasy burger is just the ticket to soak up the suds after a few too many rounds. Equally iconic, the two are almost diametrically opposed. How did this happen?

Though we don’t know who to thank for the hamburger’s first hand-held flight, there are two clear culprits in the case of its split personality: the Germans and Prohibition.

Who better to understand the pairing of meat and lager than the Oktoberfesting, biergartening Germans? Between 1820 and 1910, nearly 5.5 million German immigrants landed in North America. With them they brought the Christmas tree, a love of grilled meats and a peculiarly light lager that was cheaper and easier to produce and store than English-style ales.

As servicemen and women returned from the war, bars and taverns were fully revived, but they didn’t quite lose the illicit mark left by temperance organizations like the Anti-Saloon league. Drinking became strictly an evening activity, a small indulgence earned after the responsibilities of the day were over. Loyal as ever, the hamburger was still there, in many places being made on the very same flattop grills installed for the lunch crowd decades before. And while the shifted schedule may have taken the beer and burger underground for a few years, it didn’t make them any less beloved.

Schaefer beer, first produced by a pair of Prussian brothers in New York City in 1842, ushered in the era of German-style light, low-ABV American brews that quickly took over the market and persist to this day. In 1872, the New York Times painted a new beer-clanking, hamburger-eating scene in a story about cheap lunches that lauded German restaurants: “Boys bear lager in foaming glasses” to customers of all backgrounds who lunch on lentil soup, smoked sausage and “Hamburger steak, which is simply a beefsteak redeemed from its original toughness by being mashed into mince-meat and then formed into a conglomerated mass.”

Once in its bread-based carrying case, the hamburger steak became a lunchtime powerhouse, a quick and easy protein-packed gut bomb that sold for a reasonable nickel. It was readily available at lunch counters, diners and neighborhood restaurants that all bore a suspicious resemblance to the colonial tavern, with its mugs of beer and lively conversation among working men. The question, it turns out, is not how the hamburger got into bars: for centuries in the U.S., everything was a bar.

But as the temperance movement gained steam and led, ultimately, to Prohibition, the beer hall went from wholesome Jeffersonian tradition to scourge of a nation. At the start of World War I, temperance propaganda used the German connection to beer to brand drinking as unpatriotic. As the tavern was wiped out, the hamburger was led down the fast-food path, with its economical ingredients and universal appeal helping it to withstand the Depression and lean times of World War II.

As servicemen and women returned from the war, bars and taverns were fully revived, but they didn’t quite lose the illicit mark left by temperance organizations like the Anti-Saloon league. Drinking became strictly an evening activity, a small indulgence earned after the responsibilities of the day were over. Loyal as ever, the hamburger was still there, in many places being made on the very same flattop grills installed for the lunch crowd decades before. And while the shifted schedule may have taken the beer and burger underground for a few years, it didn’t make them any less beloved. Claiming “best burger” status for your neighborhood bar was a way of claiming membership in a community, just as in the original taverns.

Restaurants caught on, too. As fine dining mores shifted from classic French cuisine to modern American, the burger left its fast-food confines and headed for the tablecloths. To make the iconic sandwich their own, ambitious chefs swapped in new, creative condiments, buns, even patties. By the 1990s, the burger had become so decked out that it was necessary to distinguish the “pub burger” as its own distinct style, typified by a no-frills presentation (no truffled fries or kobe short rib blend here) and a generous portion size. Today, as a burger-eating society, it’s this pared-down version of the burger that we’ve swung back around to embrace.

So, was the gluten-bearing genius who invented the hamburger Louis Lassen, at his (still operational, still family-owned) lunch counter in Connecticut? Or was it created at a Wisconsin state fair, at the hands of one “Hamburger Charlie” Nagreen? Or do we have Texan Fletcher Davis at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis to thank? It was all of them and still other, nameless innovators lost to the ages; the urge to pick up our food and take it with us is uniquely, universally American. Left alone with the component parts, each one of us would have invented the hamburger, too. And we would have washed it down with a beer.

On a recent annual visit to my in-laws’ in Volta Redonda, a few hours outside of Rio de Janeiro, I found myself at one of the many mercados in town, browsing through bizarre Four Loko knock-offs and fear-inducing aguardiente. Halfway down the aisle, I paused to find a liter-sized liquor bottle done up in similar packaging as Underberg—the classic German bitter drunk straight from a tiny, brown-paper wrapped bottles. Except this bottle was labeled “Brasilberg.” A far cry from the zippo-sized Underberg bottles cultish fans obtain at German beer halls the world over, I assumed it was merely a bootlegged oddity.

But Brasilberg, I found out later, is the real deal—an expatriate hybrid of the traditional recipe using Amazonian ingredients that is sweeter and has a darker appearance and fruitier, more herbal aromas than its better-known sister.

The German bitter Underberg was founded in 1846 in Rhineberg, Germany, by Hubert Underberg, who turned the brand into one of the country’s most iconic digestifs. A generation and a half later, Underberg was suffering amidst the fallout from World War I, which was just a specter of the horrors soon to fall upon Europe again in a few years. Another war would mean continued trouble for the Underberg distillery’s ability to acquire the ingredients it needed from some 43-odd countries, all of which went into the recipe for the bitter liqueur. After the war began, Emil Underberg, Hubert’s grandson, was hit with the one-two punch of Allied blockades that rendered the import of exotic herbs near impossible and a sudden proliferation of inferior imitators that tarnished the brand’s name. Left without any options to continue operations, the Underberg family decided to shut down its distillery in 1941. (Underberg eventually re-launched the brand in 1949 with its now-famous paper-wrapped bottle, the original recipe intact.)

Familiar European bitter ingredients like aniseed and wormwood grow wild in the Amazon as well as in the Atlantic coastal rainforest around Rio de Janiero—areas that are also full of medicinal herbs that have been popular among locals for generations. These Amazonian plants and roots would make perfectly suitable replacements for Paul and Anna’s missing recipe components, eventually giving Brasilberg its more herbaceous flavor, tucked into softer, sweeter package that stands in stark contrast to Underberg’s dry, tongue-numbing lashing by way of anise and spice.

About a decade before Emil shut the factory doors, his brother, Paul, was wayfaring through Asia and Africa, and eventually settled down in South America, a world away from the turbulent air of Europe. He traveled by zeppelin to Rio de Janeiro in 1932 with his wife, Anna, and sought to distill Underberg there. But the family refused to give him that blessing (though if they had any idea of what was to come to Europe, they might have reconsidered), and Paul was left to improvise. He and his wife became friendly with a congregation of nuns who kept watch over their makeshift factory of imported German distillery equipment as well as what would become their herb room, where Paul and Anna would combine what they could glean of Hubert’s original recipe with a touch of the Amazon. This new take on Underberg had sugar added after distillation, which resulted in a spirit with closer kinship to an Italian amaro than to Underberg, which was largely considered a medicinal bitter.

Familiar European bitter ingredients like aniseed and wormwood grow wild in the Amazon as well as in the Atlantic coastal rainforest around Rio de Janiero—areas that are also full of medicinal herbs that have been popular among locals for generations. These Amazonian plants and roots would make perfectly suitable replacements for Paul and Anna’s missing recipe components, eventually giving Brasilberg its more herbaceous flavor, tucked into softer, sweeter package that stands in stark contrast to Underberg’s dry, tongue-numbing lashing by way of anise and spice.

While the working-class populace guzzled cheaply produced cachaça, Rio’s foreign and business set were the main consumers of Brasilberg, which at the time was simply called “Underberg do Brasil.” It carved out a cult following for itself in the spirit of Hubert’s original bitter, while ensuring its legacy would live on in the case that the rest of the family didn’t make it through another disastrous war.

After Paul’s death in 1959, according to Michael Griesel, brand manager for Underberg, Emil “did everything he could to acquire the company.” After years of refusing Emil’s offers, Anna finally sold it to the family just before her death in 2005.

Brasilberg’s remarkable history fits in with many of the country’s other odd cultural juxtapositions. From Lebanese to Japanese, the well-integrated culinary influences barely register as foreign to Brazilians. The country’s most popular fast-food chain serves Middle Eastern fare beneath a fez-clad neon mascot that is so culturally tone-deaf many foreigners balk at its existence. And thanks to Rio’s Japanese expat community, sushi makes a frequent appearance right alongside black beans and rice at almost all por kilo (by the pound) lunch joints.

This cultural mishmash is quintessentially Brazilian. It’s not born of any clear mission for nationalist assimilation, but rather, is part and parcel of its people’s typically unfussy approach to food and drink. As long as it is supremely enjoyable, who cares where it comes from? To this end, Brasilberg remains widely under-celebrated in its home country. In contrast to the fetishization of Underberg that has happened in the U.S., Brasilberg proudly maintains its spot on store shelves, its secrets known to few.

When I proudly lugged home my find from the market and showed it to my Brazilian uncle in-law, he shrugged and said, “It’s good for the stomach,” rubbing his gut, and then asked if I’d like to have a whiskey.

My first experience with a Jell-O shot was, I believe, fairly typical: My body rebelled. It was the early days of college, and the roller-coaster ride of cheap booze and bad decisions lay mainly in front of me, that first big drop still a few months away. So, when confronted with a solidified spirit, a cocktail gained physical manifestation, my systems froze up, unable to process the information being presented to them. Was it dessert, or drinking? Why did it feel like one thing, but taste like another? It was my first mouthful of a cultural force.

Jell-O shots are edible synesthesia, a conflicting set of signals that, for a moment, fool the brain into thinking it can taste sound or feel flavor. They trade in the same jolting confusion and delight patented by high-end molecular chefs like Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal, stripped down to an unabashed pursuit of pleasure, sugar and booze. Much as those dishes are developed to evoke specific sense memories (Blumenthal’s notorious Sound of the Sea pairs fresh seafood and pickled seaweed with an iPod playing surf sounds and a mini beachscape), Jell-O shots trigger a flood of childhood flashbacks—sore throats and Thanksgiving salads, school lunches and special treats—paired with the muscle memory of taking shots, reserved for a particular kind of night out. For those few fleeting seconds, as the shot slurps and shimmers down the throat, we are young and dumb and having fun.

For their extreme efficiency as an alcohol delivery system (in scientific studies of the effects of alcohol on rats, mini Jell-O shots are placed in their cages as a means to get them to over-consume) Jell-O shots have been resigned to the ghetto of underage drinking, the world of vodka-soaked tampons and boozy gummy bears from which a thousand tut-tutting New York Times think pieces and hysterical morning-show segments have sprung. Nearly everyone’s first encounter with the phenomenon happened in that teetering roller-coaster window, after all, and its popularity is highest among teenagers; one 2012 study found that 14.5 percent of all the alcohol consumed by a group of 16 20-year-olds came in jellied form. But long before there were bored teenagers looking for the latest Vine-worthy rush, people were dancing to the Jell-O shot’s siren song.

An apocryphal origin story pins the solidified shooter to parody song king Tom Lehrer, who in the 1950s was a military pencil-pusher. When restrictions prevented him from bringing alcohol onto the base for a holiday party, he struck upon the idea to solidify his vodka in a block of Jell-O, sneaking drinks in under the guise of a harmless dessert. Jell-O, at that point, had been the subject of an aggressive—and highly successful—marketing campaign for some 20 years. It was in consumers’ minds, not just as a standalone dessert but as a homemaker’s tool. It seemed only right to see what it could contribute to cocktail hour, too.

AM lite rock, multi-camera sitcoms and Jell-O: These things hold a place in our hearts precisely because they are insubstantial.

Likewise, longtime New York sportswriter Red Smith spent a late-career column reminiscing about Jell-O shots he had known in the early 1950s, thanks to Kentucky-born racing writer pal Joe Palmer. The idea stolen from a recipe for jellied madeira in a downhome cookbook, Palmer’s Long Island social circle was soon awash in solidified cocktails like jellied stingers: “Spooned down instead of sipped, its firepower was measured in megatons.” (That same column had Smith presciently reporting on early attempts to powder alcohol among the racing set.)

However, the real origin of jellied booze comes much earlier, and from a much more sacred source: Jerry Thomas’ original How to Mix Drinks. The 1862 bartenders’ bible includes a recipe for Jellied Punch, in which a standard punch recipe is mixed with a portion of powdered isinglass, an early gelling agent, and left to set up in elaborate molds. Even then, the concoction’s purpose was clear; as Thomas wrote in the recipe’s notes, “the strength of the punch is so artfully concealed by its admixture with the gelatine, that many persons, especially of the softer sex, have been tempted to partake so plentifully of it as to render them somewhat unfit for waltzing or quadrilling after supper.”

The Thomas connection notwithstanding, Jell-O shots have, in the past decade or so, fallen victim to an insidiously common refrain in the craft cocktail world: Drinks would be better if they were just taken more seriously. In the early 2000s, spiffed-up Jell-O shots began appearing in bars, served in martini glasses and fruit wedges alongside the Cosmos and lemon drops that marked an era on the verge of reinvention. Not long afterward, the home crafts renaissance spawned a trillion cooking blogs devoted to “upgrading” and “reimagining” the classic formula. To distance themselves from the bad old pre-packaged version, these nouveau shots were called “jelly shots,” “jiggelos,” “jiggle shots” or “party shots.”

Cocktail historian David Wondrich identified this phenomenon in the recent attempt by bartenders to reclaim the camp drinks of the 1970s. His argument: Not everything benefits from serious introspection. “Ultimately, craft versions of these things are like the singer you hear at Starbucks, strumming her guitar and breathily emoting her way through a cover of ‘Afternoon Delight,’” he wrote in a recent article for Esquire. “Her craftiness merely exposes the banality of the song without giving you the simple candy-rush pleasure it provides.” AM lite rock, multi-camera sitcoms and Jell-O: These things hold a place in our hearts precisely because they are insubstantial.

In some ways, attempts to rewrite the gauche tradition of the Jell-O shot are an attempt to gloss over the often uncomfortable fact that alcohol is a drug; all the culture and tradition of drinking is an after-market addition to the first, ultimate purpose of drinking, which is to make us feel good. Alcohol is, quite simply, intoxicating. And while I’m not here to endorse underage binge drinking (kids, if you’re reading this, cover your eyes), there’s real value in drinking terrible, one-note, cheap crap for the first few years of your boozing career—it sets a rock-bottom base from which to discover new, better drinks. Nobody wants to talk to the kid who was drinking 15-year-old scotch in high school; they want to share in the story of their first Jell-O shot. It was weird. It was confusing. Most of all, it was fun.

Visitors to Italy know you can hardly chuck a euro without hitting a grape vine. Indeed, in a land where wine is regarded both as sacrament and daily sustenance, vineyards are everywhere—from the steepest hillsides to urban backyards scarcely bigger than postage stamps.

But only in the past handful of years has viticulture begun taking root again in one of the country’s least likely places: Venice.

Hard as it is to imagine, the Floating City once had a thriving wine industry. For centuries, vineyards grew on at least several of the lagoon’s hundred-odd islands, including Mazzorbo, Burano and Sant’Erasmo. Even today’s tourist-clogged San Marco quarter, in the heart of the city, is believed to have once nourished some of the dozen or more grape varieties grown in the lagoon.

Yet the city’s rising fortunes—and seas—curiously left its distinct winemaking culture all but extinct. As Venice grew richer and more militarily powerful over the centuries, residents felt less compelled to be self-sufficient. Plus, producing wines on islands is inherently more expensive than on the mainland, in no small part because vineyards take up lots of precious space. Throw in the threat of seawater occasionally ruining vineyards, and it’s easy to see why Venice’s maritime wine culture sputtered out. And why its return is all the more interesting.

Leading Venice’s viticultural revival are two producers: Orto di Venezia and Venissa. Venissa is the latest winemaking venture by the Bisol family, makers of renowned proseccos in the town of Valdobbiadene, about an hour from Venice by train. One recent March afternoon, Matteo Bisol met me at his vineyard on the island of Mazzorbo, a short ferry ride from the center of Venice. Here, behind short brick walls, is the oasis-like Venissa, which includes a chic six-bedroom guesthouse, restaurant and Lilliputian vineyards of the indigenous dorona grape, an ancient white variety thought to be extinct. Since Venissa’s first bottling—a golden-hued wine that’s fermented on its skins and aged for two years in stainless steel—debuted in 2010, the wine has gained a cult following.

As methodical as Matteo and his family are about caring for the grapes on this two-acre vineyard, he said the fruit’s rediscovery was accidental. On a visit to the neighboring island of Torcello more than a decade ago, Matteo’s father Gianluca climbed the church’s bell tower, the lagoon’s oldest. Lovely as the landscape below was, what really caught his eye was a tiny vineyard.

“It was the last place he thought he’d see [grape vines],” said Bisol.

A visit soon after to the woman who owned the vineyard led Gianluca and his son on a quest to research Venice’s wine history, score samples of local vines and search for suitable growing spots.

Experiments by Bisol winemaker Roberto Cipresso, Matteo and his father growing dorona in and outside the lagoon revealed that the grapes favored the local soil, a unique combination of limestone, clay and sand. Stranger still, these grapes are more resistant to traces of salt in the soil borne by wind and sea during acqua alta, as the especially high tides Venetians have lived with for centuries are called. In fact, they seem to prefer this saltier turf.

Word of mouth led them to owners of dorona vines cultivated on the island since the 15th century and local archives yielded clues about where vineyards are and used to be—as did the more modern method of surfing Google Earth to study satellite photos for telltale lines in soil indicating vestigial rows of vines. Even the seemingly less scientific approach of simply wandering around, looking for gardens and plots of land with herbs known to enjoy vine-friendly soil, helped them learn where these grapes would grow best.

Some months later, they’d bought the plot of land where Venissa now sits. They’d also procured about 80 dorona grape vines from local home gardeners and farmers on Sant’Erasmo and other islands. DNA testing confirmed the grape vines were local to the lagoon and related to garganega, which is typically used to make Soave on the neighboring mainland.

