cocktail renaissance is a term for the period at the beginning of the twenty-first century, from roughly 2004 through 2019, when the classic American art of mixing drinks was reconnected with its traditions and re-prioritized in bars around the world. In the process, old recipes were revived, forgotten spirits remembered and reintroduced, and the culture of sophisticated cocktail-sipping revisited, so that Manhattans, Old-Fashioneds, and hand-shaken Daiquiris displaced in turn the Mudslides, Long Island Iced Teas, and slushie-machine Daiquiris that had displaced them a generation or two before. Most immediately, the renaissance inspired a boom in brick-and-mortar bars and fostered cocktail-industry job creation, security, and advancement. Peripherally, it helped to send a ripple of investment through the global bar and restaurant industry and heightened tourism in cities around the United States, and around the world, as well as revitalizing the spirits industry. More generally, the cocktail renaissance changed the way people drink, perhaps for good.
Inspired in part by the last golden age of cocktails, around the turn of the twentieth century, and in part by the culinary revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, the cocktail renaissance came together as a generally (but not always) harmonious movement dedicated to bringing bars back to what they were when they were at the apex of nightlife—and to making the drinks as elegant as they were then, but with perhaps an extra shot of creativity (that part is where friction sometimes occurs between the two wings of the movement). It is that culinary element that helps the movement transcend nostalgia and ensures that the cocktail renaissance as an era is much more nuanced than a predictable reminiscence for simpler times, while the dedication to tradition and heritage keep it grounded and give it a cultural foundation.
The result is not just the revitalization of classic old bars but also the opening of thousands of new ones around the world dedicated to serving handmade drinks mixed from quality ingredients and served with pride and style. While the bulk of them might be concentrated in major cities, the movement has spread to the small-town and even the rural level, aided by the fact that it is self-evangelizing: once a person has had a truly well-made cocktail, it’s hard to go back.
Cocktail renaissance pioneer, Sasha Petraske (kneeling, in white), pictured in 2015 with a posse of veterans of Milk & Honey and some of his other bars. Among the group are Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails contributors Eric Alperin (kneeling behind Mr. Petraske) and Chad Solomon (with prospector’s hat).
Photograph by Gabi Porter.
Catalysts
While it may not be possible to pinpoint a single catalyst for the cocktail renaissance, three of the most important ones are the culinary revolution of the 1970s, the rise of the craft beer industry, and the introduction of the internet and social media. Together, these separate historic circumstances created a perfect storm for cultural change.
Beginning as a reaction to the processed foods that dominated postwar, mid-twentieth-century America, the culinary revolution led to a new appreciation of fresh ingredients—and, in turn, a curiosity about where those ingredients came from that was sometimes pushed to the point of dogmatism. But along with that came a new passion for careful execution in cooking and a new attention to presentation. In many ways, the culinary world’s late-twentieth-century moment of reevaluation paved the way for similar moments in the worlds of wine and beer, and finally cocktails. It is telling that in the 1980s and 1990s, when bartender Dale DeGroff was popularizing classic cocktails as well as inventing new ones and doing it with premium ingredients and (something long out of fashion in drinks) fresh juices, he was doing it under the aegis of pioneering restaurateur Joe Baum (1920–1998), who in the late 1950s and 1960s had blazed the trail for the culinary revolution with the Four Seasons and the Fonda del Sol. See DeGroff, Dale.
Meanwhile, following President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 legislation permitting home brewing, America saw the birth and boom of the craft beer movement, in turn inspiring healthy competition in the corporate beer world. This was dedicated to the idea that consumers have the right to ask more of their drink brands—that they don’t have to accept lowest-common-denominator products and that tradition and history can be drawn from to make better tasting, more substantial, and far more interesting products. What’s more, the successful revival of India pale ales, porters, hefeweizens, and the like proved that such historically oriented products could actually sell enough to support themselves.
