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Alcohol doesn’t really need us: it already exists in nature. In fact, for alcohol to exist, all it needs is sugar and yeast. They can be sugars from a ripe fruit and wild yeast found on the skins of the fruit. These wild yeasts, called saccharomyces, consume the fruit sugars and expel both ethanol (the only potable kind of alcohol for humans) and carbon dioxide. In other words, take a ripe fruit and a little yeast—et voilà —nature makes a mixed drink, of sorts. In this way, nature is her own liquor cabinet.
BEFORE THE COCKTAIL
THE RE AL OLDE ST PROFE S SION
Let’s say that this fruit was a peach and that the fermented proto-cocktail would then be a prehistoric “Bellini,” a fizzy, peachy and delicious drink created in Italy by Giuseppe Cirpriani from white peach puree and an
Italian sparkling wine called Prosecco. Here, nature does her handiwork sans bartender (sorry, Giuseppe). So nature tends bar too. However, if that were the end, this would be a very short book indeed. It turns out that the story
of humanity is awash in booze, as well as more than a few early mixologists. There’s much more to tell.
Alcohol has seemingly been with us from the very beginning of mankind,
though we neither possessed the skills to write down the date the first drink
was made nor the foresight to keep a stash aside of that very first vintage (who would have the patience to wait for nearly 300,000 years to drink it anyway?). Some even think that alcohol was a progenitor of certain human endeavors
and at the very heart of our artistic and spiritual development, becoming the impetus for forms of symbolic thought among pre-human hominid species. It is easy in a way to imagine Neanderthals having a tipple or two before
stenciling their hands on the wall or drawing symbolic forms, images dancing in the flickering light of the fire, reminiscent of some artsy desert rave.
Regardless, we do know that alcohol evolved hand-in-hand with civilization and that the “Fertile Crescent” may well have been the “Fruitive Cup,” with
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some archaeologists arguing alcohol, not bread, was the true purpose of
agriculture. Makes sense to me: I love a loaf of bread as much as the next guy but—bakers be damned—I’d prefer a stiff drink. Even now alcohol is seemingly the crown of civilization and ubiquitous in our lives: we
celebrate with alcohol, console ourselves with alcohol, cheer our friends and achievements with alcohol, build rituals around alcohol and, sometimes,
just plain let loose with alcohol. It’s both a problem and solution, as Homer said. Homer Simpson from the cartoon The Simpsons, not the ancient Greek poet. If we don’t technically need alcohol, it sure seems to be a popular accessory to our lives.
If alcohol doesn’t need us and, in her own way, nature operates as the
saloon, the drinker doesn’t need us either—“us” meaning bartenders. Since the molecules in alcohol are light and easily dispersed in the air, that SPIRITS, SUGAR, WATER & BITTERS
theoretical first “drink”—the prehistoric Bellini—would have attracted certain animals after it had dropped from the tree and lay there on the
forest floor with its wafting aromas. And, by animals attracted to it, I’m not talking about the party animals usually attracted to the bar. I mean, quite literally, animals. Small primates for instance. There’s a growing body of
evidence that certain genetic qualities we share with small primates, such as aye-ayes, who long past branched off from our ancestral tree, show that we both evolved to consume alcohol. So, we have the first drink and the first drinker—a small arboreal, primate sipping on a prehistoric Bellini—but still not a bartender in sight.
Yet, I’m going to argue that bartenders have vastly improved alcohol and, in that way, we’ve made an indelible mark on civilization. The shining
achievement is the cocktail itself. We’ll get to that. But this isn’t a new
fad. Since those early days, we’ve drank but we’ve also mixed alcohol in surprising and inventive ways. We’re not just talking about primitive,
fermented drinks such as beer or wine, but complex drinks that involved multiple fermented beverages, plants, fruits, berries, herbs, spices and various botanicals.
Mankind’s so-called oldest profession may well be assigned to ignoble means, but I’ve always suspected that it took some early hominid “barkeep” to set the mood. We may not know the first barkeep but we do know his or her work. Abo. Am faceperest, simus alitatem que doluptiati dignihicatur.