Experiments by Bisol winemaker Roberto Cipresso, Matteo and his father growing dorona in and outside the lagoon revealed that the grapes favored the local soil, a unique combination of limestone, clay and sand. Stranger still, these grapes are more resistant to traces of salt in the soil borne by wind and sea during acqua alta, as the especially high tides Venetians have lived with for centuries are called. In fact, they seem to prefer this saltier turf.

“The other day, we were digging in a part of the vineyard where there is more salinity,” Bisol said. “The color of the rootstock in these areas is really healthy and beautiful, more than those (rootstocks) in the soil with less salinity; it’s how they’ve evolved.”

Of course, there is such a thing as too much salt for these grapes. An unusually severe acqua alta in 1966 is blamed for wiping out many then-remaining lagoon vineyards. Which is why Matteo says his family takes great care to protect their vineyard. Among other things, this meant building and maintaining traditional types of canals beside the vineyard, into which encroaching seawater can drain quickly back to the lagoon.

With Venissa’s success, the Bisol family is looking for other places in the lagoon to plant vines and to build proper winery facilities so they no longer have to transport harvested grapes to the family’s operations in Montalcino for fermentation.

Meanwhile, the title of true native winery, would belong to another relative newcomer, Orto di Venezia, on the neighboring island of Sant’Erasmo.

Founded half a dozen years ago by former French TV producer Michel Thoulouze, Orto means vegetable garden in Italian, a riff on the island’s longtime role as source of Venice’s famed produce, including asparagus and artichokes.

Over a lunch of tender stewed artichoke stalks, peppers stuffed with tuna and hard-boiled eggs garnished with anchovies (and his wines, naturally), Michel told me how when he first visited the island. He fell in love with—and bought—the then-derelict villa on 11 acres of lagoon-side land. Told by locals that his was among the most fertile soil around, Michel chafed at becoming a farmer. But after he came across a 17th-century map referring to his land as Vigna del Nobil Uomo (Nobleman’s Vineyard), he floated the idea of growing wine grapes by friends, who scoffed.

“They all thought I was crazy,” he said.

His pal Alain Graillot, a famed winemaker in France’s Crozes-Hermitage area of the Rhône Valley, recommended soil scientists Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, who tested the dirt—which is rich in clay, limestone and sedimentary rock from the Dolomites—and pronounced it excellent for wine. (In contrast, Mazzorbo’s soil is sandier and saltier.) What’s more, because Sant’Erasmo is higher than Venice’s other islands, it’s nearly immune from the ravages of acqua alta.

After months of experimenting with various kinds of grapes, including local varieties such as dorona—which they believed to be a great table grape, but not quite suited to high-quality wine production—Graillot and Michel settled on a blend of malvasia Istriana, vermentino and fiano. The first two, while not indigenous, do well in coastal climes. And fiano, typically found much farther south, in the volcanic soils of Campania, gives a nice minerality to the wine.

Ardent about using minimal intervention in the cellar and organic farming methods in the vineyards, Michel’s wines are a lovely balance of bright fruit and zingy acidity. Each vintage of the single wine the estate produces adheres to a blend of 60 percent malvasia, 30 percent vermentino and 10 percent fiano. And while Venetians don’t seem to share his love of older white wines, he’s still taken to aging magnums of his wine—many of them in the lagoon.

“Under water you have no light, no big jumps in temperature—it’s perfect,” he said, showing me an aged magnum from 2011, frosted with aquatic flora and fauna from its nine-month submersion.

When asked how he goes about cellaring in the lagoon, he conspiratorially winked and told me that he employs a pair of sandolos–traditional Venetian rowboats. One is filled with several hundred bottles filled with newly made wine; the other is merely a decoy with bottles full of seawater. Each sandolo is scuttled somewhere out in the lagoon. Only he and one worker know where.

As word of his wines have spread, so too are the number of visitors to his vineyards, including winemakers curious to learn how he managed to succeed in making wine in Venice’s lagoon, of all places.

“Everyone says the great wines are all made along the 45th parallel,” he said. “Well, here we are right on the 45th parallel.”

Inevitably, a conversation about Hemingway will trickle into a conversation about drinking. The guy wrote and drank a lot—though he didn’t drink while he wrote—and he’s been immortalized for both with countless namesake cocktails, books and bars dedicated to his affection for boozing. There’s even a Cuban bar that shamelessly manufactured its own Hemingway legend in order to capitalize on a dead man’s image.

Of course, there are other perpetually shit-faced writers celebrated for their bad behavior—Rimbaud, Coleridge, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, all of the Beats and Hunter S. Thompson. Mostly men, mostly tragic and, according to record, mostly trashed beyond comprehension. But of all of the literary screw-ups, Hemingway is most revered for his outsize way of approaching life and drink, consuming it with his bare hands and stuffing it in wherever it could fit like a bear readying himself for an unpredictable winter. But unlike, say, Fitzgerald and Rimbaud, he’s remembered surprisingly as one of the best behaved, which is probably why so many pubs and taverns welcomed him in, day after day. No profit-loving bar turns down a faithful regular, after all. And no profit-loving bar turns down the memory of a famous faithful regular.

Half a century after his death, Hemingway remains the most romanticized patron saint of literary drunks. And, like all saintly icons, his image has been imprinted upon a cadre of bars around the world—on a drink list, in adjacent conversation, in a namedrop from a bartender—and, for better or worse, they continue to run on the fuel of his erstwhile presence.

So far removed from his physical presence and often invaded by tourists, what is the allure of these “Hemingway bars,” and why do they continue to draw acolytes?

The first notable bars in which he forged a reputation were across Europe in the post-WWI years. In 1921, he moved to Paris as a foreign correspondent and began circulating in the company of other Lost Generation writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound—who spent their afternoons and evenings in Left Bank cafés like Les Deux Magots, Closerie des Lilas and Café de Flore.

Today, these once lustrous corners are dated and touristy in the way that many Parisian landmarks become dated and touristy—elegantly, and rightly so. But they aren’t filled with selfie-snapping voyeurs necessarily because Hemingway penned dispatches from its tables while talking politics with Stein. Rather—like so many French curios—they’ve cultivated a patina worn in by dozens of celebrity regulars including Picasso, Sartre, Camus and Toklas, lending them a shimmering worldliness that one man cannot alone impart. Here, Hemingway was but a thread in a tapestry being woven throughout Paris in the early 20^th century.

Throughout the 1920s and again during the Spanish Civil War in the late ’30s, Hemingway traveled to Spain, gravitating toward bars and restaurants like La Venencia and El Sobrino de Botín in Madrid where he immersed himself in the everyday conversations of locals and Republican sympathizers. Some of these places became the research material for many of his novels, including The Sun Also Rises, whose characters wander through the winding streets around the Plaza Mayor. It’s here where the first inklings of modern annoyance—or at least concern—at Hemingway’s ubiquitous presence begin to manifest.

However corny or misguided it might seem, drinking the drinks he drank, sitting at the barstools in sat in and preserving the booze-soaked trail he blazed, everyone—drinkers and bars alike—is attempting to get closer to this devil-may-care Hemingway experience, to brush up against it and hold onto it for a moment or two. Somehow, if we could all just observe the world from the angle that he saw it, then perhaps we could know what it’s like to be immortal, too.

James M. Markham, the New York Times’ Madrid bureau chief from 1976 to 1982, discusses the hard-drinking, Hemingway-spouting writers he encountered there in a 1985 editorial. As he observed their habits of retracing Hemingway’s steps to Cerveceria Alemana (a local beer hall he frequented) for one too many, he writes, “I do not say that they would not have destroyed their livers without Papa Hemingway’s inspiration, but it seems to me that his ghost was a spiritual accessory to their self-inflicted wounds.” According to another Times article from 2011, a sign that once hung above a restaurant near Botín declared, “HEMINGWAY NEVER ATE HERE.” Yet, according to the same article, Botín still maintains the memory of Hemingway without irritation; he did immortalize it as “one of the best restaurants in the world” in the pages of his first novel, after all.

By the time Hemingway made his way to Key West in the early 1930s, he’d published his first two novels to critical acclaim. He was well known in literary circles both foreign and domestic, and was bouncing as a journalist from Africa to Spain to Cuba and back to Key West again. It was in this strange, sandy back pocket of the American continent that he acquired a house (a historical landmark today), a bunch of now-mythic cats and a habit of nightly slipping over to Sloppy Joe’s, his neighborhood bar. At that time, Key West was a village with only a handful of watering holes that were certainly closer to American-style saloons than they were the established intellectual bastions of Europe’s capital cities. And it’s in these young, American establishments that Hemingway staked his own claim, unwittingly bolstering (and, in some ways, eclipsing) them for generations to come. On one hand, his ubiquitous presence often overshadows the very place that attempts to keep his memory alive. But on the other, without him, well, there would be no Hemingway stories.

Perhaps one of the bars that—without Hemingway’s tenure—would be little more than a faceless dive is Captain Tony’s, the original bar that Sloppy Joe’s once occupied (no relation to Sloppy Joe’s in Havana, Cuba). The dank, ephemera-filled den still benefits from the writer’s visits, even though Sloppy Joe’s (now a corporate entity with branches in Daytona Beach and Treasure Island, Florida) moved down the street sometime during the late 1930s. Legend has it that Hemingway acquired one of its urinals and installed it as a fountain-trough on his property.

For a long time, Captain Tony’s continued to proclaim itself “The original Sloppy Joe’s,” to which Sloppy Joe’s responded with a lawsuit. Now a sign hangs outside precisely stating, “The First and Original Sloppy Joe’s from 1933 to 1937.” For extra measure, there’s also a sign laying claim to Hemingway’s memory, though, “we have a lot of history outside of Hemingway’s years here,” says general manager Jason Lansdown. This includes having been a one-time icehouse that doubled as a morgue in the mid-19^th century. Somehow, the Hemingway story is sexier.

Down the street, Sloppy Joe’s holds an annual Hemingway lookalike contest, which ushers in dozens of potbellied men with downy hair and snow-white beards. But, as Philip Greene, author of To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, says, “Hemingway didn’t look like that when he lived there. He was slim and still had dark hair and a moustache.” Even so, the tourists flock and the pair of bars is happy to have them.

Further south, in Havana, where Hemingway lived and wrote for the better part of the 1940s and ’50s, is the fabled Floridita, an ancient lounge still dripping with red velvet, dark wood and a constant line of tourists in Old Havana. Undeniably the best-known of Hemingway’s favored bars (perhaps thanks to the fact that he was a living legend by the time he moved to Cuba), Floridita has also become the most caricatured. Granted, it was famous with Prohibition-era tourists before Hemingway ever set foot in it. “Hemingway just made it more famous,” says Julio Cabrera, the Floridita’s global ambassador.

And for that, they’ve honored him. In a spot along the bar where he once downed double Daiquiris by the dozen, there now stands a life-sized bronze effigy of a potbellied, bearded Hemingway hulking over the bar, staring into space. Each day, visitors line up to snap photos with the monument, while bartenders still dole out “Papa Dobles” by the dozen, albeit with neon colored straws. “I don’t think it affects anyone,” says Cabrera. “It’s part of the custom. It’s part of the every day.”

However corny or misguided it might seem, drinking the drinks he drank, sitting at the barstools he sat in and preserving the booze-soaked trail he blazed, everyone—drinkers and bars alike—is attempting to get closer to this devil-may-care Hemingway experience, to brush up against it and hold onto it for a moment or two. Somehow, if we could all just observe the world from the angle that he saw it, then perhaps we could know what it’s like to be immortal, too.

There are, of course, many other Hemingway bars that have attempted just the same. The Hemingway Bar at the Ritz in Paris; Harry’s New York Bar just an arrondissement over; Harry’s in Venice; El Bodeguita del Medio in Havana, which falsely claims Hemingway as a regular and the Mojito as his go-to; Bar Marsella in Barcelona; The Carousel Bar in New Orleans. According to Philip Greene, there’s even a Hemingway-themed bar forthcoming in New York. Each of these places, including Paris’s cafés and Spain’s Republican taverns, delight in perpetuating Hemingway’s legend. And when that legend concerns a man who was larger than life—and yet living that life amongst plenty of witnesses to his sobriety, his drunkenness—the legends multiply, split and multiply again.

A patron saint’s canonization is built upon adoration and miracles that support the idea of immortality and something more spiritual than we know how to imagine. But it’s also built upon the belief that this person, this regular human being, was able to achieve some intimate connection with god. However sacrilegious the idea of Hemingway as patron saint might be, his uncanny ability to reveal the humanity—his, ours—in a bust-up world is its own small miracle. And in the spirit of what a bar is, or at least what we often need it to be, it’s no wonder that so many still hope to meet him there.

When Toby Cecchini and Joel Tompkins took over and reopened Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar in 2013, they reinstalled the watering hole’s original vintage neon sign—and caused a small commotion in Cobble Hill.

Four months earlier, they had hired the shop Let There Be Neon to take the sign down, secure it in their studio and meticulously clean and repair the broken tubes and bends at the cost of a small fortune. Since the early 1950s, the red and green neon script had glowed above the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Henry Street, inviting passersby into the small, family-owned local institution for drinks. But as of 2007, when the owner retired, the sign had blinked off and the old bar inside was gathering dust behind the windows. Cecchini and Tompkins had not told anyone of their plans for the sign, and its reappearance was like the shocking return of long-lost relative who was feared dead.

“People were just crowding around the day they were reinstalling it,” Cecchini says. “Everyone had gathered and they were just ecstatic. People were saying, ‘When I saw that sign go down, I thought, those sons of bitches! But here it is, it’s back!’”

As Cecchini and Tompkins learned, it can be easy to underestimate the emotional connection that people attach to these fixtures. Having worked most of his career in Manhattan, Cecchini didn’t know what to expect from Brooklynites when they relaunched the bar. “But immediately when we opened, people started pouring in the door, saying how glad they were that we had saved the bar and, in particular, the sign,” he says. “People were just so relieved.”

For what might seem like a fairly innocuous technology, since its debut neon has served as a flashpoint for broader cultural trends, alternately attracting ire or awe depending on the nation’s mood. It’s this rich symbolic history—the ability to channel the cozy scuzziness of a 1970s hole-in-the-wall or the midcentury cool of a bustling diner—that has led a new generation of bar owners to embrace neon signage, with drinking establishments from New York to Austin featuring newly commissioned signs or restored old ones. Once called “liquid fire,” neon signs attract the human eye with an electric vitality that few other features of the modern streetscape can command. Imprinting on our minds with uncanny power, they act as landmarks in both space and memory, anchoring the spot where you tell the taxi driver to turn left, or that place where you had a date when you moved to the neighborhood.

Over time, neon has become as familiar to the mis-en-scene of bars and nightlife as the click of pool balls or the rat-a-tat of ice in a shaker. In many cases it becomes a kind of metonymy for the bar itself: Cecchini points out that the sign effectively removed their ability to rename the place. As long as the sign was on, it was going to be Long Island Bar. 

It turned out that neon signs were high-maintenance, difficult and expensive to repair, leading to the phenomenon of eerily flickering neon and their link with seedy establishments. After World Word II, many businesses didn’t have the resources to spare to fix the signs as they began malfunctioning and losing letters. “A lot of signs went dark and stayed dark, and suddenly this brand new neon was a little creepy,” says Lynxwiler. “America looked darker after the war.”

As our idea of neon increasingly becomes one shaped by historical import and the desire for preservation, there’s a Gatsby-esque touch to the way we project fantasies of the past into the present through these signs. “[Neon] signs are a touchstone for an earlier era,” says Thomas Rinaldi, author of the book New York Neon and the blog by the same name, which documents the city’s disappearing vintage neon signs. “They provide a certain comfort and solace. They stand for the city as you imagined it before you moved here.”

In Astoria, Queens, Jay Zimmerman and Derrek Vernon recently opened the casual cocktail bar Sekend Sun, complete with a huge neon sign in the backyard which shines through the glass doors in an amber, embryonic hue: “QUEENS.”

“Some of the first bars I went into, little dive bars, had neon signs,” says Zimmerman. “There’s something about the glow of it that sets the tone and the scene for a bar experience.” The sign has become such a hit on Instagram that they started a hashtag and contest to judge all the images of it taken each month—the winner gets a $50 gift certificate.

Chris Bostick, owner of the bar Half Step in Austin and a former manager at The Varnish in Los Angeles, has found similar success on social media with the neon sign at his bar, opened in 2013. A line of neat cursive in the front window reads: “you earned it.” He had it made by a local legend, neon crafter Evan Voyles. “It has a kind of subliminal effect,” says Bostick, who calculates that at least a third of the pictures taken of the bar are of the sign. “It invites in the curious.”

In the Oak Lawn neighborhood of Dallas, which, like Austin, boasts a rich neon tradition, a glowing windmill is a familiar sight on the horizon. It’s fixed atop the Windmill Lounge, a friendly, low-key spot where you can get pitch-perfect Martinis and Margaritas. Like at Long Island Bar, the sign has outlasted its original owners and purpose, and given the place a name. “People would ask, ‘What are you going to call it?’” says Louise Owens, the owner. “And we’d say, ‘Well, there’s a windmill on top.’”

She finds that after a couple of cocktails, invariably some genius will give her very specific instructions on how to make it spin—she invites them to clamber on up the roof and give it a whirl. (No one’s figured it out yet.) She flicks the sign on when she opens at 4 p.m. In the hot Texas summer daylight, it’s invisible, but at night, “it’s like a beacon of hope.”

As much as we’ve come to identify neon with urban nightlife, neon signs adorned churches before they did bars, says Rinaldi. Dating back to 1902, they were the invention of French engineer Georges Claude, who capitalized on recent discoveries by chemists about the existence of noble, nonreactive gases. By applying electricity to gases sealed in glass tubes, he was able to create distinctive colors shaped by the glass into letters.

Neon was introduced to the States during Prohibition as an eye-catching form of advertising, embraced at first by corporations and chain stores as a symbol of bright, shiny, clean modernity. (Neon comes from the Greek word “neos,” or “new,” after all.)

