9 ms·

History, Sugar and Sex: Why Mixed Drinks Were Terrible for 30 Years

87 points by samclemens 12y ago

Crito 12y ago
It seems like cost should at least be mentioned. It may not be the sort of thing your average SF tech worker can relate to, but for many Americans the choice between a $10-$20 mixed drink and a $2 double shot of a well liquor (with more ethanol than the mixed drink) is no choice at all.
- jghn 12y ago
  Not sure I agree. At least around where I live (Boston) the older style ("Dark Ages" in the parlance of TFA) bars are also serving $10-$20 mixed drinks, they're just not as good. For instance, a Dark Ages bar you'll be paying $15+ for a bird bathed style "martini" which is simply chilled vodka (martinis are not vodka, and they should have a measurable amount of vermouth) or you're paying the same for a proper 3-4 oz sized craft cocktail. This article wasn't talking about cocktails vs slugging shots of straight liquor, rather it was talking about how wretched the state of mixed drinks themselves became.
  - Crito 12y ago
    If mixed drink sales are poor (for instance, because many consumers cannot justify the price), then there isn't much motivation for the bar to hire professional bartenders rather than college kids, or even create a proper cocktail menu. Extreme cocktail pricing made it a niche market with few businesses willing to participate in it in earnest.
    - jghn 12y ago
      Except that the trend away from quality cocktail making long predated the pricey mixed drink trend. I don't disagree with your premise but I still don't think it has anything to do with the situation described in the article
- flyinghamster 12y ago
  A Manhattan made with high-grade ingredients is sublime, but DIY is far more cost-effective than having someone else do it for you. Plus, there's lots of room for experimentation (maybe try different types/amounts of bitters, using rye rather than bourbon, or adding a dash of absinthe, or different mix ratios for the main ingredients).
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
  <boggle> Is this the kind of thing I'm missing out on by living outside a dinky little town out in the country? $20 for a mixed drink is insane. Who buys this crap?
dredmorbius 12y ago
On the topic of branded alcohol and mixed drinks, I got interested in the rise of both a ways back and did some digging, much of it by way of the Google Books ngrams viewer. The part that wasn't particularly surprising was that mixed drinks and cocktails, along with associated terms ("cocktail hour", "cocktail party") largely date to U.S. Prohibition, when bootleg (and low-quality) hard liquor had to be mixed with other ingredients to become drinkable: http://goo.gl/EBXM87 http://goo.gl/EBXM87 What was more surprising was that the vast majority of branded alcohols dated to no earlier than the 1950s. Baccardi Rum is a notable exception showing up in the 1920s (http://goo.gl/it9vOc http://goo.gl/it9vOc) Schmirnoff: 1950, on the nose: http://goo.gl/j0yle3 http://goo.gl/j0yle3 http://goo.gl/YxXJ9i http://goo.gl/YxXJ9i Remy Martin, Beefeater, Gordon's, and Bombay Gin: 1950s: http://goo.gl/qX6JEY http://goo.gl/qX6JEY That "traditional old Number 7" Jack Daniels? 1970s: http://goo.gl/JWVLG6 http://goo.gl/JWVLG6 And an "Irish pub" is really a 1990s phenomenon: http://goo.gl/vLwvTn http://goo.gl/vLwvTn And if you look at many of today's "trendy" brands, most are creations of the 1980s, 1990s, or later: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120306152857AAD0Ozv https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120306152857A... "Mixology" itself -- also largely a creation of the past 20 years: http://goo.gl/1hVsEU http://goo.gl/1hVsEU And whiskey, the American version at least, was largely created to allow movement of an otherwise unusable product -- frontier grain -- to the population centres of the East Coast. Your "sophisticated drinks" are an ad-man's creation.
- strictnein 12y ago
  Bombay Sapphire is a product of the 1987. I had always assumed it was some sort of old liquor back from when India was controlled by the Brits. I'm sure that was their goal.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Quite. I was first introduced to the concept of alcohol branding by way of the wine industry (at one point Pepsi, by way of Diageo, owned a number of Napa Valley properties). The "fake rustic / family / small one-off" vibe of a great many wineries, breweries, distilleries, bars, etc., is little but a show. Though yes, there are also genuine family-owned outfits. They just don't have hundred-million-dollar advertising budgets. Well, except for the Gallos. On Diageo's holdings: "Diageo's brands include Smirnoff (the world's best-selling vodka),[7] Johnnie Walker (the world's best-selling blended Scotch whisky),[8] Baileys (the world's best-selling liqueur),[9] and Guinness (the world's best-selling stout).[10][11] It also owns 34% of Moët Hennessy, which owns brands including Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot and Hennessy.[12][13] It sells its products in over 180 countries and has offices in around 80 countries." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo
Thrymr 12y ago
Not just mixed drinks: Prohibition killed decent American beer & wine as well, and led to decades of industrialized, homogenized mediocrity that we are still recovering from.
- nsxwolf 12y ago
  I can get all the great beer I want in the US. At this point, if people are still drinking Coors and Budweiser and wondering if there's more to life, that's their own problem.
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    It depends on the state. In oakland California where I live the grocers have phenomenal selections of craft beers. But in Oklahoma City where I used to live the grocery stores can only sell beer with at most a negligible amount of alcohol so even the good grocers have at best Dos Equis and Bud. If you want real beer you have to go to a liquor store or if there's a session beer you really like you have to tell the beer buyer where to get it because they aren't on the state approved list of shitty industrial beers.
  - rdtsc 12y ago
    > If people are still drinking Coors and Budweiser and wondering if there's more to life, that's their own problem. It is not all about taste. Marking is 50% of it. For example Pabst Blue Ribbon is an amazing story. It went from cheap crap beer people cooked with to hipster signature within 5 years or so. It is the same crap but marketing turned it into cool "awesome" drink that every tight-jean, flippy-hair, messenger-bag carrying self-respecting hipster would want. Or was 3 years ago and now they are drinking something else... Anyway, a lot of it was due to very clever marketing, product placement and sponsorship.
- erikwiffin 12y ago
  Not just alcohol. An interesting observation in An Economist Gets Lunch (one of my favorite books on food) is that Prohibition is responsible for putting many great restaurants of the era out of business (restaurants make money on alcohol). The remaining restaurants adjusted to a more "family-friendly" palate, (think grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, and cheeseburgers) and away from more subtle flavors.
lmm 12y ago
The article ended just as I was expecting the meat. The article seemed to want us to blame women for this, but never quite dared to say as much outright. Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one (if you're worried about the nutritional balance of your cocktail, the alcohol will kill you first). A clever name doesn't have to mean a bad drink. The disappearance of federal regulation was interesting, but it doesn't seem like it tells the whole story - it's not like those federal whiskey inspectors have been reintroduced (have they?).
- angersock 12y ago
  I don't know how you managed to pull misogynist tones out of this--author merely pointed out that, to increase patronage, bar owners moved towards more open and public spaces. It's just what the market wanted. Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one. So, again, you're missing the point: strong mixers (sweet or sour!) cover up bad ingredients and also cover up bartenders being incompetent. It's not a choice between sweet, sour, and whatever else in a good mixed drink; it's a bartender knowing how the flavors fit together in the drink, and knowing how the flavors vary across brands and years of theoretically the same ingredient. For example, there are several different manufacturers and brands of gin, and what works well in a gin and tonic may fail to test nearly as good in a proper martini. It's more economical and requires vastly less skill to dump vodka or well tequila into a sour-mix and thrown in some cubes and give to a patron, than it is to pick the right tequila off a bar, pair with the right liquors, and add just a slight amount of mixer for flavor, and then serve.
- jghn 12y ago
  FWIW it's often the bitter flavor tones (as well as the actual booze taste) which are viewed as the more True Believer flavors, not sour. In general when you see that sort of talk decrying the "rookies" and "amateurs" they're talking about drinks designed to cover up the booze and classic booze-y flavors, and those tend to be sweet & sour mixers. And no, there's nothing wrong with those drinks, drink what you want.