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Every year in New Orleans for the past 12 years, a conference called Tales of the Cocktail is held with about 20,000 of the world’s top drinkers. Actually, they’re the world’s top bartenders, spirits industry professionals and
enthusiasts. But, yeah, drinkers too. During the conference there are parties,
BEFORE THE COCKTAIL
THE FIRST MIXED DRINK
tastings, talks and seminars. The latter involves seminars ranging from
practical aspects of bartending, running a bar and living a healthy lifestyle
amidst the bar life, to the science of cocktails, philosophy of bartending and history of drinking. It is a lot to take in, literally and figuratively. When
you start drinking at 9 a.m., that’s a long day, but learning and drinking is something I perfected in college.
In 2013, I gave a seminar on Paleococktails, exploring the earliest recorded
mixed drinks. Prominent cocktail historian David Wondrich, whose influence
resounds in this book, had taken the 19th century onward, so I had to go very, very early to find my niche. I invited some of the top thinkers on the subject:
David-Suro Piñera, director of the Tequila Interchange Project; Dan Healan, anthropologist at Tulane University; and Patrick McGovern, biomolecular
archaeologist from Penn State. I was excited to delve into the earliest mixed drinks and then show how Mesoamerica contributed to this history.
Patrick McGovern, in many ways, was our rock star. Not only has he
authored three books on the subject (Ancient Wine, Uncorking the Past
and Ancient Brews) as well as numerous papers, he has consulted on the
production of experimental beers meant to recreate ancient ales. And, for
our purposes, he is the person who has chemically authenticated the earliest discovered alcohol: a fermented drink of rice, honey and hawthorn fruit,
and dated ca. 7000–6600 BCE (or about 10,000 years ago), found in Jiahu, China, a Neolithic village in the Yellow River Valley.
David Suro-Piñera has helped guide and support research into pre-
Columbian distillation, possibly reaching as far back as the first century,
and is a restaurant owner and spirits producer (he makes a Tequila brand
called Siembra Azul). Dan Healan is an anthropologist with a wide-ranging interest in Meso-America, but was invited to join by Patrick McGovern
particularly for his interest in pulque, an agave product similar to beer and a precursor to agave spirits such as Tequila.
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In one of the most striking exchanges, I asked Patrick if the earliest
chemically authenticated alcohol was in fact a mixed drink. He answered, unequivocally, yes. That just further ingrained for me that the earliest
examples of many prehistoric drinks are not singular fermented drinks such as wine or beer, but mixed drinks. Many have a surprising prelude to the
creativity in drinks we see today. That nugget is important because it may
suggest why cocktails exist in the space they do, where they garner this kind
of experimentation we see at hearths and in kitchens, and why, despite being liquid, they straddle a line between food and something entirely different.
Certainly humans in antiquity drank straight wine. That’s probably one of
the drinks most people associate with early humans. They did, though it was also common to mix wine with water, barley honey, resin (as a preservative) or even cheese. Yes, cheese. An example, though showing up much later in SPIRITS, SUGAR, WATER & BITTERS
antiquity, comes from the 11th rhapsody of the Iliad and provides us some idea of how these foodstuffs might have made their way into wine: “In it
the woman, like unto the goddesses, had mixed for them Pramnian wine, and grated over it a goat’s-milk cheese with a brazen rasp, and sprinkled
white flour upon it: then bade them drink, as soon as she had prepared the potion.” Thankfully, cheese is rare in both history and modern mixology.
When it came to mixed drinks, beer wasn’t remarkably different. In the The Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, authors Hayden, Canuel & Shanse describe how traditional beers might have looked:
“…beers made in traditional tribal or village societies [in the upper-Neolithic] generally are quite different from modern industrial beers...traditional beers often have quite low alcohol contents (2–4%), include lactic acid fermentation giving them a tangy and sour taste, contain various additives such as honey or fruits, and vary in viscosity from clear liquids, to soupy mixtures with suspended solids, to pastes.” Again, this is essentially closer to a mixed drink or even food, one where a multitude of ingredients are used and not just fermented grapes or
grains and hops. We’re talking about drinks that include sweet, sour and bitter agents and have a range of textures and presentations. As we bear
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they connect.
THE FIRST AMERICAN DRINK
Now, drinking alcohol already existed in the Americas. Early Americans
BEFORE THE COCKTAIL
down upon the invention of the cocktail itself, this will show in part how
drank pulque. This slightly acidic, milky substance is made from agave plants similar to a beer, and comes in around 3-4% alcohol. Evidence suggest that pulque may be as much as 4,000 years old and was drunk by the Aztecs.