“You could do anything with neon,” says Eric Lynxwiler, who gives tours of LA’s neon signs in conjunction with the LA Museum of Neon. “You could have a giant eagle with flapping wings. You could animate a woman walking across a billboard in her underwear.”

It was following Prohibition and into the early 1940s that neon first began to become associated with some of the more undesirable elements of city living, embodying garish, empty commercialism. When upstanding citizen George Bailey, hero of the classic 1946 Christmas film It’s a Wonderful Life, sees what his hometown of Bedford Falls would look like if he was never born, he’s treated to a vision of “Pottersville”: Named after movie’s villain, rich capitalist Henry Potter, the town’s thoroughfare is now harshly lit and flashing with neon like a mini-Las Vegas, advertising girls, booze and gambling.

Moreover, it turned out that neon signs were high-maintenance, difficult and expensive to repair, leading to the phenomenon of eerily flickering neon and their link with seedy establishments. After World Word II, many businesses didn’t have the resources to spare to fix the signs as they began malfunctioning and losing letters. “A lot of signs went dark and stayed dark, and suddenly this brand-new neon was a little creepy,” says Lynxwiler. “America looked darker after the war.”

Hard-boiled detective novels wrote neon’s new identity as a defining feature of the nocturnal landscape: luridly bright, artificial, often in disrepair. A neon sign appears in Raymond Chandler’s book Farewell My Lovely by the third paragraph, jutting out over the street to advertise “a second floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s,” a spot which becomes central to the plot. The glow of neon was one of Chandler’s favorite textural devices, the appropriate shading for his broken world of compromised dames and by-hook-or-by-crook private eyes.

But the light would continue to beguile generations, each one giving it a new meaning, whether it was the Beats’ appropriation of neon in the 1960s as a symbol of liberated urban living, or appreciation of neon in the ’70s as an American art form. Today, neon signs—especially antique ones in cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco—are considered heirlooms, carefully protected by landmark agencies as if they were the last living creatures of an extinct breed. They have outlasted waves of businesses, glowing steadfastly while owners have shifted hands and names and moved elsewhere. Like lighthouses, visible at great distances, they draw travelers through the darkness down highways and city avenues, promising that under the neon glimmer is a sanctuary, a place to rest and have a drink.

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Milton Glaser on Design and the Current State of Booze Branding
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The greatest scourge to descend on 21st-century bar culture hasn’t been odiously flavored vodkas or hookup apps (though fie to them both), but increasing passivity about the soundtrack for these heady nights. It’s as if owners and customers alike have become so preoccupied with where the wood from their stools were sourced and what time of year the junipers for their gin were farmed that music—the pulse and personality of any dive or speakeasy worth its pours—has somehow become less considered. Thus, discerning patrons are stuck with the tinny, uniform sounds of employees’ subjective iPhone playlists on loop or some algorithm-ized Pandora/Spotify generator of randomly associated acts. It’s no hyperbole to assert that such negligence is a crime against drinking, carousing and everything that comprises a memorable evening out of the house.

OK, perhaps that’s a tad overstated, but the trend is disconcerting, which is why we scoured the country for the best remaining CD- and vinyl-operated bar jukeboxes in the land. So for those about to rock, roll, slow-dance, head-bang or even twerk in earnest, we implore you to corral all that change from under the couch, enter one of these 15 fine institutions, and indulge your sonic whims and preference for spirits the way god and Thomas Edison intended.

Commonwealth | Brooklyn, NY

The Juke: A CD-operated, 2004 Rock-Ola Bubbler supplied with mixes made by owner/bartender Ray Gish himself.
The Genres Spanned: Loads of indie rock, or as Gish describes, “Things that sound like Pavement.” Plus, a smattering of punk, glam, blues, singer-songwriter and soul.
Sample Artists: Guided by Voices, Richard and Linda Thompson, Rodriguez, John Lee Hooker, Green Day
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: 25 cents per song.
Why They Keep It Old School: Gish explains: “If you are sitting at the jukebox and have to turn the pages more than once to find the song you want to play, you’re in the wrong bar.”

Dino’s | Nashville, TN

The Juke: A CD-operated NSM Gemfire
The Genres Spanned: Vintage country and R&B, in addition to classic rock
Sample Artists: Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Ted Nugent, Molly Hatchet, David Bowie, Forrest Gump soundtrack
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: 50 cents per song, three songs for a buck, 17 songs for five dollars. (Note: It only accepts old $5 dollar bills.)
Why They Keep It Old-School: “We’re a small dive bar that specializes in making people feel comfortable and at home,” says bartender Jeremy McAnulty. “When people use the jukebox, it gives people the opportunity to cater to their own vibe and set the tone.”

Bob and Barbara’s | Philadelphia, PA

The Juke: A CD-operated machine that replaced a short-lived Internet model because the latter was not “who we are,” says manager Lucky.
The Genres Spanned: Primarily vintage R&B and jazz, with a “few little pop things on there,” according to Lucky.
Sample Artists: John Coltrane, assorted Stax and Motown
Total Albums: 90-95
Customer Cost: 50 cents per song, three songs for a dollar, six for two and 18 for five.
Why They Keep It Old School: “If you’ve got a 21-and-older crowd,” reasons Lucky, “the music should also be 21 and older.”

Hotsy Totsy Club | Albany, CA

The Juke: A circa-1960s, vinyl-operated Wurlitzer Americana
The Genres Spanned: Hard-to-find rock, go-go, mambo, surf, ska, punk and soul from the early ’50s-late ’70s, complimenting the old exploitation films on their TV.
Sample Artists: The Trashmen, the Meters, the Ramones, Perez Prado, Toots and the Maytals. “We don’t play anthems,” assures co-owner Michael Valladares.
Total Albums: 100 45s
Customer Cost: Free!
Why They Keep It Old School: “When we took over this bar, there was a digital jukebox,” says Valladares. “And it’s very disconcerting to walk into a bar and hear a Christina Aguilera song in a room that makes no sense with that. Nothing against Ms. Aguilera. It’s just not what we do.”

Jimmy’s Corner | New York, NY

The Juke: A relatively recently acquired, CD-operated Rowe International
The Genres Spanned: Jazz, R&B, soul, pop, vocalists
Sample Artists: Frank Sinatra, Ornette Coleman, Dexter Gordon, Barry White, Ray Charles
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: Two songs for a dollar, five songs for two.
Why They Keep It Old School: Owner and longtime boxing aficionado/trainer Jimmy Glenn is an old-school kind of guy. Go there and ask him yourself. He holds court most nights.

MAPS | Portland, ME

The Juke: A vinyl-operated, 1959 Seeburg 220
The Genres Spanned: Punk, rock ’n’ roll
Sample Artists: The Replacements, Big Star, Joy Division, Harry Nilsson… “Not your average hit songs,” says co-owner Kyle Tzrinski, who runs MAPS with his wife, Vikki Walker.
Total Albums: 50
Customer Cost: Free!
Why They Keep It Old School: “It takes people back,” offers Tzrinski. “People will get up and dance when they play the jukebox. They feel like it’s their own little party.” (Warning: Tzrinski concedes that, “If we get annoyed with the jukebox, we shut it off.”)

The Righteous Room | Atlanta, GA

The Juke: A CD-operated Rock-Ola Fireball
The Genres Spanned: Rock, punk, soul, R&B, new wave, indie rock
Sample Artists: Marvin Gaye, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Kinks, Devo, Social Distortion, Nina Simone… “The newest thing we probably have is Tame Impala,” clarifies Righteous Room partner Kelly Hart.
Total Albums: 99
Customer Cost: Three songs for a dollar, 18 for five.
Why They Keep It Old School: “When the jukebox broke down, it was a huge deal,” says Hart. “We plugged in iPods, and it just wasn’t the same. It plays a tremendous part in who we are.”

Lucky 13 | San Francisco, CA

The Juke: A CD-operated Rowe AMI that’s been in place since the bar opened in the early 2000s and features mixes made by the staff and official label compilations.
The Genres Spanned: Metal, punk, alternative, rock ’n’ roll
Sample Artists: Brian Eno, Johnny Cash, Black Sabbath, Jane’s Addiction
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: Three songs for a dollar, 25 for five.
Why They Keep It Old School: “It’s a rock ’n’ roll dive bar with blaring guitars and lots of drinking,” boasts bartender Craig Gray.

Warren’s Inn | Houston, TX

The Juke: A CD-operated Rowe AMI Venus that dates back roughly three decades.
The Genres Spanned: Blues, doo-wop, R&B jazz, easy listening, soul, singer-songwriter
Sample Artists: Percy Faith, Johnny Mathis, Fats Domino, Dionne Warwick, Miles Davis, Bobby Blues Band… “The most recent thing we have in there is a Split Enz album from the ’80s,” laughs manager Ainslea Wolfe.
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: Four songs for a dollar, nine for two and 25 for five, the latter of which is “what I always do,” says Wolfe.
Why They Keep It Old School: “Controlling what’s on here is really important,” explains Wolfe. “We don’t want anyone to come in and change our vibe. People call and ask if it’s a sports bar, and it’s like. ‘No, we never will be.’”

Gold Star Bar | Chicago, IL

The Juke: A CD-operated Rowe Ami Saturn II dating back roughly a decade. (“This is the second or third,” confirms owner Mary Ann Reid. “Eventually, they kinda crap out.”)
The Genres Spanned: Metal, reggae, country, punk
Sample Artists: Stiff Little Fingers, Patsy Cline
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: Two songs for a dollar, seven for two and 18 for five.
Why They Keep It Old School: “The music is very important,” says Reid. “We prefer people come in and enjoy the music rather than just watch television. We’re an old dive bar and have a neighborhood feel. I call it live theater.”

Gooski’s | Pittsburgh, PA

The Juke: A relatively recent, wall-mounted, CD-operated Rowe AMI
The Genres Spanned: Punk, alternative, hip-hop
Sample Artists: The Clash, Whodini, the Pixies
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: Three songs for a dollar, seven for two and 21 for five.
Why They Keep It Old School: “It’s heavy here,” says bartender John Winter about their machine’s appeal. “You can hear stuff from your childhood and stuff that’s fairly modern. If you grew up in the punk or alternative scene, this is your jukebox.”

Big Star Bar | Houston, TX

The Juke: A CD-operated Rowe AMI Starlight acquired from another venue when Big Star opened in 2008.
The Genres Spanned: Classic rock, pop, country, hip-hop, R&B, soul
Sample Artists: Thin Lizzy, T. Rex, Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Lightning Hopkins, Merle Haggard
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: Three songs for a dollar, seven for two and 18 for five.
Why They Keep It Old School: “So we can have some control over our environment,” says owner/partner Arian Owens, adding that, “We try to freshen [the selection] up every couple years with something new. It’s kind of like having a new whiskey behind the bar: You gotta change people’s palates up a little bit.”

The R Bar | New Orleans, LA

The Juke: A CD-operated Rowe Storm that dates back roughly 25 years.
The Genres Spanned: Alternative, local, hip-hop, R&B, jazz, world music, vocalists… “I don’t think there’s one genre we haven’t put on there,” asserts R Bar manager Adam Boltuch, whose other managing partners include Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli.

Sample Artists: Irma Thomas, A Tribe Called Quest, Built to Spill, EL-P, ZZ Top, Judas Priest, Django Reinhardt
Total Albums: 100
Customer Cost: Two songs for a dollar, seven for two and 18 for five. Though Boltuch happily shares, “We’ll just throw a bunch of free credits on there sometimes.”
Why They Keep It Old School: “If there’s 99 CDs on there, I think you can find something,” encourages managing partner Bailey Smith. “Greg Dulli and I are both obsessive about music, so we care about it a lot. We can’t help it.”

Charlie’s Kitchen | Boston, MA

The Juke: A CD-operated NSM Sapphire (Disclosure: there is a digital juke on the premises as well.)
The Genres Spanned: Local, classic rock, garage, alternative, singer-songwriter, indie rock
Sample Artists: The Cult, Holly Golightly, Happy Mondays, 13th Floor Elevators, Wooden Shjips
Why They Keep It Old School: “We like to keep things the way they used to be in the old days,” says Charlie’s manager Jaap Overgaag, who’s particularly conscious of holding onto his Sapphire to support area acts. “For local bands that don’t have the money to go digital… it’s important for us to get people a chance to get that exposure.”

Lakewood Landing | Dallas, TX

The Juke: A CD-operated Rowe Encore that bartender Brandy Butler speculates has been at Lakewood for between 20 and 30 years
The Genres Spanned: Classic country, soul, blues, indie rock, punk, jazz, classic rock
Sample Artists: Bob Wells, Billie Holiday, Heartless Bastards, the Stooges, the Byrds, Tom Petty, Howlin’ Wolf
Total Albums: 99
Customer Cost: Two songs for a dollar, seven for two and 18 for five.
Why They Keep It Old School: “Lakewood as a whole has been a neighborhood staple for a lengthy period of time, [and] its music reflects how long it’s been standing here and everything that’s good about classic things,” says Lakewood regular Maddison Craig. “New craft cocktail and beer bars pop up all over the place, but I think the classics are where it’s at.”

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There are people—the type of people who use “summer” as a verb—who say horse racing is the sport of kings. The sport called Kings, meanwhile, has about as much in common with royalty as John Goodman in King Ralph.

It’s more of a game than a sport, really, but one built around the most molecular aspects of competition—quick thinking, risk-taking, self-preservation, picking up what others are putting down. It calls for some physical prowess, but not so much that you’re asked to stand. It demands a worthy, though not encyclopedic, knowledge of the world’s most important topics—like ‘90s television shows, cigarette brands and breakfast cereal mascots. And most vitally, it requires a willingness to revel in the alcohol-fueled misfortune of others, a boutique brand of schadenfreude accessible only by those who know how it feels to chug a mug filled with equal parts shitty beer, Smirnoff Ice, Steel Reserve and warm Franzia.

Unlike horse racing, Kings, aka King’s Cup (aka Circle of Death, aka Ring of Fire—for fans of nuance), did not earn its regal title filling the idle time of blue-bloods. It’s so named because a deck of cards—along with booze, a liquid-holding receptacle and as many coherent participants one can raise—is all you need to play. Still, much like the trod-upon serf who struggles under the crush of a tyrannical monarch, Kings often ends with a cold, expressionless white guy in a fly crown ruining your life.

And it can happen so fast. Truly one of the easiest drinking games to organize—a quick root through the junk drawer should it—it’s also equally easy to play. All you have to do is set up a cup, fan out the playing cards face down in an unbroken circle around it, equip yourself with a beer or cocktail and go. Each card corresponds to a different mini-game or drinking challenge, depending on who’s dictating the format, which tends to vary wildly. Based on who’s in charge, you could end up crushing a Coors Light tallboy, struggling to remember track names off Surfer Rosa or flailing your limbs around like a holy roller. There’s also the built-in ability to create new rules within the game, and it’s up to you to enforce them.

“I probably learned it from a dude with cargo pants, a fleece vest and a hemp necklace, who drove a truck and was really into how the colors of his glass bowl were changing over time.”

No matter where you’re playing, one sinister directive seems to hold fast across the board: Upon drawing a king, you’re required to pour a portion of whatever’s in your hand into that cup in the middle, regardless of what’s already been added. And whichever poor bastard draws the fourth and final king? That poor bastard is required to drink it.

As ubiquitous as the game is, attempting to trace the origins of Kings, or any drinking game for that matter, is frustrating. It’s a little like trying to pin a name on the first guy to spin a tall tale about Paul Bunyan—these diversions are downright folkloric in their spread, Johnny Appleseeded across each generation by a network of older siblings, cooler cousins and freshman-year roommates.

Personally speaking, my earliest memory of Kings is playing in college with my friend Kibby, who I’m pretty sure introduced me to it. She’s pretty sure that she was introduced to it by her older sister, who brought her along to a high school party. “I probably learned it from a dude with cargo pants, a fleece vest and a hemp necklace, who drove a truck and was really into how the colors of his glass bowl were changing over time,” Kibby recalls, which sounds as realistic as any Kings origin story I could ever muster.

Rowan Woodbine, a native of Caloundra on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, can’t quite remember where he picked up Kings, either, but it’s stuck with him so much that he’s turned it into a moneymaker. First coming into contact with the game as a teen, he and his friends fell in “instant love” with its fast pace and inclusive nature, and kept on playing as the years passed.

After one particularly spirited session, Woodbine and his friend Dan Forsythe began working on a proprietary Kings deck, with their favorite rules illustrated in lieu of suits and faces. They peddle their decks online for $12.99—throw in a bit extra if you want the official cup to go with it, demarcated with medieval classes, from peasant on up to supreme ruler. “It is a great way to start a night,” he says. “Everyone is involved, and [it] always has a good vibe to it.”

Using a custom-made deck instead of the customary playing cards will likely rankle purists, but it’s tricky to lobby in favor of tradition when there’s no standard to begin with. The rules of Kings vary from drunken fiefdom to drunken fiefdom, which I think has more to do with its persistent popularity than anything else. Royal rep notwithstanding, it’s the most democratic drinking game imaginable. And it’s a lot of damn fun, as long as that night-ending fourth king never comes.

How to Play 

This particular set of rules, which I’ve generally used growing up between Baltimore and Philadelphia, is just one rundown in an ever-expanding universe of them. Adding in your own rules, no matter how sadistic and inappropriate, is expected and encouraged. One overarching directive to go along with the cup of death: Never break the circle by leaving a table-visible gap after you draw a card. If you do? Drink.

2: To you. Divvy out a mandatory drink to a player of your choosing.

3: To me. You must drink. It could be worse.

4: To the floor. Everyone puts a hand on the floor; the last person to do so must drink. Since floors are gross, the “Thumb Rule”—last person to place a thumb on the table must drink—is a welcome hygienic alternative.

5: To the sky. The last person to raise his or her hands toward the heavens like they’re riding a rollercoaster must drink.

