The cocktail shaker , a dedicated container for shaking spirits and other ingredients with ice in order to homogenize them, chill them, and dilute them to a more palatable proof, is generally considered the heart of the mixologist’s toolkit. It comes in a great number of styles, which we shall attempt to navigate below. All, however, share the same basic operating principle: the rapid melting that occurs when an ice-liquid mix is agitated violently not only chills the liquid with maximum efficiency but also shrinks the volume of the mix (ice taking up more space than water) and creates a vacuum. This is sufficient to hold the parts of the shaker without leaking, yet not so strong that, in a well-designed shaker, the parts cannot be easily separated.
In its first iteration, which we shall call type 1, the cocktail shaker was remarkably basic: a flared, flat-bottomed glass, large or small (i.e., roughly 180 or 360 ml) and a gently flared tin cup sized so that its mouth fit easily over that of the glass. Build the drink in the glass, add ice, cover with the tin, and press it down until it grips the glass. Shake. A little sideways pressure on the glass will flex the tin and break the seal. Remove the tin and slide the glass to the customer or strain the drink into another glass.
We do not know when this simple bartender’s trick was first conceived. Its use is first recorded, however, in New York City, in 1850, when lowlife journalist George Foster described a city bartender “pulling long ribbons of julep out of a tin cup” (the normal method of mixing drinks at the time involved pouring them back and forth between glasses; here, it seems that the bartender was shaking his drinks before pouring them from the tin into the glass). By the next year this bit of improvisation had become formalized, and one finds the tin cups being referred to as “cobbler mixers”—it took a while for everyone to agree on the name “cocktail shaker,” particularly since cocktails were more often stirred than shaken until the twentieth century. Other names included just plain “mixer” or “shaker,” “punch” or “Milk Punch shaker,” “lemonade shaker,” and “eggnog shaker.”
These shakers, generally soldered together from thin pieces of sheet tin or brass and then silver-plated, were flimsy and very easy to distort out of round, making them leak (some superior, but expensive, versions were hammered out of sterling silver). By the late nineteenth century manufacturing technology had improved, and they were stamped—or even better spun—from thicker metal. Generally this was nickel silver (an alloy of copper, tin, and zinc, electroplated in silver), or “EPNS,” as it was known. Yet this still deformed fairly easily, unless it was made so thick that it lacked the flexibility necessary to allow the vacuum to be broken. Only in 1919 with the introduction of the first stainless steel mixing tins was a material found that was light, flexible, and durable, although it lacked the older alloy’s beauty, weight, and thermal conductivity.
Type 2 was quite popular in Europe, and particularly in the United Kingdom, where it only faded from use in the 1960s, but it never really caught on in America. Nonetheless, its most popular variation—type 3—seems to have been invented in the United States: it first appears, at least, in an 1878 American silver catalogue. Instead of a second metal cup like the first, it has a top shaped like a bulbous, pinch-headed cowbell. An elegant shaker, it was particularly favored in France, Germany, Italy, and Argentina, and vintage examples, heavy and thickly-plated, remain in favor among top mixologists such as Salvatore Calabrese. See Calabrese, Salvatore.
In 1884, Edward J. Hauck, a Brooklyn, New York, metalworker, patented what would become the final style of shaker to be accepted into widespread professional use when he came up with a version of the type 3 that had a strainer built into the top, with a small, separate cap to fit over that; this obviated the need for a separate strainer—we shall call it type 4. See cocktail strainer. Hauck’s patent was only one of at least twenty the United States granted between 1870 and 1920 for attempts to improve the basic cocktail shaker, most of them employing moving parts or other features that do not stand up to hard use. But Hauck’s was simple and fairly rugged, and it was widely adopted for both home and bar use (although bartenders had a habit of misplacing the top cap). It was also widely imitated in America and around the world, patent or no patent. Hauck’s original version was quite utilitarian, being made in thin-gauge, plain or nickel-plated brass, and it was relatively small; the substantial, well-plated EPNS versions the great European drinkware manufacturers, such as Loftus of London, Christofle of Paris, and WMF of Germany, began turning out in the years before the First World War added elegance to the utility.