How pulque was drunk may have been similar to primitive wine and beer. In fact, there are several instances where Spaniards chastised the Native
Americans for mixing pulque with herbs, spices and fruit. One particular
beverage, Tepache, includes the rinds of pineapple and spices. More evidence of early mixologists at work!
There are even early indications that, despite drunkenness being forbidden, pulque was consumed with great enthusiasm (and sometimes ill effects). One temple site in Mexico shows a pictograph of an overly enthusiastic drinker evacuating his bowels. The more things change...
The one thing we’re missing here is spirits. You can certainly make beer-tails
and wine-tails, and pulque-tails if you will, and we’ll see they had their place in early colonial America before the birth of the cocktail. But when we
think mixed drinks, we think of vodka, gin and Bourbon. So where do spirits come from then, and when did they arrive on the scene? THE INVENTION OF SPIRITS
There are indications of distillation in ancient Greece, but disappointingly,
the liquid in question was water. Even Aristotle wrote in his notes regarding the desalinization of sea water: “salt water, when it turns into vapour,
becomes sweet and the vapour does not form salt water again when it
condenses.” Great for making water potable, though it was not yet applied
to alcohol, the “water of life.” Because distillation is not solely about spirits, the technology appears in bits and pieces throughout the ancient world. The distillation of alcohol doesn’t begin until the first century in what is now modern day Pakistan. But it may be worthwhile to understand that technology to see how it makes its way into the Americas.
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The most basic aspect of distillation is that water and alcohol boil at
different temperatures, 173.1°F and 212°F respectively. That means you
begin with alcohol such as a fruit wine or grain-based beer. Once you have your wine or beer, you boil the mash or wort, as it’s called, and the result
is the steam boils off first, which means you can engineer the apparatus to have a tube or an arm or neck that captures the now more concentrated
alcohol that follows the steam through condensation. There are primitive ways of doing this and then new, more modern ways such as the column that allows for continuous distillation. Either way, ethanol contains
poisonous compounds that need to be separated from the spirit intended to be drunk. In distillers terms, this is called the hearts, where the more congener and metal-heavy portions are called the heads and the tails. SPIRITS IN MESOAMERICA SPIRITS, SUGAR, WATER & BITTERS
I mentioned more primitive ways of distilling with the potential of Pre-
Colombian distillation in mind. A few months after the seminar we held at
Tales of the Cocktail, David Suro-Pińera hosted Drs. McGovern and Helan along with a group of bartenders, myself included, on a trip to western
Jalisco in Mexico, where some evidence exists that there was distillation
well before the arrival of Columbus - possibly as early as the first century.
The evidence exists near Colima, where archaeologists found a clay pot at a funerary site dating back to the Capacha period in Mexico around the first century, thus named the Capacha pot. It is a simple, two-chambered pot
[Plate 2: Capacha Pot]. The theory is, if it was heated from beneath with
fire, and sealed on top with a dish that collects the steam along its bottom,
out would slowly drip a shimmery, potent liquid into a small cup suspended by strings. They re-created the pot and actually distilled using it.
But that they could doesn’t mean they did. This pot may be used for
distillation, but there is no clear evidence that it was. Also, the smaller cup
used to capture the liquid was never found. Dr. McGovern took a few small
shards to analyze for organic material that might relate to the production of a distillate. That is done by first finding a biomarker, or organic compound that can be linked to an agave spirit. So, we also visited traditional mezcal (and raicilla, another traditional name for agave spirits) production sites. Once the biomarker is established, for wine it is tartaric acid, then you crush the shards and put them under mass spectrometry to determine
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The Oaxacan Old Fashioned has quickly become a new classic, created by bartender Phil Ward while he was at Death & Company in New York City. Phil Ward would later open the bar Mayahuel in the East Village, unfortunately now closed, once a temple to agave-spirit cocktails. He also made the trip to Western Jalisco with me and was always ready with a Victoria pilsner and Mezcal in hand. The drink is singularly perfect, drawing from the form of the classic Old Fashioned but weighing the sometimes smoky and more aggressive taste of Mezcal against the more refined, aged taste of Reposado Tequila. This is definitely a sipper, and one that can introduce the neophyte to Mezcal cocktails.
BEFORE THE COCKTAIL
OA X ACAN OLD FASHIONED
DOUBLE ROCKS GLASS (10 - 12 OZ.) 1½ oz. Reposado Tequila ½ oz. Mezcal 1 barspoon Agave Nectar 2 dashes Aromatic Bitters Orange Peel
Combine ingredients in mixing glass with ice and stir until chilled. Express orange peel over drink and add. Makes one serving.