6: To the left. The person to your left must drink.

7: To the right. The person to your right must drink.

8: Pick a mate. Select one competitor with whom to drink. He or she can’t stop drinking until you do.

9: Bust a rhyme. The card drawer starts with a declarative statement (“I live by the bay”), and subsequent players must follow it up with a rhyme (“My favorite YA adventure novel is The Cay”). This is quite possibly the most mortifying of all Kings rules, as some of your wastrel friends will interpret it as “pretend to be a rapper.”

10: Categories. Any player who pulls a 10 must select a category—sneaker companies, Nirvana songs, musical instruments, sports franchises named after birds—and everyone takes a turn offering an example. Hesitation? Erroneous reply? Drink.

Jack: Celebrities. This is my favorite. The player who draws a Jack names any notable, fictional or real celebrity(“Steve Martin”). The next person in line must follow with someone whose first name starts with the first letter of the just-named celeb’s last name (“Michael Jordan”). So that could go: Steve Martin → Michael Jordan → Jennifer Lawrence → Lisa Bonet → etc. A twist for the ambitious: An alliterative answer (Matthew Modine) reverses the order of participation, snapping the action back to the person who just went.

Queen: Questions. There are two ways to play this. You can rapid-fire ask anyone at the table a question, and if they don’t immediately respond with one of their own (directed to anyone) or fail to use the interrogative, they drink. (Solid source material for this: 50 Cent’s “21 Questions,” any child under 10.) Or, you could opt for a session-long ruling, one that’ll earn anyone who asks you a question during gameplay a compulsory drink.

King: Look to the cup. Fill whatever vessel you’ve chosen to stick in the middle of the card circle about a quarter of the way up with the beverage you’re enjoying. If you draw the fourth and final king card, you’re drinking that whole thing. It can be pretty bad. The worst that Aussie Kings entrepreneur Woodbine’s ever seen: rum, beer and wine, along with a half-cooked sausage, potato chips and chili sauce. (He acknowledges that this particular session got “out of hand.”)

Ace: Make a rule. Anything you want, basically. There are thousands of preposterous examples listed online, but classics include “you can’t show your teeth while laughing,” “you can’t say anyone’s name” and “The Little Man” (remove the imaginary “little man” from the top of your drinks before you sip, replace him when you’re done). Violating or failure to adhere is enforceable by drinking. And no, you cannot make the rule “I don’t have to drink the cup if I draw the fourth king,” you coward.

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A man of boundless talent and bottomless appetite, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker knew his way around a bottle.

In the 1940s and early ‘50s, Parker would nurse his withdrawals with whole-bottle binge-drinking—somehow without affecting his caterwauling solos on the bandstand. Pianist Hampton Hawes, recalling a gig with Bird, watched him “line up and take down eleven shots of whiskey, pop a handful of bennies, then tie up, smoking a joint at the same time. He sweated like a horse for five minutes, got up, put on his suit and a half hour later was on the stand playing strong and beautiful.”

Parker’s career was a dizzying journey of highs, hangovers and revolutionary art—the liberating Neo to jazz’s Matrix of rules and boundaries. But the saxophonist treated his body as America-at-large treated jazz musicians: appreciative of the creative product, but with utter disregard for the well being of those involved. A drinker from as early as 12 years old, Charlie Parker was dead at age 34 of liver cirrhosis and a bleeding ulcer. The coroner who inspected his body first assumed that he was a 50- to 60-year-old man.

Unfortunately, Parker was not alone—a disproportionate number of the music’s most creative and prolific musicians died this way. Jazz’s great minds have long contemplated musicians’ tragic relationship with heroin, but how did alcohol come to decimate the ranks of jazz’s all-time talent?

Emerging as a popular art form during Prohibition, jazz’s first few years should have been sober. But, like anything young and rebellious, jazz found its way to alcohol. The early, stomp-rhythm jazz musicians performed in the speakeasy environment, where, as the coolest people in any given room, they knew how to find a stiff drink. “They were out there playing for people who were dancing and drinking hard,” says Kory Cook, drummer and music director of KRTU San Antonio. “They had to join the party.”

In November of 1933—a few weeks before the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition—Bessie Smith laid down one of jazz’s first great drinking songs, “Gimme a Pigfoot.” With the confidence of a few cocktails in her, Smith sang of a hard night of work in the Harlem underground, drinking Prohibition’s most popular liquor until the morning light—“Play me ‘cause I’m in my sin / Blame me ‘cause I’m full of gin.”

As its players began to realize jazz’s unbounded potential, alcohol abuse ate away at some of the great musician’s best years. Paid poorly and working bartenders’ hours, booze offered shelter from the pressures of performing and touring. Psychologists studying addiction among artists look to these stresses, and to the connection between the brain’s creative areas and pleasure centers, to help explain the uncannily high rates of addiction among creatives across all mediums.

On a pharmacological level, alcohol and drugs do not alter a mind’s creative ability. But, in 1994, researchers William M. Lapp, R. Lorraine Collins and Charles V. Izzo proposed that alcohol’s endorphin payoff changes people’s perception of their creativity, something that anyone who’s spent late evenings with a dorm room guitar can attest. The authors found that the “expected effects of alcohol” magnify one’s belief in their creative ability.

Dr. Paul Adams puts a rough estimate on alcohol’s impact on jazz. By subtracting the age at which musicians suffered an early death from an assumed life expectancy of 75 years old, Adams estimates that the bop generation lost a combined 461 years of collective creative output to alcohol and liver cirrhosis.

In jazz, this applied to directly to a phenomenon that has been referred to as “Chasing the Bird,” after a Charlie Parker tune from 1947. Watching Parker reinvent the improvisational process in real time, young musicians hoped to catch his creative spark by emulating Parker’s lifestyle and process. It was a great attitude in the practice room, but a death march at the bar. “Some of these smart kids who think you have to be completely knocked out to be a good hornman are just plain crazy,” Parker told DownBeat in 1949. “It isn’t true. I know, believe me. That way you can miss the most important years of your life, the years of possible creation.”

Drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath, the lively, 80-year-old caretaker of the Philadelphia beat, understands jazz’s alcohol problem as a product of environment. Tootie, the man behind the kit for Philly icons and lushes John Coltrane and Bobby Timmons, made his living on the club bandstand, where a nursed fifth might help ease the time between sets. “We were playing in bars, not churches,” Heath said over the phone. “And there was alcohol and drugs in the bars. [We drank] no more than lawyers, no more than guys on Wall Street. It’s just that musicians have a reputation for it.”

Whether Chasing the Bird or becoming casualties of the environment, alcohol abuse embedded itself in the culture of jazz. Bobby Timmons, Paul Chambers and Bunny Berigan all died from alcoholism or liver cirrhosis before the age of 40. John Coltrane, the spiritual leader of jazz, was dead at 40 from liver cancer, despite quitting ten years earlier. Trumpeter Chet Baker drank so heavily that a cocktail named after him made it into the canon—aged rum, Carpano Antica and honey, to match his mellow tone on the horn. (His abuse also transformed his look from young hunk to Breaking Bad neo-Nazi villain.) Lester Young and Billie Holiday, dependent on the bottle and on each other, were dead at 49 and 44, respectively.

Dr. Paul Adams puts a rough estimate on alcohol’s impact in jazz. By subtracting the age at which musicians suffered an early death from an assumed life expectancy of 75 years old, Adams estimates that the bop generation lost a combined 461 years of collective creative output to alcohol and liver cirrhosis.

Lucky for today’s lovers of jazz, if you buy tickets to a gig in 2016, you’re far less likely to see musicians hitting the bar between sets. In the late 1960s, jazz began moving toward the artistic margins in pursuit of the “out”—the ambitious, political, avant-garde and non-melodic. Practicing and performing this technical, athletic music required a full physical commitment.

“I think it’s a matter of understanding how difficult the art form is when you’re of a right mind,” says Jerry Tolson, pianist and professor of jazz studies at the University of Louisville. “It had a lot to do with being musicians—like Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, musicians like that who came through—and they didn’t take part in that culture and they lived long lives.”

An apprenticed art, jazz styles and improvisation techniques have long been passed between generations. Bop and post-bop musicians, witnessing the damage of widespread substance abuse, warned the next round of artists against the romantic myth of the heavy-drinking creative genius.

As the music became more technical—or, as jazz musicians folded into the mainstream—casual, full-bar jazz venues began to close. To ensure that this American art form still had a home to call its own, university systems and privately funded arts organizations provided grants and jobs for vanguard musicians. In 2016, if you’re seeing a young, high-caliber quartet outside of New York—where the scene still largely exists in bars, like a refuge for an endangered species—you’re likely to buy a ticket to a beautiful, but dry, performing arts venue to see musicians who have spent time in a jazz program.

It’s still delightfully fun music, and one that pairs well with alcohol—something simple and high-proof to sip on during complex solos, or a bourbon drink during New Orleans backline romps. But, like Parker himself, the romance of the binge-drinking performer has largely been laid to rest.

As Officer Joseph Cooney’s ears register the gentle rapping of metal on wood, he begins patting himself down in search of a concealed weapon: a small disc, about the size of a silver dollar, embossed with the Philly skyline trained in crosshairs.

“Someone will take a coin out and start tapping the bar, then another will tap,” says Cooney, a 20-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department. “Pretty soon, you’ll hear someone go, ‘Coin check!’ That’s when you’ll see someone slowly backing away, like, ‘I gotta go to the bathroom.’”

The colleague performing that evasive maneuver most likely forgot to bring their “challenge coin,” issued to current and former members of the PPD’s SWAT unit. And there’s a penalty for being caught empty-handed: You must buy the entire group its next round of drinks.

A tangible token of fellowship, the challenge coin was born of the Armed Forces, and using them to ambush drinking buddies in this manner is a time-honored practice. They’ve been adopted in law enforcement, emergency services and the trades. More recently, however, the tradition has been co-opted by liquor families like Distillerie Fratelli Branca as a way to foster IRL camaraderie among its biggest fans.

There are multiple challenge coin origin stories where the military’s concerned. The most commonly told tale involves an American ace shot down over Europe in World War I, only to be detained by French allies who erroneously believed he was a German sympathizer. He was able to prove his identity and save his skin by producing a solid bronze coin bearing the marks of his flying squadron, a gift from his commanding officer. One of his Gallic captors recognized it, called off the firing squad and gave the pilot a bottle of wine.

A later legend involves talk of the challenge coin as it pertains to pfennig (penny) checks. During WWII, American GIs occupying Germany after the Nazi surrender would mess with each other at local taverns, seeing who among them wasn’t carrying a pfennig, a now-defunct form of small-denomination German currency, in their pockets. These were worth so little at the time compared to the U.S. dollar that anyone holding onto one was likely broke; if you didn’t have one, the thinking was you were rich enough to refill everyone’s steins.

Inspired by the military, the [Fernet Branca] coins are manufactured in scant 100-count batches, and have become a commodity among industry cognoscenti.

As you might suspect, there’s not much hard evidence backing any of this up. But that takes nothing away from challenge coins and their symbolic status within the military community.

One ex-Special Forces Project DELTA vet who declined to be named in this piece—“We’re quiet professionals . . . we’re not the SEALs”—believes the challenge coin has its roots in the proto-CIA Office of Strategic Services, as well as in the 10th Special Forces Group, an elite squad of operators that’s been around for more than 60 years. Today, every branch of the military uses them—and the bar isn’t the only arena in which they’re brandished.

“I’ve seen the whole system used as a way to figure out who has to do some particularly shit task,” says Eamonn Connor, a former Army sergeant who served in Iraq as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal tech (think, The Hurt Locker). An alternative to drawing straws, coin checks could decide who among Connor’s fellow soldiers would get stuck with a joyless chore, like running maintenance checks on crappy old Humvees.

It could be way worse. A Navy lieutenant who’s stationed in Southern California told me a story about a deployment during which his vessel was terrorized by a “phantom shitter”—in military parlance, a scatological prankster who defecates in unexpected places around the ship. Coin checks often determined who would be on cleanup. “Really, really bad stuff. That’s a deep, dark hole,” says the officer, whose comparatively cheery coin is emblazoned with the key values of the Navy—honor, courage, commitment—beneath a bald eagle perched on an anchor.

The eventual migration of challenge coins from the military to the police makes sense, since so many cops come from that world. Scott Turdo, a New Jersey corrections lieutenant who produces custom challenge coins as a side business, estimates that 90 percent of his clientele is law enforcement. But he also fills requests from firefighters, EMTs, private business owners, fraternities and sports teams. And I’ve talked to tradesmen who have their own variations on the challenge coin, including an electrician whose crew would carry mahogany “beans” that functioned in an identical manner in a social drinking setting.

The practice has crept over to the service side of the bar, as well. A few years ago, the Milanese makers of Fernet Branca began producing specialty coins, asking reps to hand them out to influential bartenders in American markets where their amaro does well, like San Francisco, Seattle, New York and New Orleans. (They’ve since taken the program global.) Inspired by the military, the coins are manufactured in scant 100-count batches and have become a commodity among industry cognoscenti. Playing off the reputation of Fernet as the “bartender’s handshake,” the brand encourages coin holders to challenge one another for shots, especially when they’re visiting unfamiliar cities.

This appropriation of tradition has been met with a tepid response from some in uniform. “Honestly, as someone in the military, I think that’s kind of lame,” says the Navy lieutenant. “It’s about more than a game.” Hoodwinking friends for free drinks is clearly the most fun function of these coins, but they represent something loftier than that, at least according to those who make them part of their everyday carry.

“It’s a rite of passage. What happens on our last day of [SWAT] training here: You get Tasered, pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed,” says Cooney, the Philly cop. “And after all that’s said and done, they turn around and give you your coin.”

When a friend suggested on a recent night out that we order Pousse Cafés—a drink generally consisting of three to seven Technicolor liqueurs layered like a rainbow cookie—I had no choice but to demur. It was Friday night, the bar was busy and anyone who orders a Pousse Café in such a circumstance is, plainly, a dick.

Plenty of anecdotal evidence has accumulated over the years to support this notion. In one instance, recorded in The New York Times in 1903 under the heading, “A POUSSE CAFÉ SACRILEGE,” a customer with “an air of the provincial about him” ordered said drink at a Fifth Avenue bar. After laboring for a full 15 minutes on a multi-tiered masterpiece, the bartender presented the drink to the customer who promptly stirred it with a straw and downed the artless mixture.

Through a series of similar stories, the Pousse Café cemented its reputation as the universal emblem of terrible customers. But, before it became a punch line, the Pousse Café was a beloved 19th-century after-dinner drink (“Pousse Café” translates to “coffee pusher,” something to follow your late-night jolt). A French invention, it migrated to the U.S. as a fashionable example of continental drinking, appearing in Jerry Thomas’s How To Mix Drinks in 1862 under the unironic heading, “Fancy Drinks.”

Designed as a showpiece, the Pousse Café has always put the eye before the palate. Even the record-holding rendition, while impressive at a staggering 34 layers, is hardly inviting. Bartender and cocktail historian David Wondrich sums up the experience of drinking such a cocktail: “Oh, there’s the Cognac. Oh, there’s the maraschino.” In other words, he says, “Stupid.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Pousse Café has resisted its own bona fide craft revival. This is at least partially because its categorically unmixed nature stands in diametric opposition to the ethos of the craft cocktail movement, which, at its essence, strives to create drinks that are greater than the sum of their parts. The Pousse Café is literally the sum of its parts, nothing more, those parts all stacked one on top of another like some cartoon mockery of mixology.

However, for some drinkers, like Crosby Gaige, author of the 1941 Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion, the resolutely unmixed manner of the Pousse Café is the essence of its charm: “The successive sips give varying taste thrills.”

Likewise, Andrew Bohrer, a self-proclaimed fan of layered drinks, is one of the few modern craft cocktail bartenders—alongside Alex Negranza of Anvil and Eben Klemm of Rebelle—who appreciates the Pousse Café in all of its absurdist glory. In his days as bar manager at Mistral, Bohrer was known for his tradition of celebrating the 21st birthdays of externs by making “the biggest Pousse Café possible,” he explains.

Eben Klemm, a longtime bartender and cocktail consultant, takes a slightly different approach to the Pousse Café he created last year for the opening menu at Rebelle (it’s still available by request). Consisting of six layers—including housemade grenadine, Giffard Pamplemousse and green Chartreuse, each methodically striated—the meat of the drink comes in the form of housemade bourbon milk punch, “which itself is labor intensive,” explains Klemm. “It’s really all about wasted utility.”

Despite topping the pyramid of inefficiency, literally, a seven-layered Pousse Café has a loyal audience at Anvil, where Alex Negranza estimates he makes around 30 per week. “What initially started as a fun drink to have guests order from one of our bartenders quickly turned into a drink that people were coming in for,” says Negranza.

Caught somewhere between the dignified decorum of early 20th-century cocktailing and the vulgar reality of layered shots like the B-52 and Slippery Nipple, the Pousse Café may never make it back into the mainstream. But it’s nice to know that it lives on among the devoted few.

Earlier this month, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History announced that it was embarking on an epic three-year beer project, documenting American brewing history from roughly 1960 to today.

At the helm of this endeavor is Susan Evans McClure, the Smithsonian’s Director of Food History Programs. With a Master’s degree in arts education in from Harvard, several years as Marketing Manager at Vermont’s Magic Hat brewery and six years under her belt at the Smithsonian, McClure is uniquely positioned to head up the project.

For the past 20 years, the Smithsonian has been pursuing an ongoing study of the history of wine in the United States. Now, in collaboration with the Brewer’s Association, beer will get its chance in the spotlight, too. Here, McClure talks about the impact of agriculture on beer, how technology fits into the picture and how a grassroots home brewing movement has greatly improved brewing in America.