WillNotDownvote 12y ago
When I worked as a bartender, if we didn't know what a particular drink was, and the customer didn't know what was in it, we just asked "What color is it?". We usually came up with something satisfactory!
Animats 12y ago
That's the marketed, romanticized side of the booze industry. The reality is more like this: A sizable fraction of the liquor on the US West Coast comes from Frank-Lin Distillers Products.[1] They used to be near the San Jose railyards, but now they're in Fairfield, with better rail access. They need rail access because the ethanol comes in by the trainload, in tank cars.[2] One of their major suppliers is MGP Ingredients in Illinois. They used to be called Midwest Grain Products, and before that, Midwest Solvents. MGP provides pure ethanol to both the beverage and gasoline industries. Frank-Lin has their own water deionization and filtering plant on-site, to take all the minerals out of tap water and have just pure water. They do some additional processing on the ethanol to remove trace impurities. Then they mix ethanol, water, and flavoring to produce beverages. They have about a thousand different products - vodkas, gins, brandies, bourbons, rums, and wines, but only about a hundred different recipes. Each brand has its own bottle design and label. The Ball bottle-making factory is conveniently next door. Frank-Lin has an advanced bottling line that can automatically change from one bottle to another without a shutdown. Frank-Lin also does "contract bottling" - they will make your brand for you. They used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy was a virtual company - everything was outsourced, like a app startup. Skyy was bought by a major distiller a few years ago, which pulled production in-house. Once you get past the marketing, that's the reality. [1] http://www.frank-lin.com/ http://www.frank-lin.com/ [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.278159,-121.973672,3a,75y,110.96h,84.71t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s7q5oONBCFi809rGS7PMM1w!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@38.278159,-121.973672,3a,75y,11...
- deeferty 12y ago
  Are you saying all Frank Lin products are made with the same grain ethanol and just different flavourings? I'd be astounded if that's the case. I thought things labelled as for example 'wine' or 'rum' had legal definitions. Can you really sell flavoured grain ethanol as unqualified 'wine'?
  - kyllo 12y ago
    Wine is fundamentally different from liquor, but he's probably referring to fortified wine, which is cheap wine with neutral grain spirits added to it.
mturmon 12y ago
It's easy to write an article poking fun at fern bars and pseudo-naughty drink names like Slippery Nipple. People in the past and their absurd habits - so unbelievably shallow. So unlike you and I, who have discovered genuine connoisseurship concerning drinking habits. But history is unforgiving, and the laugh will be on us. In a few years the term "mixologist" and the whole discourse concerning bitters, muddling, and artisanal gin is going to be ripe for the comedic shredder. I look forward to it.
- pedalpete 12y ago
  Dare I say it is already here. The mixologist is a pretentious name for a bartender. Though I'd argue there is nothing wrong with bitters, muddling or artisan liquers. I can go to any number of bars in Sydney where a 'mixologist' can't make a simple Belvedere Vodka, a bit dirty (not slutty). Go to a place that has a bartender, and at least you've got a shot at something half decent.
lscharen 12y ago
Somewhat off-topic, but I've really enjoyed the "Bartender" manga over the years and its historical digressing into various mixed drinks. I can't vouch for accuracy, but it's an entertaining read. http://www.mangahere.co/manga/bartender/ http://www.mangahere.co/manga/bartender/
- astrange 12y ago
  You can learn all kinds of things from Bartender, like how to turn someone's life around by serving them whiskey with water. He truly makes the bar tender.
dredmorbius 12y ago
In related news, a list of what whiskey brands are owned by which of the big-four companies: Pernod Ricard, Diageo, Suntory, and Brown-Forman: "Bourbon or scotch? You may be surprised by who owns your favorite whiskey" Raghu Manavalan, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - 15:53 http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/numbers/bourbon-or-scotch-you-may-surprised-who-owns-your-favorite-whiskey http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/numbers/bourbon-o...