Haigh, Ted; Harrington, Paul; and Hess, Robert. This quickly boosted the popularity of not only Prohibition-era classics (Bee’s Knees, Negroni, etc.) but drinks introduced much earlier (Old Fashioned, Sazerac, Clover Club) and much later (Moscow Mule). Many of these drinks made appearances on menus alongside craft cocktails of the bar staff’s own design, which were often credited accordingly.Success
After bartenders and bar owners gave patrons a literal taste for what they had been missing, interest grew in an all but invisible industry: distilling. So many of the old drinks called for ingredients that were poorly distributed at best, such as maraschino liqueur or rye whisky, or entirely unavailable in most markets, if not all of them. Crème de violette might have been available in France, if you knew where to look, but it wasn’t in the United States. American straight rye was almost as hard to find in Europe, and Old Tom gin hadn’t been made since World War II. See gin, Old Tom; Jack Daniel’s; crème de violette; and whisky, rye. In America, twentieth-century consolidation had drastically shrunk the number of distilleries and the range of products that they made, and the same forces were at work in Europe, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. This created an opening, and people rushed in. In the late 1980s, the number of new distillery applicants in America was typically one or two a year, and in 2000 there were but twenty-four operational distilleries in the whole country; by 2010, however, there were more than two hundred, and in 2020 there were more than two thousand. The distillery boom is not isolated to the United States. Ireland, for example, went from just four distilleries in 2010 to thirty-two operational distilleries in 2020. Beyond bars and booze, the cocktail renaissance changed the perception of the occupation of bartending itself. The blue-collar job once relegated to those who couldn’t succeed in traditional nine-to-fives was suddenly an enviable position, particularly since those office jobs had lost their stability in the new tech economy. Spirits manufacturers began to promote careers in the industry via so-called brand ambassadors: individuals willing to peddle a product from bar to bar, sometimes across the globe, wining and dining prospective buyers to feature their brands in original craft cocktails. Senior bartenders found careers as beverage managers, overseeing multiple, complex “cocktail programs” and creating elaborate training programs to meet the higher standards of a clientele that, thanks to the internet, was often as educated about the drinks as the bartenders.
One can see the growth in the high end of the bar industry in the story of Tales of the Cocktail, an informal cocktail convention organized in 2002 in New Orleans to introduce writers of drink books to their readers. In the first year, it was presented essentially by a handful of friends and drew a couple hundred people. At its peak a dozen years later, Tales of the Cocktail hosted upward of fifteen thousand attendees from all over the world, representing hundreds of distilleries, brands, and bars. See Tales of the Cocktail.
Bars and Bartenders
The most romantic legacy of the cocktail renaissance is the reimagining of the speakeasy: an homage to the hidden, dimly lit barrooms that existed by necessity during Prohibition. The most important of these was Milk & Honey, a dark, narrow shoebox of a bar hidden in plain sight in New York City’s Lower East Side. Milk & Honey, which opened at the end of 1999, was modeled after Angel’s Share, another New York City “speakeasy” opened in 1993—ahead of its time, as far as the movement was concerned. See Milk & Honey and speakeasy (new).
Far more successful were less retiring interpretations of the trend, such as Julie Reiner’s Flatiron Lounge (2003) and Audrey Saunders’s Pegu Club (2005), which appropriated the retro glamour of the speakeasies but without the secret doors. See Pegu Club; Reiner, Julie; and Saunders, Audrey. Those doors came back with Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco (2006), with Jon Santer and Dominic Venegas as opening bartenders, and PDT (“please don’t tell”) in New York, which Jim Meehan, a Pegu Club veteran, opened in 2007 behind the phone booth in a downtown hot dog joint. That same year, Chicago saw the opening of the (speakeasy-ish) Violet Hour with bartender Toby Maloney, a veteran of both Milk & Honey and Pegu Club. In fact, those bars served as seminaries, training bartender-missionaries who spread across America opening bars and imbuing more bartenders with the gospel of the craft cocktail, as did Bourbon & Branch, PDT, and the Violet Hour in turn. This process would be repeated around the world. See Match.