What historical objects related to beer or brewing does the Smithsonian already have in its collection?
We have the collection of a former brewmaster from Maryland [Walter Voigt] dating mostly from 1870 to 1960. He personally collected a lot of advertising material, glassware, patent papers, beer steins, bottle openers—and oh gosh, beer trays, beer trays all day.

Why do you, and the Smithsonian, think that the time is right for this project?
A lot of the changes that have been made since the 1960s in the brewing industry are changing again now. There’s enough to look back on in our rearview mirror… What we’re excited to do is really bring stories of brewing history into our collections so that they can help us tell a broader story of American history. So, we’ll be looking at advertising, agriculture, industry, business history, community and all of these strands that people might not even think are related to brewing. I’m particularly interested in the agriculture stories of brewing. How does the farmer who feeds spent grains to his cows relate to the fact that Americans are drinking more craft beer? That, to me, is a much more complex story of American history.

Where do you even start with a project of this magnitude?
That’s a great question that we are asking, too. We don’t go into it saying, “We want this thing.” We’re going into it saying, “What’s the most important part of this story? And what’s the object that tells that story for our audiences?” So, the first step is research; before we ever go out to talk to anyone or collect anything, we build a research base. What were those major changes from 1960s to today? What were the technological changes? What were the agricultural changes? We’ll lay that all out and then go into the field and interview people who have worked in the industry and document oral histories. We actually go into it with a very open perspective because it will become obvious in those conversations what material objects best represent the stories.

Who do you plan to talk with for these oral histories?
It will be brewers, but it will also be farmers and beer business people and consumers. One of the things that we’re interested in, from a community perspective, are these groups that grow up around brewing. Today, people are so committed to this brand identity around beer. How did that happen and what does that mean for American history? When I worked at a brewery, people used to send me pictures of their tattoos of our labels that they’d put on their bodies. So even way outside of food and drink, throughout American history, what is the thing that people have been that committed to that they’ll tattoo it on their body? Having it as a part of a broad American history story allows us to look at where else this is happening and where it came from.

[For example], in our food exhibition, we have a section about the Good Food movement, so post-1960s, back-to-the-land, farmers markets, food coops—that story. Being able to look at brewing in comparison to that is fascinating to us. Was that happening at the same time? How were the beer and food movement talking to each other—or not?

What role will current brewers play in this project?
We’re documenting history and history is happening every day, so we’ll be trying to find a good balance of people who were kind of the post-1960 beer revolutionaries up to the people who are doing the work today.

Others around the country are trying to document brewing history right now, too. Oregon State University has the Oregon Hops and Brewing archives and they’re doing really interesting work. We’re hoping to find other archives and museums around the country that are doing this and to see how we can collaborate. A lot of local areas look through a local lens, which is very important when we’re looking throughout all of the U.S.

Aside from breweries, who or what else will you be looking at?
We will definitely be looking at industry and how technology has impacted how beer has been made [from the 1960s to today]. The museum has what we call our Division of Work and Industry collection and that looks at how things are produced and the technology that goes into that. That’s a story about brewing that I don’t think most people who drink beer really think about. Even in the time since I started working in a brewery and in the four or five years that I was there, the whole process became automated. That’s a huge technological shift. So, when did that start? There are still people that are brewing on systems that are not digital—what does that mean?

You mentioned that agricultural history will be a big part of this. What, specifically, will you be investigating?
We’re really going to look at the impact that agricultural innovation and workers and production have had on brewing—and that brewing has had on production and agriculture. Hops production is a very interesting aspect, too, especially as hop farms are expanding beyond Washington State—you know, there are some in Virginia and Vermont… and so we’ll be looking at that.

How does advertising, or even political history, fit in?
The way Americans have used graphics and ads to sell product is a great American history story. And being able to include some of the brewery advertising, post 1950, will again help us tell a broader story of the world of American advertising.

The federal regulations piece is another thing. The impact of Prohibition on every alcoholic beverage industry today is still very strongly felt. Every state has different rules; there federal rules and state rules. We’re going to be looking at the impact that homebrewers had on craft beer industry—it was illegal to homebrew until not too long ago—and how changing laws and regulations have allowed brewing as an industry to change.

The impact of homebrewing on beer history is interesting. Is that something that you plan to delve into?
You can’t to talk about the craft brewing side of beer now without talking about the impact of homebrewers. A lot of the people who started the first craft breweries started as homebrewers. The homebrew community has been very supportive of the craft brewing community—and vice versa. We’ll look at that, first because we have to because it’s part of the story, but also because we want to. Our theme for the museum this year is America Participates—so we’re looking at how Americans shape their democracy through voting and community participation and civic organizations and clubs. If you look at it from that angle, homebrewers are participating everyday. There are homebrew clubs across the country and homebrewers have been working to change laws about brewing for a long time.

[A lot of this research will often take us] way beyond beer. You start out with beer and somehow end up in a field somewhere arguing with a senator.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

At some point over the last dozen or so years, the Bloody Mary lost its mind.

Across the country, you can now find Bloody Marys that are garnished with beef sliders, lamb sliders, fries, pickles, shrimp, cheese skewers, jalapeño poppers, hot dogs, bacon, chicken nuggets, pickled okra or a cinnamon roll; in Chicago, you can order an Asian-inspired riff that is overstuffed with lumpia, duck bao and Chinese broccoli; in Leland, Michigan, a bar has been known to serve a Bloody Mary that has a whole smoked fish sticking out of it. And one variation, seemingly in an attempt to stun competitors into silence, simply plopped an entire fried chicken on top.

“The drink is the ultimate world heavyweight championship belt of pro-wrestling,” says Brian Bartels, a bartender and the author of The Bloody Mary Book, which will be published by Ten Speed Press in spring 2017. “You don’t know what to expect next.”

You could argue that the Bloody Mary’s grasp on sanity was never very firm to begin with. Some mixology historians have traced its earliest origin back to what was known in the late 19th century as an “oyster cocktail”: an alcohol-free concoction of tomato juice, salt, Tabasco, lemon juice, horseradish, black pepper and seven small oysters, stirred together and served warm. The recipe was published in a London newspaper in 1892 along with the caveat that it was provided “for the benefit of those who may be possessed of suicidal intentions.”

That’s just one of the many narratives that populate the mythology of the Bloody Mary, which has about as many conflicting origin stories as there are recipes. In one version, the drink got its name from a bar maid who worked at a grisly Chicago dive called Buckets of Blood, where pailfuls of water were habitually thrown onto the floor and street outside to wash away blood from fights and the occasional homicide. In another version, the drink’s first recipe was discovered by the Jewish comedian George Jessel after partying until late the next morning. 

While arguments rage on about who invented the drink and how, there was in fact a period in the early 20th century when the make-up of the cocktail remained relatively static—even urbane. It was and still is served at New York City’s tony King Cole Bar in the St. Regis Hotel, where it was introduced by bartender Fernand Petiot as the Red Snapper and beloved by Manhattan elites. Before that, it was served (and likely partially invented) by Petiot at the legendary Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, frequented by regulars like Ernest Hemingway and Rita Hayworth, in its most elementary form: tomato juice, vodka, lemon, salt, black and cayenne pepper and Worcestershire sauce.

Into the midcentury in America, it continued to carry a kind of WASP-y cachet—the type of thing one sipped from a tulip glass after finishing a round of golf at the country club or at a Sunday ladies lunch. It eventually became established enough in the prep firmament to be featured and praised in 1980’s The Official Preppy Handbook as “perhaps, the #1 Prep mixed drink.” But a change began occurring around the late 1980s, accelerating significantly at the turn of the 21st century—the center could not hold, the falcon could no longer hear the falconer.

Five of the World's Craziest Bloody Marys

Amidst the Bloody Mary arms race, a few drinks have stood out for their sheer shock value. Christopher Ross offers stats on five of the most outlandish Bloody Marys money can buy.

Read On →

Signaling that public perception had begun to shift to regard the cocktail as a kitchen-sink concoction into which almost anything could be thrown, in 1997, the New York Times reported that a number of drinking establishments had “added do-it-yourself Bloody Mary bars” that proffered “several tomato-based mixes prepared by the bartender plus an array of flavored vodkas and hot sauces, clam juice, beef broth, mango juice and garnishes from celery to pickles to shrimp.”

A few years later, East Village restaurant Prune launched an iconic variation, the Chicago Matchbox, which came with pickled green beans, Brussel sprouts, turnips, radishes and caper berries, presaging the Bloody Mary’s many reinventions that arrived with the cocktail renaissance in the early 2000s. These were the first stirrings that led the drink to become a palimpsest for the free-for-all millennial brunch craze, as well as a symbol for the Midwest’s fondness for bigness, taste and reason be damned.

But why the Bloody Mary, in particular? What exactly is it about the drink that seems to invite such unbridled tweaking and interpretation?

“It’s a cocktail that mimics food,” says Jack McGarry, co-owner of The Dead Rabbit and a drink historian who wrote a four-part investigation of the Bloody Mary for Difford’s Guide. “If you were to make a riff on a Sidecar or a Champs-Élysées or a Martini, they wouldn’t have that same depth, where [with the Bloody Mary] you can add so many ingredients. I think the versatility is what anchors the ferociousness in regards to all the different versions of the [drink].”

But it doesn’t seem that the Bloody Mary would have evolved to its gargantuan proportions solely because of the malleability of its flavors. The tradition of maximalism demands a cultural explanation as well. One possible inciting factor was the rise of brunch and the Bloody Mary’s unshakeable place in that weekend ritual. According to Farha Ternikar, author of Brunch: A History and a professor at Le Moyne College, from its earliest inception brunch was a space of excess and indulgence. At the turn of the 20th century, a college newspaper described it as a meal that affluent varsity college men got up to while hungover on Sundays—it went on to become a high society ritual in the 1920s.

In its very nature, brunch is about piling vice on vice—rewarding yourself for bad behavior the night before with yet another helping of reckless abandon. “There’s an idea that brunch is a place where people will eat as much as they want,” says Ternikar. It seems only inevitable that this same impulse would impose itself upon the Bloody Mary. But it needed one last ingredient to go fully berserk: The Midwest.

Middle America has always had an outsized love for the drink. Ron Faiola—a filmmaker, author of two books on Wisconsin supper clubs and an authority on Badger State eating and drinking—cites it as the second or third most popular drink in the region, usually second only to the Brandy Old-Fashioned. In this land of natural abundance and healthy appetites, a mere celery stick just wasn’t going to cut it. 

Enter Dave Sobelman. If you had to finger a single culprit for starting the Bloody Mary arms race, it’d be him. In 1999, he opened Sobelman’s Pub & Grill in Milwaukee, catering to the blue-collar workers in the neighborhood factories. The Bloody Mary he started out serving was relatively tame, accompanied by celery, asparagus and a shrimp. But after meeting with one of his neighbors in the area, a third-generation pickling factory owner, Sobelman came away with an idea for a Bloody Mary that would incorporate about as many of his neighbor’s products as could fit in a glass.

“I knew I was going to do something special here,” he says. “When it came to the Bloody Mary, I just thought, ‘Why don’t I take this as far as I can?’” Beginning with around a dozen garnishes, his Bloody Mary began taking on ever more outlandish ingredients: bacon-wrapped cheese balls, mushrooms, sausages. As the years passed, he grew bolder, and by 2012 he was ornamenting his Bloody Mary with a cheeseburger. When he put an image of it on Facebook, customers couldn’t get enough. It became a viral sensation and, as pictures of his creations began spreading via social media, bars and restaurants throughout Milwaukee—and then the nation—began trying to top the original with ever-more ostentatious arrangements.

“I’ve seen on TV or in movies, they’ll go, ‘I’ll have a Bloody Mary,’ and it’s a short little tulip glass and there’s maybe an olive in it, and you always have to laugh because its like, yeah, nobody from Wisconsin was around there for that,” says Faiola.

For Bartels, a fellow Wisconsinite, the Bloody Mary was the first drink he ever learned to make. “They treat the Bloody Mary in a very sacred way,” says Bartels. The Midwestern Bloody Mary has been best known for always being served with a beer chaser, which Faiola believes evolved from the Prohibition practice of mixing beer with tomato juice. But when you look at the kinds of things that tend to populate today’s Brobdingnagian Bloody Marys—burgers, cheese skewers, pickled vegetables—it’s hard to miss the culinary heritage of the region.

The heartland approach represents just one of the drink’s many contemporary identities. The Bloody Mary is not an “either/or” drink—it’s an “and” drink. It inspires multiplicity, whether in origin stories or ingredients, evolving with the times, taking a bit of this vogue, a little of that decade. Already, the garnish arms race seems to be slowing—after all, where do you really go after someone drops the mic with a four-pound fried chicken?

“I feel like, today, there’s a minimalism going on in terms of consumption, and food trends are following that,” says Ternikar. “Things are cyclical, like fashion. So there’s cycles where excess is good, and then you have a scaling back.”

Whether in the urbane ‘20s or the over-the-top aughts, the Bloody Mary appears to reflect those cycles. Like other American icons, it above all boasts a genius for reinvention. It, in the words of McGarry, is the “Madonna of cocktails.”

There are few symbols in the drink world more powerful, more recognizable or more American than the Martini glass. An angular monument to Deco design, its characteristic V-shaped bowl and fine stem have long represented that most iconic of drinks, so much so that there is arguably no other image that better communicates the very notion of the cocktail.

There is also no glass more despised by today’s bartenders.

“It’s a problematic glass,” says Greg Boehm, founder of Cocktail Kingdom, which supplies some of today’s most popular bar tools, from bitters dashers to artisan syrups to, notably, glassware. “It’s incredibly impractical.”

Veteran bartender Toby Cecchini puts it even more bluntly: “Those glasses are odious. They’re horrible. They spill everything. They’re just miserable.”

But impracticality isn’t solely to blame for the glass falling out of favor; it’s equally a matter of what the Martini glass has come to represent. Today it is less Deco icon and more neon symbol of the cocktail’s dark ages—a glass overflowing with several decades of negative association, and Pucker.

To understand how that came to be, it’s important to consider how, and when, the glass became synonymous with the drink in the first place. Though it made its formal debut at the 1925 Paris Exhibition (by many accounts, as a modernist take on the coupe), it didn’t catch on immediately. And when it did, it wasn’t necessarily used for cocktails; as David Wondrich points out in Imbibe!, the glass as it appears in the films of the 1920s is depicted as being used much like the coupe—for Champagne.

Meanwhile, the Martini, as a drink, was growing swiftly in popularity. Having been invented in the mid-19th century, it was bolstered in the 20th by Prohibition, which had crowned gin as the country’s preferred spirit. Not only had the speakeasies of the era fashioned the drink into something both stylish and urbane, they had ushered in a new age of drinking, writes Max Rudin in “There’s Something About a Martini,” his deep-dive essay on the subject published in American Heritage in 1997.

“Outlawing liquor,” he explains, “had put the gentlemen-only saloon and hotel bar out of business,” and replaced it with “a new cocktail culture where women drank with men.” It would ultimately prompt a drinking-buddy camaraderie between the sexes, epitomized by characters like Nick and Nora Charles, the Martini-drinking crime solvers in the 1934 novel and film, The Thin Man. It also laid the groundwork for the rise of the cocktail party, a cultural institution that would become a fixture of American life for the next several decades.

Bringing the cocktail out of the bar and into the home had a twofold effect on the Martini as we know it today: Not only did the process of making the drink become ritualized (“In the 1930s, mixing cocktails at home became one of the manly arts, like carving a turkey,” writes Rudin), the approach to serving it did, too, as it spurred a new market for home barware. Sampling from the same modernist aesthetics that had similarly shaped the era’s architecture, interiors and furnishings, more geometric examples of glassware were suddenly in high demand.

“The symbolism of the drink and the new cultural perception of this particular glass shape come together in the 1940s,” explains Lowell Edmunds, author of Martini: Straight Up, “[because] it became culturally possible to see that particular glass design as au courant.” It was in that decade, too, that the glass first became known, at least colloquially, as the “Martini” glass, its outline, according to Rudin, “one of the few American designs to make a seamless transition from moderne to modern.” Before long, it had become so ubiquitous—and the drink so popular—that in 1958, a New York Times article would describe it as “the symbol of our civilization.”

But it was during that era, too, that the iconic drink would begin to change.

Who Killed the Cocktail?

From the vantage of our current craft cocktail renaissance, it's easy to identify the cocktail's Dark Age. It's much harder to pinpoint the exact individuals who were responsible for it all. Christopher Ross goes on the hunt for the culprit—and finds that we may only have ourselves to blame.

Read On →

“[J]ust as architecture moved in the direction of brutalism, so the Martini became excessively dry, flavorless vodka replaced gin, and the ritual of mixing was abandoned in favor of the Martini on the rocks,” writes Edmunds. “In both cases, the esthetic impulse of modernism was carried to a self-defeating extreme.”

What had once been, in effect, an emblem of the middle-class cocktail party was by the ‘60s being outwardly shunned as disagreeably dry, too spirituous and representative—both literally and metaphorically—of American corporate values as epitomized by the advertising culture of Madison Avenue.

“The purity, transparency, and lack of messiness of the perfect American cocktail now seemed to mirror a sterile lack of messiness in life and work,” explains Rudin, “won at the expense of emotional involvement and the realities of life.”

Following its nearly two decade-long decline, the Martini would fall out of vogue entirely by the early ‘70s. In 1973, Esquire derided it as “a bitter, medicinal-tasting beverage” that represented “everything from phony bourgeois values and social snobbery to jaded alcoholism and latent masochism.” By 1976, it earned a notable, albeit damning, mention in American politics when, in a debate with Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter famously suggested that the working class was subsidizing the “$50 Martini lunch,” solidifying the drink’s reputation as an unfortunate emblem of conservative America.

Still, however, the Martini glass remained fixed in the country’s imagination, consequently lending its glass—not to mention its name—to many of the oversized, fruit-infused vodka drinks of the 1980s and ‘90s.