Many variations on the shaker have been introduced since Hauck’s, but almost all of them are variations on his idea or on the Type 2/3 shaker. Most of those are aimed at home use and to appeal to the consumer, and they add shortcuts (embossed drink recipes, built-in juicers, etc.) or decorative frills, such as cut or colored glass (for the bottom of the shaker), chrome plating, and odd shapes—zeppelins, airplanes, rockets, lighthouses, firehose-nozzles, artillery shells, naval cannon, and a whole host of other things. Also intended for home use was one final type of shaker that was enormously popular in America during Prohibition: pitcher-shaped, it had a cork plug top and a pour spout projecting from the side (usually with screw cap). This type 5 shaker worked poorly—the spout poured slowly and was prone to blockage with ice—but it did not obviously look like a cocktail shaker, and at the time that was desirable.
Type 5 excepted, over the course of the twentieth century, bartenders’ jargon found names for the various types of shakers. Unfortunately, in the absence of a central, controlling authority, these names kept getting tangled up. Type 1 (with a pint glass and a large, stainless steel tin) was used by the vast majority of American bars, from the most humble to the most august, and was known there simply as a “cocktail shaker.” Elsewhere, it was the “American” shaker, at least through mid-century; after that, it was the “American-type Boston shaker” and then simply the “Boston shaker.” Originally, however, the name “Boston shaker” belonged strictly to type 2, although nobody is sure why. It can be traced back to advertisements labeling the shaker as such that the W. R. Loftus company placed in two influential 1920s British cocktail books, those by Harry McElhone and Robert Vermiere, but we do not know why Loftus called it that. See
When the type 2 shaker faded away, in the 1960s and 1970s, the type 1 inherited its name. This British usage then crossed the Atlantic with the cocktail renaissance and was popularized by Dale DeGroff in the late 1990s. See cocktail renaissance and DeGroff, Dale. Ironically, the cocktail renaissance also saw the pint glass largely replaced by a smaller “cheater” tin, also stainless steel, thus turning the American Boston shaker into an improvised facsimile of the British one (this usage seems to have been pioneered by the New York bar Milk & Honey). See Milk & Honey.
Type 3, which acquired the name “Parisian” shaker due to its prevalence behind that city’s more elegant bars, faded away in the 1970s and 1980s. With classic mixology in eclipse, there were few new buyers, while the fact that Parisian shakers are practically indestructible meant that the elegant old bars that still used them had no need for replacements. Indeed, the old EPNS Christofle and WMF versions still remain unchallenged as the pinnacles of practical shaker design.
Finally, the type 4 shaker. This did not have a distinctive name until the turn of the twenty-first century. Before that, it was simply a “cocktail shaker” or a “three-piece shaker.” While rarely used in American bars, it was found frequently elsewhere, and almost universally in Japan. In the late 1990s, Dale DeGroff began calling it a “cobbler shaker,” one of the names formerly used for it in England (the name was generic, and not exclusive: it was also applied to type 1 and type 2 shakers). This usage caught on and is now general.
At present, most modern cocktail bars use the large tin–small tin Boston shaker, except in Japan, where the Cobbler shaker, rarely used elsewhere, is standard. The type 2 Boston shaker and the Parisian shaker, however, are showing signs of revival, albeit in stainless steel. There have, however, been experiments with EPNS, a material not used in fifty years, and it is possible that that, too, will be revived.
Foster, George G. New York by Gaslight. Edited by Stuart M. Blumin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Rogers, Smith & Co’s Illustrated Catalogue. Meriden, CT: 1878.
Sala, George Augustus. “New Application and Change of Terms, Words, Etc.” Notes and Queries, October 24, 1868, 400–401.
Visakay, Stephen. Vintage Bar Ware. Paducah, KY: Collector Books, 1997.
By: David Wondrich