cocktails on the internet.

cocktails on the internet. The rebirth of interest in cocktails that began in the 1990s, and the subsequent and evolving worldwide cocktail subculture, are inextricably entwined with the popularization of the internet. As Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh says, “the cocktail revival … could not have happened as it did but for the Internet and World Wide Web.” See Haigh, Ted.

Craig Goldwyn’s Food & Drink Network on AOL appeared in the early 1990s. In 1995, Wired magazine launched the first ambitious suite of early web publications, among which was CocktailTime, a website built from the work of the San Francisco–area bartender Paul Harrington. See Harrington, Paul. Inspired by the work of Dale DeGroff and Charles Schumann, Harrington published a new mixed-drink recipe each week, each including a short history and illustration. See DeGroff, Dale, and Schumann, Charles. CocktailTime only ran for about a year, but it reached tens of thousands of people, some of whom went on to be deeply involved in the cocktail movement. Also in 1995, P. C. Loberg launched the Webtender, the first web-based cocktail recipe database.

Robert Hess started the Drinkboy Forum in 1999 which, as AOL waned, largely took over as the main message board for cocktail enthusiasts. See Hess, Robert; and Drinkboy Forum. Beginning in 2001, Drinkboy was complemented by eGullet, a culinary forum founded by Steven Shaw and Jason Perlow that has hosted a lively and often sophisticated cocktail discussion. In the early years of the twenty-first century, committed independent online publishers and bloggers such as Chuck Taggart, Hanford Lemoore, Jamie Boudreau, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, Jimmy Patrick, Paul Clarke, Erik Ellestad, Darcy O’Neil, Marleigh Riggins, Michael Dietsch, Rick Stutz, Natalie Bovis-Nelson, Lauren Clark, Camper English, Craig Mrusek, Jeff Berry, Gabriel Szaszko, Blair Reynolds, Gary Regan, and Sonja Kassebaum emerged, each building followings and spreading inspiration and knowledge.

Online archives of old newspapers and enthusiast-prepared libraries of PDF-based scans of old cocktail books, bar manuals, and distiller’s handbooks have been a boon for researchers. On the flip side, the ad hoc, casual semipermanence of internet content has also facilitated the spreading of misinformation, plagiarism, and mythology, as has the voracious need for content to drive traffic to the many culinary web magazines of the 2010s, although those at least are edited.

As commercial interest in mixed drinks and cocktail culture has risen, so has the proliferation of “shovelware” and other low-grade content online. HTML, the lingua franca of the Web, offers no special value to the representation of recipes, the organization of spirits and cocktail information, or even representations of authorship, and as yet no technological standards have emerged to further deepen discourse.

Haigh, Ted. Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: Deluxe Revised and Expanded Edition. Beverly, MA: Quarry, 2009.

By: Martin Doudoroff