That word “Martini,” before long, had become so overused that in a story written in 1998 by William Grimes for the New York Times Dining section, the Martini was described as having entered its “late-Elvis” phase, with Grimes lamenting the drink’s modern permutations and suggesting that a “modern Dante, if so inclined, could tour the many circles of this cocktail hell and come up with a truly compelling mixed-drink Inferno.”

Though today’s craft cocktail movement has helped the classic Gin Martini shed these decades-old associations, the glass remains, for many, one of the last remaining pillars of the Technicolor “‘tini” craze that gripped the country prior to the drink’s revival. Add to that the fact that today’s bartenders have famously looked beyond Prohibition to the age of Jerry Thomas—in which coupes were considered the vessel of choice for such a drink—and it’s no surprise that the Martini glass has been effectively usurped in favor of rounded, even more classic stemware. Ironically, that same element of symbolism that first propelled the Martini glass to fame is exactly the thing that’s lead to its ultimate demonization within the craft market.

Which begs the question: Is the Martini glass—admittedly still a prominent fixture in many parts of the country—primed to fall by the wayside? Or will it come back around? After all, there are plenty of more practical vessels whose burdens figure far less into the American bartender’s imagination.

But, then again, when conjuring up an image of a cocktail—neon sign, or otherwise—does anyone really think of a coupe?

Recently, I found myself sitting in the tasting lab at the Mount Gay distillery tucked away in the canefields of St. Lucy, Barbados, getting schooled in rum-making by master blender Allen Smith. In a conversation that delved into many obscure topics, it was a far more routine discussion that finally stumped him.

Why were all of the bottles of Mount Gay Eclipse I was seeing on store shelves labeled as being 43 percent alcohol by volume, while I was certain the bottles I had seen in America were labeled 40 percent? Smith had just added yet another wrinkle: In Australia, Eclipse is released at 37.5 percent.

“It’s diluted to whatever they say we are supposed to dilute to,” he said.

This is not a phenomenon relegated to just rum. Spirits across most categories vary by region and have even changed over time. Campari, for example, is sold in most parts of the world at 25 percent ABV. In the United States, however, it’s 24 percent, and in Brazil and elsewhere in South America it’s popped up to 28.5 percent. Or take Bombay Sapphire: In the U.S., drinkers get it at 47 percent, while in the United Kingdom, the Caribbean and New Zealand, it’s 40 percent, and in South Africa, it’s bottled at 43 percent.

Other spirits have simply dropped over the years: Jack Daniels was once bottled at 45 percent alcohol, before dropping to 43 percent, and then, again, down to 40 in the United States. And in the United Kingdom, Gordon’s gin followed a similar trajectory: Once bottled at 40 percent, today it’s sold at 37.5 percent, says Edgar Harden, a London-based vintage spirits dealer who tracks data across time and geography for the bottles he sells on his website, Old Spirits Company. Overall, he says, spirits have generally become weaker over the last few decades. And as proof decreases, so does flavor.

As it pertains to whiskey, the difference in the flavor of spirits bottled at today’s standard—40 percent ABV, or 80 proof—and the standard proof at the beginning of the century—100 proof—is significant.

“It certainly seems like a lot more than 20 [proof],” says John Little, the master distiller at Smooth Ambler, who frequently bottles liquors closer to 100 proof. “A lot of times I drink spirits that I know are really, really good and wonder, hey, where did all the flavor go?”

But, why? I wanted to know. Why did the proof of spirits vary so much around the world and through the ages? And why did America dictate as part of its “Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits” that whiskey, rum, gin, tequila, brandy and vodka be bottled at 80 proof when other places set their minimum proof at a different level?

For the most part, Smith was essentially right. In many countries, the ubiquitous proof is the lowest regulation a particular place will allow. (Or in the case of Barbados, tradition: Despite the law actually allowing producers to go as low as 40 percent, rums have almost always been bottled at 43 percent.) But that doesn’t tell us how we got to 80 proof.

When I put the question to some booze historians, to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the agency that’s responsible for administering those standards, none of them could tell me exactly why 80 was decided on as the minimum—and then, ultimately, the standard.

Inside the Booming Market for Vintage Spirits

In the last half-decade, the market for vintage spirits and liqueurs has expanded, so much so that old and rare bottles of whiskey, Cognac and Chartreuse are setting record prices at auction—and becoming increasingly difficult to find. Bryce T. Bauer on the nostalgic appeal of these bottles and how collectors are sourcing them.

Read On →

It seems that America arrived at it in the wake of the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which gave the federal government the power to mandate that what a product said on the label actually matched what was inside. (And it takes only a cursory glance at the horrors of what was actually in products of the era, including booze, to realize how far those two things were from each other).

Following that legislation, bureaucrats spent a couple of years trying to figure out just what whiskey was. Among the standards they settled on was that it had to be bottled at 40 percent ABV, a provision that seems to have then been applied to other distilled spirits in America as well. But 80 proof was just the minimum—the lowest a bottle of whiskey could be sold and still be deemed worthy of being called whiskey.

Such a low proof, however, was not the vanguard. South Dakota chemistry professor James Henry Shepard, who helped set the law, wrote in his book The Constants of Whisky that 80 proof had traditionally been the hallmark of a whiskey that was “wholly factitious.” At the time, what connoisseurs were typically pouring was bottled at 100 proof.

To get from 80 proof being the minimum a whiskey could possibly be bottled at to being the ubiquitous proof took a number of different shifts in drinking culture. Newspaper reports suggest the 100 proof standard held through the first decades after Prohibition. But by the middle of the century, the Times noted that usual standard had fallen significantly, citing industry sources that estimated only about 15 percent of whiskey sold was still bottled at 100 proof, while 72 percent fell somewhere between 86 and 90 proof, and the remaining 13 percent was 80 proof.

The reason for that drop, says Noah Rothbaum, the author of The Art of American Whiskey and the food and drink editor at The Daily Beast, was likely related to two factors: the need to stretch whiskey stocks during wartime and the palates of returning American GIs who’d become accustomed to drinking lower-proof Scotch.

It would take another invasion of a different sort, however, to push whiskey down to its bare minimum: vodka, a spirit Harden has found to have been, unlike whiskey, unusually stable at 80 proof over the decades. As vodka stole drinkers away from whiskey in the 1970s, American whiskey makers decided to win them back by producing a lighter product. To do so, many cut to 80.

But producers also had another incentive to lower the alcohol content of a spirit—a motivation that has arguably had a greater influence on why spirits today are often weaker than spirits of 50 and 100 years ago: money.

Simply put, more dilute spirits are cheaper to produce. Not only does doing so allow distillers to get more bottles out of every drop of alcohol they produce (a drop in proof from 100 to 80 can create about a half-dozen extra cases per whiskey barrel for a distiller), but each of those bottles carries a lower tax burden, which, in the U.S., makes the federal taxes on an 80 proof bottle 53 cents lower than on a 100 proof one. In a competitive market, those extra two quarters, once magnified by distributor and retail markups and the addition of state taxes, can have a significant impact on the bottle’s apparent value.

Despite that disadvantage, many craft distillers have moved away from the 80 proof standard and are releasing spirits at a bevy of different, higher alcohol levels. As they do, they are finding that far from there being one proof that works for all products across all classes of spirits, each individual bottle often has a proof at which the distiller thinks it’s best. Moreover, it’s one that often varies based on how that spirit is likely to be consumed, whether via cocktails or on its own.

One of those distillers is Lance Winters, the master distiller at St. George Spirits. For him, the proper number is often arrived at only after tasting the spirit at numerous different alcohol levels.

For example, for their Baller whiskey (“a California spin on the Japanese take on Scotch whisky”), that process resulted in a bottling proof of 94, a point at which they felt it could cut through a bowl of ramen.

But proof isn’t determined by taste alone. Chemistry also has a say. Spirits with higher congener levels—such as aged spirits that haven’t been chill filtered, or anisette liquors—require more alcohol to keep those chemicals from falling out of suspension and becoming cloudy, as absinthe does every time you add a few drops of water into it. Moreover, for gins, where aroma is important, diluting the spirit too much increases the surface tension and prevents the aromatic chemicals from escaping and reaching the nose, says Winters.

While proof used to be a decision left largely to the producer, increasingly it’s becoming a topic that well-educated bartenders and spirits professionals are also commenting on, says Smooth Ambler master distiller John Little. When his company originally released their Greenbrier Gin, they did so at 80 proof. But feedback from consumers was that the gin got lost in cocktails. “It was the single biggest complaint we had on our gin, [and] the only thing we heard on a consistent basis,” he said of the proof. So they upped it to 90, in turn strengthening the flavor.

Whatever the future trends for proof, what seems clear is that the spirits aimed at drinkers who care more about what’s in a bottle than its price are likely the ones that will continue to deviate from the standard proofs. Which may be why, when I circled back to Mount Gay to confirm I’d scribbled down all those proofs correctly, they not only confirmed I had, but also added a gentle reminder: Unlike Eclipse, their higher-end varieties are sold at 43 percent worldwide.

On cocktail menus across the country and overseas, drinks are popping up that appear to have fallen through a hole in time. At Canon in Seattle, you can order a Champs-Élysées made with Courvoisier and Chartreuse from 1935—a year when FDR was still president and Babe Ruth hit his final home run. At the Milk Room in Chicago, guests can order a Jasmine cocktail made with 1960s Campari, a burgundy-colored liqueur that bears little resemblance to today’s neon-red version. The Beaufort Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London serves a Hotel Nacional cocktail composed of apricot brandy from the 1960s and a rare Cuban Bacardi rum from the 1940s, predating the Cuban Revolution.

For years, bartenders have made a hobby of collecting rare and vintage spirits, doling out neat pours for favorite (or well-heeled) customers. Now, spurred by a growing market for historic booze, these spirits are showing up in cocktails as they might actually have been served decades ago—a development, critics say, that constitutes a waste of good liquor. But for proponents, cocktails made with vintage spirits offer a tantalizing, visceral brush with history, while opening up new and unexplored dimensions of flavor. They’ve also essentially introduced a new luxury category to the cocktail world: that Hotel Nacional at the Savoy goes for 250£ (roughly $315), and Canon’s Champs-Élysées will set you back $495.

“The same drink made with contemporary ingredients versus vintage spirits are as comparable to each other as a tricycle and a Ducati,” say Jamie Boudreau, the owner of Canon, a leader in the vintage spirits market. “If you’ve ever sipped a vintage spirit, you realize there’s a complexity and length of finish that just doesn’t exist in most modern-day spirits.”

For Boudreau, the appeal of stirring and shaking with vintage spirits is about getting as close as possible to historically recreating the drinks of yore. Like most bartenders who use antique spirits, he sticks with simple, mainly spirit-forward classics that allow the prized main ingredient to shine. His menu will soon feature ten cocktails made with vintage spirits, including drinks like a Pegu Club (1964 Booth’s gin, 1930s Cointreau, lime) for $205 and a Negroni (1971 Tanqueray, 1960 vermouth, 1970 Campari) for $195. These often taste both softer and more concentrated than contemporary versions.

The interest in and growing demand for vintage spirits across the U.S. and in other cities around the world has, in turn, generated a cottage industry of experts who source these hard-to-find, often scarce bottles. A little over a year ago, Alex Bachman—a former bartender at Chicago’s Billy Sunday—founded Sole Agent, a Windy City-based firm dedicated to locating and selling historic spirits. He relies on a small team of scouts who crisscross the globe, salvaging dusty back vintages from defunct restaurants and bars, auctions and shuttered distilleries and wholesalers. Recent finds include a bottle of the now-defunct gentian-based bitter Secrestat from the 1920s (called for in a number of esoteric classic cocktail recipes), vintages of Fernet from throughout the 20th century and Gordon’s Dry gin from the 1940s. Sole Agent works with over 30 bars and restaurants in Chicago, including acclaimed spots such as Lost Lake and Longman & Eagle, as well as a few venues in California, like the world-famous San Francisco tiki bar Smuggler’s Cove.

The genesis of Bachman’s interest in the field dates back to when he first started as a sommelier at Charlie Trotter’s, which boasted one of the finest restaurant wine cellars in the country. Poring over Trotter’s massive wine list, which included some vintages as old as a 150 years, Bachman began to wonder if a similarly rigorous classification could be applied to spirits dating back dozens of years.

“The vintage means something in every spirit,” says Bachman, though the differences don’t necessarily manifest themselves year to year like wine. Historic spirits with macerated ingredients or lots of botanicals are covetable because of how they age, resulting in rich complexity. Liquors like whiskey or gin, on the other hand, remain more static in the bottle, offering a frozen snapshot in liquid time.

Inside the Booming Market for Vintage Spirits

In the last half-decade, the market for vintage spirits and liqueurs has expanded, so much so that old and rare bottles of whiskey, Cognac and Chartreuse are setting record prices at auction—and becoming increasingly difficult to find. Bryce T. Bauer on the nostalgic appeal of these bottles and how collectors are sourcing them.

Read On →

Sole Agent’s biggest customer is Milk Room, a dimly lit, eight-seat hideaway in the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel that specializes in classic cocktails made with vintage spirits. It was in part the building itself, an 1890s Venetian Gothic landmark with stained glass windows and candelabras, that inspired the idea for a bar that would transport guests—and their palates—back into the past. Bartender Paul McGee oversees the menu, which currently features eight classic drinks, including a Daiquiri and an De La Louisiane, each made with at least one rare, vintage spirit. Alternately, guests can select something from the pages of historic brandies, whiskies, gins and amari to sub it into their favorite cocktail.

McGee also runs the bar programs at the hotel’s three other venues, but the Milk Room takes up the lion’s share of his time, despite having just a fraction of the seating of the other spots. That’s because regularly employing vintage spirits poses a number of challenges to bartenders.

For one thing, scarcity severely limits how much R&D a bartender can do to find the right balance of ingredients for a drink. The taste memory that enables a bartender to predict how a modern bottle of Buffalo Trace or Plymouth gin might play in a drink is useless when it comes to bottles whose flavor profiles or formulas haven’t been used in decades. And vastly complicating the process of ordering and planning menus is the fact that some of the spirits are irreplaceable. “When the bottle is gone, the chances are great that we will not get another bottle like that again,” says McGee. “It really heightens the experience.”

But not everyone gets behind the idea that historic spirits have a role to play in cocktails. Pablo Moix, a co-founder and owner of the bar Old Lightning in Los Angeles, boasts a highly curated library of vintage spirits worth a sizeable fortune, but he doesn’t encourage mixing them in cocktails. “Master distillers are like mixologists,” he says. “A well-made spirit is basically a cocktail in a bottle. The idea of having something that’s perfectly distilled is much more exciting to me than making a vintage Manhattan.” Moix also points to the relative difficulty of sourcing vintage bottles that have been preserved correctly and whose integrity hasn’t been compromised by exposure to light, oxidation or anomalies resulting from the use of corks.

For the bars that carefully vet vintage bottles and take the time to learn how to deploy them in ways that improve a drink, the rewards are clear enough. “I don’t think it’s wasteful,” says Leo Robitschek, the bar director of the NoMad Hotel’s decorated drinks program in New York City. “The comparison I give people is caviar. Caviar is amazing on its own, but it can also be an accent to a dish that makes that dish better.” Robitscheck dedicates a small but popular section of the menu to cocktails made with vintage spirits. It’s caught on to the extent that some customers have actually called ahead to see if the Jungle Bird is being made with 1960s or 1970s Campari, each resulting in a different expression and slightly tweaked recipe. The ’60s version of the liqueur is bright with notes of cooked strawberry, while the ’70s version has a fresh berry profile as well as an earthy bitterness. These kinds of variations, and how they change a drink, can be a revelation to guests as their stable, singular idea of what a brand tastes like unfolds into faceted multiples.

“Age mellows these spirits out in such a beautiful way. You’re getting a piece of history,” says Robitschek. And just as importantly, he adds: “They’re absolutely delicious.”

A Taste of the Past

Illustration: Ric Carrasquillo

A new, flourishing market for vintage spirits has afforded bartenders an unprecedented opportunity to recreate the flavors of the cocktails of the past with historical accuracy. From a $3,000 vintage Sidecar to a Mai Tai with ’60s-era rum, here are nine drinks that showcase how contemporary bars are serving up history in a glass.

Canon, Seattle | Champs-Élysées | Price: $495
Head bartender Jamie Boudreau broke out the deep cuts from his bar’s 4,000 bottle collection to create this singular FDR-era Champs-Élysées. Using both Courvoisier and Chartreuse from 1935, this is about as historically accurate as vintage cocktails get, since the drink itself was first recorded in the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book. Price: $495

The NoMad Bar, New York City | Tuxedo #2 | Price: $28
The key to the acclaimed hotel bar’s Tuxedo #2—made with Beefeater Burrough’s Reserve Gin, Noilly Prat dry vermouth and maraschino liqueur—is the vintage absinthe. A Pernod Fils from 1941, the spirit offers, “besides the licorice and anise qualities, all these other vegetal flavors you don’t usually have,” says bar director Leo Robitschek. “It’s like taking a Tuxedo and adding some age to it.”

The Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel, New York | Sidecar | $3,000
This tony bar was, at one point, selling the most luxe Sidecar imaginable, composed of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Black Pearl Cognac—a blend that includes eaux-de-vie over 100 years old—and pre-Nazi-Germany Cointreau. At that time, the liqueur was actually made with oranges from the island of Curaçao, according to the bar’s consulting mixologist Brian Van Flandern.

Beaufort Bar at the Savoy, London | Hotel Nacional | Price: 250£ ($315)
The Hotel Nacional cocktail was created at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba and served to illustrious guests like Winston Churchill and Marlene Dietrich. The Beaufort recreates a version that resembles something like what those luminaries might have sipped, using a 1960s apricot brandy and a pre-Revolution Cuban Bacardi rum from the 1940s whose remaining stocks are incredibly rare.