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SATIN SHEETS
SPIRITS, SUGAR, WATER & BITTERS
I found the Satin Sheets in a Mr. Boston’s Cocktail guide, but sadly don’t know the origin. Who made this great cocktail? Let’s just say someone who likely wished to slip into its name. This drink is sure to put anyone in the mood as it is silky, delicious and boozy enough without tipping the scale toward drunk. It’s a variation on a Margarita, but incorporates Velvet Falernum, named after the ancient Roman wine falernum, but a product of the Caribbean including spices, almonds and rum. The Satin Sheets veers toward the sweet, though it is carefully balanced. Want it a little more sour? Cut down the agave syrup to a quarter ounce.
COUPE OR COCKTAIL GLASS (5.5 - 7.5 OZ.) 1½ oz. Joven Tequila ¾ oz. Fresh Squeezed Lime Juice ½ oz. Velvet Falernum ½ oz. Agave Nectar Lime Wheel
Combine ingredients in shaker with ice and shake until cold. Strain into cocktail glass and add lime wheel. Makes one serving.
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The Oaxacan Old Fashioned has quickly become a new classic, created by bartender Phil Ward while he was at Death & Company in New York City. Phil Ward would later open the bar Mayahuel in the East Village, unfortunately now closed, once a temple to agave-spirit cocktails. He also made the trip to Western Jalisco with me and was always ready with a Victoria pilsner and Mezcal in hand. The drink is singularly perfect, drawing from the form of the classic Old Fashioned but weighing the sometimes smoky and more aggressive taste of Mezcal against the more refined, aged taste of Reposado Tequila. This is definitely a sipper, and one that can introduce the neophyte to Mezcal cocktails.
BEFORE THE COCKTAIL
OA X ACAN OLD FASHIONED
DOUBLE ROCKS GLASS (10 - 12 OZ.) 1½ oz. Reposado Tequila ½ oz. Mezcal 1 barspoon Agave Nectar 2 dashes Aromatic Bitters Orange Peel
Combine ingredients in mixing glass with ice and stir until chilled. Express orange peel over drink and add. Makes one serving.
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SATIN SHEETS
SPIRITS, SUGAR, WATER & BITTERS
I found the Satin Sheets in a Mr. Boston’s Cocktail guide, but sadly don’t know the origin. Who made this great cocktail? Let’s just say someone who likely wished to slip into its name. This drink is sure to put anyone in the mood as it is silky, delicious and boozy enough without tipping the scale toward drunk. It’s a variation on a Margarita, but incorporates Velvet Falernum, named after the ancient Roman wine falernum, but a product of the Caribbean including spices, almonds and rum. The Satin Sheets veers toward the sweet, though it is carefully balanced. Want it a little more sour? Cut down the agave syrup to a quarter ounce.
COUPE OR COCKTAIL GLASS (5.5 - 7.5 OZ.) 1½ oz. Joven Tequila ¾ oz. Fresh Squeezed Lime Juice ½ oz. Velvet Falernum ½ oz. Agave Nectar Lime Wheel
Combine ingredients in shaker with ice and shake until cold. Strain into cocktail glass and add lime wheel. Makes one serving.
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We created this drink at the Columbia Room, my bar in Washington, D.C., to incorporate Bison Grass, which we found to be a fascinating ingredient. Bison grass is found in the Polish spirit, Zumbrowka, and has coumarin, an aromatic compound found in vanilla. (It’s also a blood thinner, so use with caution in food and drinks.) I loved how the smoke “dances” in the glass and wanted to give a nod to one of my favorite movies by Jim Jarmusch, Ghost Dog.
BEFORE THE COCKTAIL
GHOST DOG
TWO DOUBLE ROCKS GLASSES (10- 12 OZ.) 2 oz. Calvados (French apple brandy from Normandy) ½ oz. Rich Simple Syrup ½ oz. Fernet-Branca Bison Grass or Vanilla Pod Star Anise Pod
Burn bison grass or vanilla pod on metal plate and capture smoke in glass by placing the glass upside down. Combine ingredients in mixing glass with ice and stir until chilled. Strained ingredients into smoked glass. Garnish with star anise pod. Makes one serving.
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SPIRITS, SUGAR, WATER & BITTERS
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