Of course, not all of these new bars were the same. By the early 2010s, there were clear subcultures on display. To catalog them all is beyond the scope of this entry, but let’s take a quick glance at Chicago, as an example, with the understanding that the same subdivisions could be found in London, New York, San Francisco, or Sydney. A cocktail renaissance bar crawl around Chicago at the time would have included straight cocktail bars, of course, such as the Drawing Room, with Charles Joly and Lynn House behind the bar, both of them trained in part by brand ambassador and educator Bridget Albert (a Tony Abou Ganim protégée; see Abou Ganim, Tony). There would be a whisky bar, such as the rock-and-roll-friendly Delilah’s. Shelby Allison and Paul McGhee’s Lost Lake would answer any tiki needs. The fine-dining–chemistry-lab fusion that characterized so many of the more culinary-influenced bars at the time was on full display at the Aviary, opened in 2011 by the Michelin-starred chef Grant Achatz. Drawing a direct line from the culinary world to that of cocktails, Achatz opened the Aviary, a molecular mixology bar that featured expensive cocktails created using scientific methods and technology: smoke infusers, sieve traps, Clinebell block-ice makers, and the like. See Clinebell ice machine.
By that point, the cocktail renaissance had created a whole self-perpetuating infrastructure, with new products (and newly rejuvenated old ones), educational institutions, consultants, books, and magazines all cooperating to spread the gospel. See American Distilling Institute; Beverage Alcohol Resource (BAR); and mixography.
Legacy
The cocktail renaissance changed the way people drank, and not just in bars. (The last time both microbreweries and micro-distilleries existed en masse was before Prohibition, when alcohol manufacturing had few limitations and laws.) By the late 2010s, the battles had been won. Craft cocktails were officially mainstream. Corporate restaurant chains such as Chili’s, Denny’s, and Ruby Tuesday featured craft cocktail menus, and rare was the neighborhood restaurant that didn’t have at least a few original cocktails on the menu, not to mention a cursory interpretation of a Moscow Mule. But there were signs that another transformation was brewing, as issues of equity and inclusion, of sobriety and work-life balance began to be raised in the bartending world. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which pretty much shut the whole industry down; in 2020 alone, upward of a hundred thousand restaurants and bars closed permanently. As bars reopen, there is little doubt that it will be as avatars of a new era.
Clarke, Paul. The Cocktail Chronicles. Nashville, TN: Spring House, 2015.
Harry, John. “Jimmy Carter: American Homebrew Hero?” National Museum of American History website, September 30, 2019. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/papazian (accessed June 2, 2021).
Kinstlick, Michael. “The U.S. Craft Distilling Market: 2011 and Beyond.” Coppersea Distilling website. https://coppersea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/CraftDistilling2011WhitePaper_Final.pdf (accessed June 2, 2021).
Simonson, Robert. “New York’s Pioneering Angel’s Share, 24 Years Later.” Punch. https://punchdrink.com/articles/review-angels-share-nyc-cocktail-bar-24-years-later/ (accessed June 2, 2021).
Simonson, Robert. A Proper Drink. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed, 2016.
Viera, Lauren. “Achatz’s Aviary Mixes Drinks with a Sense of Whimsy.” Chicago Tribune, April 24, 2011. https://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/ct-xpm-2011-04-24-ct-live-0425-aviary-opens-20110424-story.html (accessed June 2, 2021).
By: Lauren Viera
Cocktail renaissance pioneer, Sasha Petraske (kneeling, in white), pictured in 2015 with a posse of veterans of Milk & Honey and some of his other bars. Among the group are Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails contributors Eric Alperin (kneeling behind Mr. Petraske) and Chad Solomon (with prospector’s hat). Source: Photograph by Gabi Porter.