Milk Room, Chicago | Old Pal | Price: $45
Paul McGee’s tiny, elegant bar boasts an outsized vintage spirits collection that can be combined in any number of ways to recreate rare historic classics. McGee’s personal go-to? An Old Pal. Made with rye and dry vermouth, the 1920s drink is one of the best vehicles for showcasing 1950s Campari, which he says offers “more depth of flavor, nuance and floral notes” than contemporary versions.

Jack Rose, Washington D.C. | Manhattan | Price: $300
Boasting one of the best vintage spirits collection in the country, Jack Rose mixes up a delectable Manhattan made with Cocchi di Torino vermouth and 1982 19-Year W.L. Weller whiskey, a bottle which can fetch thousands of dollars at auction. With this vintage, the brand was the first to substitute winter wheat for rye in the mash, making for a more rounded, fruited profile.

The Rivoli Bar at the Ritz London, London | Negroni | Price: 90£ ($113)
Ever wonder what a Negroni tasted like in the middle of the 20th century? The Rivoli Bar can help you out with that. One of their four vintage cocktails is the classic Italian drink featuring pours from bottles of Gordon’s Gin, Campari and Martini Rossi sweet vermouth—all dating back to the 1950s.

Queen Mary Tavern, Chicago | Martini | Price: $33
Choose from among a selection of vintage gins at this nautical Wicker Park watering hole to mix into a Martini. A 1970s Plymouth gin, says general manager and beverage director Daniel Smith, “is thick and heavy in the mouth, super rich, woodsy and earthy.”

Smuggler’s Cove, San Francisco | Mai Tai | Price: $150 – $720
At this tiki landmark, Martin Cate serves most of his collection of vintage rums neat, but if you ask nicely he might make you a Mai Tai with an authentic 1960s bottle of Trader Vic’s Mai Tai rum. The cocktail “is well-receptive to a full-bodied, long-aged rum,” says Cate. Price: Depending on the vintage rum used, a Mai Tai can run anywhere from $150 to $720.

The post What Would You Pay for a True Taste of Cocktail History? appeared first on PUNCH.

Even if you’ve never heard of Hop Louie, there’s a good chance you’ve seen pictures of it. The restaurant is located inside one of the most iconic buildings in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, a baroque, five-tiered pagoda structure with each level slightly smaller than the one below it, like Russian nesting dolls stacked in reverse.

When it was constructed, in 1941, it was the tallest building in the neighborhood—a triumph of thematic Oriental architecture and the crown jewel of a recently debuted, tourist-friendly “New Chinatown.” For a few decades a Cantonese restaurant called the Golden Pagoda occupied the space, but sometime in the 1980s a man known as Uncle Hop Louie Woo (former Senior Vice President of Far East affairs at Caesars Palace Las Vegas) took ownership. The dining room, which served as a backdrop for such acclaimed films as Lethal Weapon 4 and Mystery Men, was heavy on red pleather and faux gold leaf.

The last time my wife and I were at Hop Louie, about a year ago, we’d shuffled over after drinks at a nearby cocktail spot called General Lee’s. We shared a “Special Dinner Combination Plate,” or something to that effect—a prix fixe assemblage of foil-wrapped chicken, wonton soup, BBQ pork chow mein and crispy lemon chicken soaked in a neon yellow sauce so sour it could have been made with powdered Country Time lemonade. Full and already buzzed, we agreed on a nightcap at Hop Louie’s downstairs cocktail lounge, a noir-era relic from the days when drinking dens were labeled as cocktail lounges without a hint of irony.

Nearly everyone in the bar—art school kids, mostly—were drinking either bottles of Tsingtao or Scorpion Bowls, that lethal built-for-two tiki drink that is as much a provocation as it is an alcoholic beverage. I asked for latter, of course, and my wife promptly shot me that you’re on your own look. I’d barely gotten through half before a sudden sting of heartburn hit my chest like a screeching air raid siren—a warning for the college-freshman hangover that awaited me the next morning.

By itself, a lackluster Scorpion Bowl made with bottled juice and bottom-shelf rum didn’t strike me as all that interesting. But blended-to-order inside an old Chinese restaurant, that lone tiki drink signaled a broader type of idiosyncrasy.

I. The Chinese-Tiki Connection

Hop Louie isn’t the only Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles where you’ll find Scorpion Bowls, Zombies and Mai Tais flowing freely. In the neighborhood of Pico-Robertson—often referred to as LA’s Kosher Korridor for its ample Jewish population—are two beacons of Cantonese-American cuisine, Twin Dragon and Fu’s Palace, located not more than a few blocks apart. Twin Dragon, which opened in 1962, was remodeled and revamped a few years back, and while it lost much of its retro luster, an illustrated cocktail menu still hangs behind the bar, next to a long illuminated fish tank filled with koi. Options include the Flaming Virgin (with a floating lemon garnish set aflame), Blue Hawaii, Navy Grog and Banana Daiquiri.

Fu’s Palace, by contrast, has retained its kitschy ‘60s splendor, complete with a faded-green thatched roof and paper Zodiac mats on every table. Once a grand and spacious restaurant in its glory days, Fu’s is now best known as home to an extra-potent Scorpion Bowl, which functions as a tropical Long Island Iced Tea for rowdy and occasionally lascivious UCLA kids. The place is sometimes referred to as “F.U. Palace,” short for “fucked up.”

As it turns out, Fu’s had actually replaced an even older Cantonese restaurant called Wan-Q sometime in the 1970s, which was owned by a man named Benny Eng and known for its flamboyant tropical cocktails. Wan-Q, too, had a rival located just a few blocks away, a now-closed Cantonese establishment called the Kowloon, which served Polynesian delights like pineapple Peking duck and a Tahitian Rum Punch. On a number of message boards and tiki fan sites users have chronicled long-forgotten Cantonese restaurants like these not only in Southern California—Yue’s Cantonese in Gardena, Edwin Tan’s Chinese Gardens in San Bernardino, China Inn in Pacific Beach, Mandarin Tiger in Tarzana—but all across the United States, including a few that had managed to survive over the decades.

There was the beloved King Yum in Queens, Lun Wah in New Jersey, Chef Shangri-La in the suburbs outside Chicago, Zom Hee Chinese in Florida, Shanghai Lounge in Oklahoma, Ho Kong in Rhode Island—the list stretched onward. It’s been estimated by Chinese Restaurant News that 80 percent of the 40,000 or so Chinese restaurants in America serve what is considered Chinese-American food (egg rolls, sweet and sour, chow mein, tomato beef, cashew chicken, etc.). If even a small percentage of those restaurants also served tiki drinks, it would easily dwarf the number of tiki bars and restaurants left in America by a wide margin. What wasn’t ready available was an answer as to why. How, exactly, had Chinese food and tiki drinks become so intertwined in America?

On a basic level, their marriage was one of commercial opportunism. “Tiki bars were having great success with serving [their own] version of Cantonese cooking in the 1950s,” says Martin Cate, author of the book Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki. “Basically the Cantonese restaurants all started to say, Hey, they’re already serving our food, why don’t we serve their drinks? Many Chinese restaurants at that time had separate cocktail lounges attached, so they added some bamboo and thatch in there and started rolling out the tiki drink menus.”

But to write the pervasiveness of tiki in today’s Cantonese restaurants off as a remnant of a burnt-out fad would be to miss the larger parable. If I wanted to understand the full story behind their enduring relationship, Cate told me, I would have to start at the very beginning.

II. Just Mysterious Enough

Ernest Gantt—the man who would later be known as Don the Beachcomber, the founding father of the tiki movement—grew up, according to some sources, the son of a wealthy Texas oilman. When he turned 19, his father handed him a large sum of money, ostensibly to be spent on a college education. Gantt decide to pack his suitcase instead. He spent the next five years traveling the globe—the Caribbean, Central America, Hawaii, Singapore, the Philippines.

After he had exhausted his inheritance, Gantt landed in Los Angeles, where he worked various odd jobs: dishwasher at Chinese restaurants; valet at celebrity-filled nightclubs; set designer and technical consultant for schlocky, low-budget “adventure” movies. By 1933, Gantt had scraped together enough money to open Don’s Beachcomber Café in Hollywood, a palm frond and bamboo-clad shack that showcased island knick-knacks picked up from his travels; he completed the 24-seat island paradise with his own brand of “Rum Rhapsodies”—intricate cocktails influenced by both Caribbean-style rum punches and tropical juice drinks popular in the Philippines—and would later legally change his name to Donn Beach, taking on a bohemian persona that fell somewhere between Paul Gauguin and Jimmy Buffett. In an era when themed bars ruled LA, Don’s quickly emerged as a rollicking hotspot for Hollywood high society.

While Beach was busy planting the flag for exotic cocktails, Americanized Chinese food (cooked by mostly Cantonese immigrants) was breaking into the mainstream. Over the past few decades, Cantonese cooking had slowly expanded beyond the confines of Chinatowns, developing, as Andrew Coe puts in his book Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, a broad appeal as food that was “cheap, filling, and just mysterious enough.”

In 1937, Beach and his new wife, Cora “Sunny” Sund—a former Minnesota school teacher turned LA waitress—decided to expand their wildly successful bar (now renamed Don the Beachcomber) across the street into a much roomier space with a full kitchen. Beach, though a visionary in many ways, wasn’t know for being a particularly shrewd businessman. It took the foresight of Sund to realize that serving Cantonese food, tweaked with just enough Polynesian flair (read: pineapple) to label as their own, would be exotic enough to entice, but not intimidate.

“Among [Sunny’s] first moves was the hiring of a Chinese chef. With Don and the chef, she set to work to devise a South Seas-Cantonese cuisine to outdo any cuisine ever tasted in the South Seas or Canton,” wrote the author of a (rather condescending) 1948 profile of Don the Beachcomber in the Saturday Evening Post. “The usual victual Chinatown dishes up for Americans are composed largely of celery and bean sprouts, both inexpensive. Don and Sunny decided to use chicken, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots with a lavish hand… They also began to import oyster sauce, wild-plum sauce, lichee nuts and lotus nuts from China, an issued an ukase that there would be no chop suey and chow mein on their menus.”

At the new restaurant, large portholes were installed in the dining room so diners could peer into the brightly lit kitchen while immaculately dressed Chinese waiters were on hand to supply explanations for any dish that seemed unusual. Menu prices, while still relatively cheap (profits were supplemented by the high-margin rum drinks), were elevated just enough to distinguish them from the bargain chop suey joints across town.

It would be easy to dismiss Don the Beachcomber’s approach to Chinese food as unabashed cultural appropriation by two enterprising white folks—which it most certainly was—but in a broader sense, the restaurant marked an early shift toward legitimizing Chinese cooking as an elevated and distinguished cuisine in the eyes of many non-Chinese Americans. At that point in the country’s dining culture, if you were a restaurant that wanted to attract celebrities and other stylish segments of society, you generally served steaks or French cuisine. Not only did Don the Beachcomber serve something altogether foreign, but it was able to convince customers to actually pay more for it.

That same year, 1937, another budding entrepreneur in Oakland named Vic Bergeron added Chinese food to his tropical-themed bar, Hinky Dink’s, and renamed it Trader Vic’s. Bergeron was a world traveler with a taste for the island life, but unlike his rival he proved to be much more astute about growing a national empire. Bergeron realized that most of his customers would be turned off by actual Polynesian food (“Who wants to eat poi?,” he once quipped, according to Cate) and so created faux-Polynesian hits like the pupu platter, a combination of Cantonese-ish appetizers like shrimp toast, egg rolls and sticky-sweet pork ribs arranged over a flaming bowl. For the most part, what Americans soon came to identify as Polynesian food was in reality a carefully curated strain of rich Cantonese food, adorned with pineapple and copious amounts of rum.

Although tiki pioneers like Beach and Bergeron were, on some level, culinary carpetbaggers, they were also extremely earnest in their passion for other cultures. Both were known for treating and paying their staff well in an era when discrimination against Asians was still rampant. Both were exceptionally knowledgeable about global cuisine—especially Bergeron, who became a sort of proto-authenticity advocate and later expanded his menu to encompass food that no one else was serving at the time, including Malaysian curries, Thai satay and even sushi decades before they were well-known. As actual Chinese chefs like Cecilia Chiang began to expose the country to a more authentic genre of regional Chinese cooking in the 1950s, Bergeron would go on to borrow from her style as well, even going as far as to have traditional Chinese ovens installed in Trader Vic’s kitchens.

The Twin Dragon

It was only natural, then, that the growing number of Cantonese restaurant owners across the country would capitalize on the appropriation of Chinese food by the tiki movement, retrofitting their own existing cocktail lounges with palm thatching and elaborate exotic drinks to attract thirsty customers. 

By the 1950s, the tiki fad had gone mainstream. There were tiki bowling alleys, tiki apartment complexes and tiki furniture stores. The tiki aesthetic soon seeped outward from cities into the booming suburbs, and in the process had become democratized and commercialized. Restaurants could order everything from tiki mugs to bamboo table skirts to carved totems through mail-order catalogues, or from exotica-themed restaurant supply companies like Orchids of Hawaii and Dynasty Wholesale (which explains why so many tiki bars across the country use the same ceramic bowls for Scorpions).

Drink recipes, once closely guarded secrets, became widely available as former bartenders, waiters and managers at chains like Trader Vic’s or Kon Tiki—many of them Chinese-American—left to work at other restaurants, took over for their retiring bosses or, in some cases, opened their own establishments. Like a giant game of telephone, tiki culture became looser in interpretation as it expanded into Cantonese restaurants. The Dr. Funk, a rare tiki drink actually invented in the South Pacific (by Robert Louis Stevenson’s personal physician no less) was often renamed the Dr. Fong, and served in Fu Manchu mug. Bamboo wallpaper mingled with hanging red lanterns. And Polynesian dishes like crab rangoon (a Trader Vic invention) became firmly planted in the Chinese-American canon.

Once the trend had reached peak saturation, however, its devolution was inevitable. As Sven Kirsten, the accomplished author and historian behind Tiki Pop and Tiki Modern told me, “the mythology behind Polynesian restaurants was never about authenticity, but rather presenting these unknown flavors and sensations in ways that seemed exotic.” As Americans began to view the now ubiquitous Cantonese-American cooking as lowbrow—greasy chow mein, fried stuff in sticky sauce—it lost much of its allure for the thrill-seeker. As quickly as “Polynesian” cuisine had leapfrogged into the national consciousness, it began to fade from relevance.

III. The Post-Polynesian Era

During the dark ages of tiki—a period which, and this is open to interpretation, stretched from the late 1970s until the early 2000s—the most reliable place to find a tropical cocktail across the country was almost certainly at a Chinese restaurant.

Nowhere was this Sino-Polynesian alliance more impervious to change than areas like suburban Massachusetts—and the greater Northeast in general—which isn’t surprising given the affection Boston still holds for lovably bastardized dishes like Peking Ravioli and American Chop Suey. Brother Cleve, a musician, bar consultant and tiki enthusiast widely considered the paterfamilias of Boston’s cocktail scene, recalls being given free Scorpion Bowls and pupu platters after playing a show at a local Chinese joint called the Kowloon (established 1950) in his early touring days. When fellow tiki pioneer Otto Von Stroheim flew out from LA to visit in 1997, Cleve says that Von Stroheim was astounded that “you could walk out the front door and within five minutes find yourself a Scorpion Bowl, Fog Cutter, Mai Tai or Suffering Bastard, all at Chinese restaurants.”

In her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Jennifer 8. Lee describes Chinese restaurant culture as fundamentally “open-source,” to borrow a term from the tech world. “Good ideas have historically rippled quickly through the Chinese-restaurant system, carried by word of mouth, and by the experiences of dispersing immigrants,” she explains.

If something proves successful—General Tso’s chicken, for instance—it gets duplicated everywhere, a theory that explains why tiki drinks continued to find a home in Chinese restaurants even as the Polynesian trend began to wane in the late 1960s. According to Lee, Chinese food—especially when found outside of China—is above all else, malleable: “A driving force behind Chinese cooking is the desire to adapt and incorporate indigenous ingredients and utilize Chinese cooking techniques… Chinese cooking is a not a set of dishes. It is a philosophy that serves local tastes.”

If there are any glimmers of an update in the world of Chinese-tiki, it might be best personified in part by a decorated Boston bartender named Ran Duan. Duan’s parents own a Chinese restaurant, called Sichuan Garden II, located in the suburban city of Woburn. Back in 2009, the restaurant served bad tiki drinks.“We had all the classic Chinese tiki recipes, which basically meant that nothing was done properly… It was all sour mix, well booze—which can still be great. It’s become America’s Chinese classic now, you know, but it wasn’t really what I wanted,” Duan told Bevvy.co in an interview last August.

The self-taught bartender picked up cocktail books by Trader Vic and Beachbum Berry and crafted a menu based around quality tiki drinks, one that also pays homage to the Chinese restaurant his parents created. “It’s weird when you walk in and you see a Sichuan restaurant in an old, colonial-style house and now it has two tiki-centric cocktail bars,” Duan said. “But it works.”

Back in Los Angeles, there are further hints of a reimagined connection. Bryant Ng, chef and co-owner at Santa Monica’s wildly successful Cassia, is the grandson of two Cantonese immigrants who emigrated from Hong Kong to Santa Monica in the 1950s. Ng’s family manufactured and sold laundry detergent in China, but decided to open a Polynesian restaurant called the Bali Hai when they moved to the U.S.

“They served typical Polynesian foods like pupu platters and crab rangoon, but also Chinese-American staples like egg rolls, barbecued honey ribs, silver-wrapped chicken, pork chow mein, sweet and sour pork, egg foo young, Peking duck,” Ng told me. “I love looking through the old menus.” Cocktails included the Doctor Wong, the Tonga Cooler, the Mr. Chan and, of course, a flaming Scorpion Bowl built for four and served with 20-inch straws. Bali Hai closed in 1968, around the time the popularity of both tiki and Cantonese food were beginning their decline.

