The Philosophy of Cocktails

An early description of a cocktail as ‘a mix of alcoholic drinks with flavoring ingredients’ does nothing to convey the alchemy and speakeasy glamour of these elaborate drinks.

The cocktail’s humble beginnings as a medicinal tonic through the inclusion of botanicals into distilled spirits such as gin and whiskey, accelerates with the ingenuity of bartenders who created the ‘classics’ – the Martini, Manhattan and Old Fashioned – in the nineteenth-century, and in the decadence of the Jazz Age...