The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails

The United States and Canada


The United States and Canada comprise the former British colonies of North America, along with significant pieces of the American empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden that they absorbed over the years. Their drinking cultures, although divergent in detail, nonetheless share a common DNA and retain a good deal of their British heritage. That heritage is not an abstemious one: the United States is the largest spirits-consuming country in the world by value, if not by absolute volume or per capita, and the largest importer, while both countries are major spirits producers and exporters. The United States is also the birthplace of the so-called American bar, where iced drinks are assembled to order in front of the customer, and it still to a large degree drives global trends in mixology (an American word). See mixology, the history of.

Despite its British heritage, American and Canadian drinking culture has some key differences. In the late 1500s and early 1600s, when Britain began establishing colonies in North America, the settlers it sent across the Atlantic found themselves at the end of a long and tenuous supply line. The beer and ale that were their staple daily drink proved challenging to brew and difficult to keep in the hotter climate found in America, and particularly in the South. Likewise, the wine that the upper classes drank could not be made locally (American vines provided an undrinkable product, while European ones fell victim to the phylloxera louse) and was expensive and chancy to import. As a result, the colonists turned to distillation. Spirits would not be widely consumed in England itself until after the Restoration in 1660, while the colonists had been making large amounts of apple brandy, which was known in Britain, and peach brandy, which was not, since the early 1640s. See peach brandy. They also experimented with other fruit brandies, sometimes successfully, and with distilling spirits from various European grains and the indigenous maize, or Indian corn. See corn. The development of local spirits was greatly assisted by the absorption of the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, where many were experienced at distilling from grain, and, in the early 1700s, by the arrival in Pennsylvania of large numbers of farmers from the western parts of Germany, where both grain and fruit spirits were common. By the mid-1650s, the colonists were also importing rum from the Caribbean in quantity, and by the end of the century they were making their own, after a fashion, from Caribbean molasses.

whisky, rye. Corn whisky soon followed, particularly in the West. With the American Revolution in 1776, the northernmost colonies remained loyal to the English crown. Henceforth, Canadian distillers, who had begun making rum in the 1760s and grain spirits soon after, would draw increasingly on British, and in particular Scottish, expertise, while those in the United States managed things in their own, sometimes peculiar, fashion, which led to such idiosyncrasies as the three-chamber still and aging in charred barrels. See still, three-chamber; and barrel.

The United States also diverged from Britain in the way it drank its spirits. Americans made a specialty of mixed drinks. By the end of the eighteenth century, British punch (first found in the American colonies in the 1660s) and toddy had spawned the julep, sling, and Cock-Tail, all drinks with deep British roots but a peculiar American flair. See punch; toddy; julep; sling; and Cock-Tail. Over the next generation, these and other single-serving mixed drinks, some of them iced, spread throughout the expanding United States and across the porous Canadian border. Under the influence of star mixologists such as Peter Bent Brigham, Joseph Santini, John Dabney, Jerry Thomas, and William Schmidt, mixing drinks developed into a true American folk art, and by the middle of the nineteenth century an international one. See Brigham, Peter Bent; Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”; and Schmidt, William. As masses of immigrants poured into the country, new ingredients— vermouth, European liqueurs—were introduced and new drinks created including the Martini, the Manhattan, and the fizz. See vermouth; Martini; Manhattan Cocktail; and fizz.

Meanwhile, American whisky came into its own as rye, bourbon, and Tennessee whisky slowly displaced peach and apple brandy as the premiere American spirits. See whisky, bourbon; and whisky, Tennessee. Canadian whisky too was developing into a national spirit, although there was still a good deal of cheap rum being distilled in the Maritime provinces. (Like New England’s Medford rum, made in large quantities through the nineteenth century, this rum generally had a poor reputation.) See rum, Medford. Canadian distillers originally made mixed-grain whiskies like those in the United States, but as the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth, they began following the scotch model, where straight, full-flavored whisky was blended with lighter grain whisky. See whisky, grain; and whisky, Canadian.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw the United States and, briefly, Canada enact Prohibition laws forbidding the sale of spirits (and, in the United States, all other alcoholic beverages) within their respective territories, but only the United States also forbade their manufacture. See Prohibition and Temperance in America. As a result, in 1933, when the American law was repealed after fourteen years, the country’s distilling industry was in ruins. Canadian distillers, on the other hand, few in number (there were twenty-five in 1927) but large and technically advanced, were thriving, having supplied much of the United States’ illicit whisky during the dry years. By the time it joined World War II, in 1941, the United States had rebuilt its distilling industry, after a fashion: where there had been 6,211 operating distilleries in the country in 1890, in 1943 there were only 238, the largest and most successful of which were operated by the conglomerates known as the “big four”: Seton Porter’s National Distillers Products, Schenley Distilleries, Hiram Walker & Sons, and Joseph E. Seagram & Sons (the last two being Canadian-owned). See Hiram Walker and Sons and Seagram Company Ltd. The decades after the war brought even more consolidation and homogenization (as it did to food industries in general), so that by 1997 there were a mere sixty licensed distillers in the country.

This consolidation was aided in part by the meteoric rise of vodka, a spirit that rewards economies of scale. See vodka. Indeed, after a meteoric rise in the 1950s and 1960s, in 1976 vodka displaced whisky, which in the 1930s had been 85 percent of the spirits market, as the nation’s most popular spirit. Vodka made it there on the back of a new wave of mixology, one relying on simple drinks that could be made with packaged ingredients: the Screwdriver, the Moscow Mule, and the Bloody Mary (and, of course, its Canadian offshoot, the Bloody Caesar). See Screwdriver; Moscow Mule; Bloody Mary; and Bloody Caesar. Joining them in the 1950s was the tequila-based Margarita and a whole lot of rum-based tiki drinks. See Margarita and tiki.

By the 1980s, mixology had in the majority of American and Canadian bars been reduced to its least common denominator, with artificially flavored liquors mixed with prepackaged juices and poured over quick-melting ice chips. A few bartenders, however, saw the potential in reviving the best practices of the craft and were rewarded by a small but enthusiastic and vocal clientele when they did so.

The turn of the twenty-first century saw this clique (and ones like it in Europe) serve as the seeds for a revival in the fine art of mixing drinks. See cocktail renaissance. It also saw the beginning of a deconsolidation in the distilling industry, as micro-distillers began opening with increasing frequency in the United States and, by the 2010s, in Canada. By 2010, vodka’s growth had almost come to a standstill, while whisky began booming, including the almost-extinct rye whisky, now a micro-distillery staple. In general, younger American and Canadian drinkers began to develop a taste for more specialized and even exotic spirits, such as mezcal and Italian aperitifs and digestives, mostly drunk in cocktails. See mezcal and aperitif and digestive. A few decades in to the twenty-first century, this trend shows no signs of abating.

Liquor Industry Hearings. Washington, DC: US General Printing Office, 1944.

Morewood, Samuel. A Philosophical and Statistical History of the Inventions and Customs of Ancient and Modern Nations in the Manufacture and Use of Inebriating Liquors. Dublin: 1838.

Steiner, Bernard Christian. Archives of Maryland XLI. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922.

Trumbull, J. Hammond. Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut. Hartford: Brown & Parson, 1850.

United States Tariff Commission. Whisky. Washington, DC: United States Tariff Commission, 1958.

Wondrich, David. Imbibe!, 2nd ed. New York: Perigee, 2015.

By: David Wondrich