Ng is now a third-generation restaurant owner, one that deals in a more au courant style of Asian fusion, but there are still nods to the past, in dishes like a classic Cantonese fried rice tossed with cured Chinese sausage (lap cheong), salt pork and preserved fish, and an evocative pineapple-coconut Lava Flow—the favorite drink of Ng’s wife, Kim—topped off with a swirl of strawberry-balsamic gastrique.

While Cassia and Sichuan Garden II pay homage to the now timeless connection between tiki and Chinese restaurants in America, there won’t ever be a way to replicate places like Hop Louie or Twin Dragon. They were born from a mixture of commercial opportunism, exotic fantasies and ethnic distortion, all thrown together into the whirling blender of pop culture. We’re probably too obsessed with culinary authenticity these days to get swept up in such blissful ignorance again.

Last September, after nearly 76 years in operation, the family behind Hop Louie decided to close their long-tenured restaurant. Running the place required too much work of its aging owners, I was told. To the relief of many, though, they decided to keep the cocktail lounge downstairs open, albeit only for the time being. There’s comfort in knowing that until the final day comes, that Scorpion Bowl will be on the menu, unchanged, like a rum-soaked fossil preserved in amber.

The post A Match Made in Paradise: The Story of Chinese-Tiki appeared first on PUNCH.

Old Monongahela is back. This is thrilling news for whiskey lovers, but it also raises a reasonable question: What the hell is Old Monongahela?

The short answer: Monongahela (MO-non-gah-HEEL-a) is a rye whiskey distilled in and around southwestern Pennsylvania and northwestern Maryland, typically within barging distance of the Monongahela River. (Geography refresher: the Monongahela flows northward from Virginia and, via tributaries, from Maryland into Pittsburgh, where it merges with the Allegheny to become the Ohio River.) The rye made in this region long had a reputation for being bigger, spicier and “chewier” than other, softer ryes historically made elsewhere, and was certainly more assertive than the corn whiskey associated with distilleries that cropped up as settlers moved west.

Old Monongahela has also, until recently, had the reputation of being non-existent. Chasing after it was like chasing after a ghost: A few descendants of original producers persisted (Rittenhouse, Old Overholt, Hochstadter’s), but all had been acquired by bigger producers and production uprooted to outside the region. You could call these “Nongahela” ryes—the same in name but not necessarily in style or flavor.

The fact that this category of whiskey had all but disappeared is surprising, historically speaking, given the dominance of Monongahela in the early days of the republic. Pioneering farmers had pushed west over the Alleghenies and Appalachians and cleared dense forest, where they found fertile soils ideal for growing grain. But they had no way to economically ship bulky grains to coastal cities. (Canal and rail networks wouldn’t arise until the 1830s.) But, thanks to the know-how of German and Scots-Irish immigrants, they were able to distill what they grew into whiskey, which could be put in a barrel and shipped more practically.

Thus, rye whiskey became a thriving industry in this part of the Mid-Atlantic in the 18th century. Today, the region is perhaps best known for being home to the Whiskey Rebellion, which came to a head in 1794 after the new federal government imposed taxes on liquor to pay off debts incurred during the revolution. This did not go over well with the farmer-distillers; federal troops had to be sent in to put down the foment, and the tax remained.

As the 19th century progressed, distilleries moved off farms and into centralized areas with better access to transportation, and distilling centers like Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania became known for the quality of its whiskey, much as Kentucky would later become famed for its bourbon. (Not coincidentally, both regions are noted for their limestone deposits and thus high levels of calcium bicarbonate in spring water, which raises the pH and aids fermentation, as well as adding other desirable minerals.)

But then came Prohibition. Hundreds of distilleries shuttered in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Kentucky. Other industries (such as steel and glass) took over factory locations in the east; rural Kentucky had few competing industries and so many of the distilleries were simply boarded up. When Repeal came around, Kentucky fired up the stills again, and went on to dominate the whiskey world. Pennsylvania and Maryland, meanwhile, had few stills to resurrect and, for decades, their whiskey roots were more or less lost to history.

With the rise of craft spirits, however, many curious bartenders and distillers—especially those endlessly intrigued by the ghosts of spirits past—clamored to bring it back. Just one problem: few could agree as to what actually defined a Pennsylvania or Maryland rye, other than that they were made in one of those two states.

Some evidence has cropped up that distillers in the east used different methods than Kentucky bourbon makers. Notably, they employed a sweet mash rather than supplementing with the leftover wash known as sour mash, which yields a sharper-tasting product. They also appeared to invest more in stout rickhouses, in which they could better control the environment and speed of barrel aging.

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Some in the position to know, including spirits historian David Wondrich, have argued that the distilling technology in the east was also fundamentally different than in the west. A few years ago, Todd Leopold, of Leopold Brothers distillery in Denver, came upon a 1910 diagram of a unique three-chamber still that had been used in Peoria, Ill. He had never seen anything like it, and believed it to be linked to traditional ryes. Since none existed, in 2015 he wrote a check for more than six figures and had Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville make one for him, despite the fact that Vendome wouldn’t guarantee that it would work. It did. He’s since been cranking out rye, which he plans to begin releasing once it’s spent five years in barrel. (He also makes a traditionally distilled “Maryland-style” rye, which he defines as a sweeter rye than the Pennsylvania style; he achieves this via careful yeast selection.)

Today, the style is more typically defined as whiskey made from local rye grains, whether grown in eastern or western Pennsylvania, or Maryland. Meredith Grelli, who with her husband, Alex, founded Wigle Whiskey in Pittsburgh, argues that the definition is cultural, and begins with Monongahela rye in Western Pennsylvania. “Monongahela was born out of our earlier settlement patterns, with the Germans and the Scots-Irish. The rest of the state then expanded on that tradition, with Pennsylvania rye,” she says. “I do think there’s something about regionality, whether with grain or culture or who was distilling and where, along with what they were able to grow.”

She admits that a clear definition of an eastern rye will be elusive. She sees these more like “Old Tom gin” or “Philly cheesesteak”—terms that acknowledge tradition and history rather than narrow definition. “We have to be okay with living in the gray area with this one,” she says.

As eastern ryes start to reemerge from their century-plus slumber, expect these old flavor profiles to make incursions in new markets, offering newer, more distinctive ryes. “Rye should be young, rye should be vibrant,” says Herman Mihalich of Dad’s Hat Rye in Pennsylvania, “and rye should smack you in the face a little bit.”

The post America’s Oldest Rye Whiskey Is Back from Extinction appeared first on PUNCH.

The swim-up bar is pretty much clickbait incarnate. Just ask your browser: “Coolest Swim-Up Bars in the World” (Travel + Leisure) “18 Resorts and Hotels With the Most Amazing Swim-Up Bars” (Trips to Discover), “12 Best Swim-Up Bars Around the World” (Travel Channel), “The World’s Most Enticing Swim-Up Bars” (Paste).

“It says something about a hotel and casino when the pool is one of its sickest, most sought after attractions,” Thrillist notes in their entry into the crowded field of swim-up bar reporting. Yet, for all of the “coolest,” “most incredible,” “sexiest” slideshows of swim-up bars the world over, it’s a lot harder to figure out where the hell they originated.

When exactly did people decide they wanted to sip frozen Margaritas on a submerged bar stool?

Like most seemingly misguided drinking trends, the swim-up bar was born in—you know it—Las Vegas. As architect Stefan Al explains in his recent book The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, the initial goal of Las Vegas developers was “to seep gambling into a suburban vacation.” Swimming pools grew tenfold in the U.S. during the early-1950s, becoming a requisite hotel attraction. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to mash up legalized gambling and pool-going.

Just after opening, in 1952, The Sands Hotel and Casino launched floating craps and blackjack tables, as well as poolside slot machines, as a gimmicky way to garner press coverage. It worked: in 1954 the casino landed a spread in Life magazine. Other hotels took note. When the Tropicana opened at the other end of the strip, in 1957, the pool area quickly added “swim-up” blackjack tables and tiki drinks in an attempt to combat the loss of summer revenue from guests hanging out in the pool as opposed to the casino floor. It turned out to be a match made in paradise.

“These days in Las Vegas, the bar and the pool have truly become a hybrid,” Al told me over email, “with entire pool clubs, such as XS in Encore, among the top 10 world’s highest-grossing nightclubs, because they can get revenue during the day as well as the night.” In actuality, buoyed by frequent poolside “nightswim” performances by musicians such as Laidback Luke, XS has been the number one highest-grossing bar in the entire world the last five years running.

However, today’s more archetypal swim-up bars—with their signature submerged stools and comically-named drinks—are more closely associated with Mexican and Caribbean resorts, favored by the same folks who enjoy Carnival cruises and the ring of “all-inclusive.” Credit for this breed of swim-up boozing goes to the Jamaica-based Sandals Resorts.

Originally, Sandals’ Montego Bay flagship location (which opened in 1981) only served beachside cocktails to guests who didn’t want to leave the ocean. But when a new block of rooms was added away from the beachfront in 1984, management decided to build something that might attract guests to that end of the property. Architect Evan Williams casually remarked to Sandals chairman Gordon “Butch” Stewart that he “never understood why you couldn’t have bars in pools.” Recognizing a potentially lucrative idea, Stewart promptly gave Williams the go-ahead to build the Caribbean’s first swim-up pool bar. It was an immediate hit; today, all 16 Sandals resorts sport swim-up bars serving drinks like the rum cream-backed Hummingbird and the Dirty Banana.

“Guests love these bars because they are a novelty,” claims Paul Bauer, Sandals group manager of F&B standards. “Plus, it’s virtually instantaneous cocktail service without having to move a muscle.”

Less a trend than a resort necessity, swim-up bars have become an indelible part of relaxation culture, spreading beyond well-trodden vacation spots.

Des Moines, Iowa, has a swim-up bar. Last summer, Nebraska got the state’s first at the Fun-Plex Waterpark. The famed Wisconsin Dells (“The Waterpark Capital of the World!”) has two: Margarita’s Swim-Up Bar at the Wilderness Resort and Mud Hut Swim-Up Bar at the Kalahari Resort  (with both places serving 42-ounce “monster” drinks in souvenir cups). And you’d better believe the Jersey Shore has a swim-up tiki hut.

So does Manhattan, it turns out. Located in Times Square’s Hotel Room Mate Grace, the pink-lit swim-up bar is located in a side room of their indoor nightclub. The 3’ 9”-deep pool abuts a 40-foot bar, hosts DJs and synchronized swimming performances and offers guests disposable bikinis and swim trunks. As a goggle-clad drinker told Travel Channel earlier this year, “Having a cocktail in the pool just can’t be beat. You’re not gonna find that at the Y.”

Unsurprisingly, the swim-up bar has also been co-opted by private citizens looking for a snazzy McMansion amenity. For the less financially-solvent among us, there are a few inflatable swim-up bars out there, which are probably more fun than a few twenties should buy you.

But nothing really beats drinking Mudslides in lukewarm water alongside middle-American moms and dudes with barbed wire tattoos. It has its risks, though. While Tropicana’s pool bar was shut down in 2015 for a litany of predictable health hazards, there is a more benign, but ubiquitous issue, according to Bauer.

“Well, we do have to increase the amount of chlorine in the pool,” he says. “Many guests either won’t—or can’t—leave.”

The post The Surprising History of the Swim-Up Bar appeared first on PUNCH.

It’s hard to imagine a drink that is equally as loathed and enduring as the Dirty Martini.

“The classic Martini is so beautifully balanced,” says David Wondrich, cocktail historian and author of Imbibe!. “It’s focused like a laser beam—cold, refreshing, incisive—and once you put olive brine in it, it kind of spoils all of that stuff.”

Yet hoards of people—people like me—continue to order it, savoring the guilty pleasure of cold vodka or gin sloshed together with suspect brine. It is a flawed drink with a remarkable fan base. Which is why many of the country’s bartender-critics are (however begrudgingly) trying to fix it.

According to Wondrich, the un-fairer Martini’s history begins in 1901, when John E. O’Connor served a Martini with muddled olives at the Waldorf Astoria. But a dash of brine doesn’t appear, at least in writing, until 1930, in G.H. Steele’s My New Cocktail Book. The drink, dubbed the Perfect, à la Hyland, consisted of half gin, half vodka, dry vermouth, three types of bitters and one teaspoon of olive brine. It appears again, in the years following World War II, sans bitters, perhaps most notably by way of FDR, whose Martini call was two parts gin, one part vermouth and a teaspoon of olive brine.

This brine-dashed variation remained an anomaly during the 1950s and 1960s, when the bone-dry gin Martini served as a stand in for post-war values: pure, strong and homegrown in the U.S. By the 1970s, however, vodka was outselling gin, and the cocktail aesthetic was skewing (much) sweeter. Fast forward even further, to the late-1990s, and the classic Martini had been sullied six ways from Sunday, making plenty of room for its dirty sibling to dig in.

“Nobody knew anything. Everything was bad,” says TJ Lynch, co-owner and bartender at New York’s Mother’s Ruin. “I’m sure there were some people doing the right things, but I made a lot of Dirty Martinis in the ‘90s, and it was literally just vodka and crappy olive juice.” (Today, he prefers a 50/50 gin Martini with a dash of Alfonso olive brine.)

With the rise of craft cocktails in the early aughts, the Dirty Martini went underground, but it never quite faded away. In fact, today, as bartenders seek to upgrade even the most un-loved cocktails, the drink has reemerged in the same bars that sought to estrange a generation from vodka ‘tinis.

Much of the new dialogue around the drink centers on the freshness and quality of the brine, and the method of employing it. For Josh Goldman, who consults on the bar program at Santa Monica’s Belcampo, the answer came in a teabag, which he first witnessed used in a drink (in horror) during the mid-2000s, when D.C. bartenders were making “Nicotinis”: nicotine-infused cocktails meant to placate smokers in the days following the city’s ban.

His method begins with a sachet of six ingredients, which he blanches in hot water—long enough to prime the aromatics but not unduly raise the temperature—before placing it in the glass. He then adds Aylesbury Duck vodka (which has been stirred to chill), alongside a finishing spritz of concentrated olive brine. Let it steep for 20 seconds if you like your Martini slightly dirty, he says, and a whole minute if you like it filthy. While Goldman won’t reveal his exact blend, I could detect olives, dried herbs and a hit of miso.

Lynnette Marrero, the bar director at Llama Inn, has taken a more post-modern approach. She is currently workshopping a riff that calls for thickening olive brine by adding modified tapioca starch and then painting it along the inside of a Martini glass—a perhaps unintentional but wholly appropriate ‘90s throwback move. (She hasn’t quite nailed the texture and flavor—an early attempt with Kalamata olive brine was unsuccessful—but, she says, “I’m going to keep pursuing it.”)

At Petit Trois in Los Angeles, beverage manager Courtney Rose is also taking a modern approach to the drink, by way of fat-washing. She makes use of the herb-studded oil the kitchen routinely tosses out by Cryovacing it with gin, then tossing the mixture in a sous-vide machine for an hour. She then freezes it, strains off the solids and pairs it with sweet vermouth and lemon oil for a “dirty” take on the Martinez, a precursor to the Martini.

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The award for the most obsessive take on the drink may well go to New York’s Naren Young. During his tenure at Saxon & Parole, Young, an outspoken critic of the Dirty Martini, spent two years creating his Olives 7 Ways, which calls on a custom olive bitters by Bitters, Old Men and an olive distillate Young co-crafted with Allen Katz of New York Distilling Company. For the latter, they distilled a small batch of neutral spirit with Cerignola olives and used it as a replacement for brine. Robert Simonson, writing about the drink for the New York Times, described it as “more elegant than any offspring of the dirty martini deserves to be.”

While this kind of innovation on the bar side certainly has elevated the drink, it’s the advent of premium bottled brine that has had the biggest impact on the quality of the Dirty Martini nationwide.

Consider Dirty Sue. The brainchild of Eric Tecosky, Dirty Sue was founded in 2004 after a particularly rough service behind the bar at the Jones Hollywood. Aggravated by having to strain gallon jugs of olives during service, he found himself googling “pre-bottled olive juice.” It yielded zero results.

He eventually took to making phone calls to farms in California and connected with a grower who was also importing olives from Spain. From there, he formulated a product using the mother brine (the original brine that the olives are shipped in rather than the salt water and lactic acid they are distributed in) and, by 2005, began hand-delivering samples to his friends and colleagues in the industry.

Two years later, in 2007, brothers Daniel and Marc Singer came up with a similar idea in Florida. They noticed that bartenders were replacing pre-bottled mixes with fresh juices and adding herbs to the bar, but olives were still coming in from distributors in the same gallon jugs that they were using in the ‘90s.

“Everybody hated their olives,” Daniel Singer recalls. They were oily and salty, and no bar would cycle through them quickly enough to avoid oxidization, which made the liquid especially bitter.

The Singers looked at 200 types of olives around the world and settled on a coastal Greek variety that was less oily, with fleshy fruit. Rather than adopting the industrial method of curing olives in lye, they persuaded a family to naturally ferment the olives in salt water, changing the water every two days over four months to slowly draw the bitter glucoside out of the fruit. By comparison, the same process using lye takes only four days, but, according to Singer, lye “shuts down the pores and strips the fruit of all that woodiness and nuttiness.” To compensate, producers add a ton of salt and oil to return flavor to those gallon jugs of olives.

In 2009, the brothers launched Filthy Food, a line of artisanal cocktail garnishes that includes Filthy olive brine, which is made from their Greek olive brine and filtered five times before it is packaged in squeeze bottles and distributed around the country. Today, both Filthy Food and Dirty Sue ship to thousands of restaurants and bars nationwide, from P.F. Chang’s to Pegu Club. In fact, order a regular Dirty Martini at Dante, and Young will make it with Filthy olive brine.

Yet, despite cleaning up its act, the Dirty Martini’s dirty-pleasure status remains gleefully intact. And those of us who order it wouldn’t have it any other way. “I like to make them for myself where nobody can see,” says Petit Trois’s Rose, who tips the brine from habanero-stuffed olives into her gin Martini at home. “A lot of people I know drink them on the hush-hush.”

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