87 points by samclemens 12y ago

Crito 12y ago

It seems like cost should at least be mentioned. It may not be the sort of thing your average SF tech worker can relate to, but for many Americans the choice between a $10-$20 mixed drink and a $2 double shot of a well liquor (with more ethanol than the mixed drink) is no choice at all.

jghn 12y ago
Not sure I agree. At least around where I live (Boston) the older style ("Dark Ages" in the parlance of TFA) bars are also serving $10-$20 mixed drinks, they're just not as good. For instance, a Dark Ages bar you'll be paying $15+ for a bird bathed style "martini" which is simply chilled vodka (martinis are not vodka, and they should have a measurable amount of vermouth) or you're paying the same for a proper 3-4 oz sized craft cocktail. This article wasn't talking about cocktails vs slugging shots of straight liquor, rather it was talking about how wretched the state of mixed drinks themselves became.
- Crito 12y ago
  If mixed drink sales are poor (for instance, because many consumers cannot justify the price), then there isn't much motivation for the bar to hire professional bartenders rather than college kids, or even create a proper cocktail menu. Extreme cocktail pricing made it a niche market with few businesses willing to participate in it in earnest.
  - jghn 12y ago
    Except that the trend away from quality cocktail making long predated the pricey mixed drink trend. I don't disagree with your premise but I still don't think it has anything to do with the situation described in the article
flyinghamster 12y ago
A Manhattan made with high-grade ingredients is sublime, but DIY is far more cost-effective than having someone else do it for you. Plus, there's lots of room for experimentation (maybe try different types/amounts of bitters, using rye rather than bourbon, or adding a dash of absinthe, or different mix ratios for the main ingredients).
HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
<boggle> Is this the kind of thing I'm missing out on by living outside a dinky little town out in the country? $20 for a mixed drink is insane. Who buys this crap?

dredmorbius 12y ago

On the topic of branded alcohol and mixed drinks, I got interested in the rise of both a ways back and did some digging, much of it by way of the Google Books ngrams viewer. The part that wasn't particularly surprising was that mixed drinks and cocktails, along with associated terms ("cocktail hour", "cocktail party") largely date to U.S. Prohibition, when bootleg (and low-quality) hard liquor had to be mixed with other ingredients to become drinkable: http://goo.gl/EBXM87 http://goo.gl/EBXM87 What was more surprising was that the vast majority of branded alcohols dated to no earlier than the 1950s. Baccardi Rum is a notable exception showing up in the 1920s (http://goo.gl/it9vOc http://goo.gl/it9vOc) Schmirnoff: 1950, on the nose: http://goo.gl/j0yle3 http://goo.gl/j0yle3 http://goo.gl/YxXJ9i http://goo.gl/YxXJ9i Remy Martin, Beefeater, Gordon's, and Bombay Gin: 1950s: http://goo.gl/qX6JEY http://goo.gl/qX6JEY That "traditional old Number 7" Jack Daniels? 1970s: http://goo.gl/JWVLG6 http://goo.gl/JWVLG6 And an "Irish pub" is really a 1990s phenomenon: http://goo.gl/vLwvTn http://goo.gl/vLwvTn And if you look at many of today's "trendy" brands, most are creations of the 1980s, 1990s, or later: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120306152857AAD0Ozv https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120306152857A... "Mixology" itself -- also largely a creation of the past 20 years: http://goo.gl/1hVsEU http://goo.gl/1hVsEU And whiskey, the American version at least, was largely created to allow movement of an otherwise unusable product -- frontier grain -- to the population centres of the East Coast. Your "sophisticated drinks" are an ad-man's creation.

strictnein 12y ago
Bombay Sapphire is a product of the 1987. I had always assumed it was some sort of old liquor back from when India was controlled by the Brits. I'm sure that was their goal.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Quite. I was first introduced to the concept of alcohol branding by way of the wine industry (at one point Pepsi, by way of Diageo, owned a number of Napa Valley properties). The "fake rustic / family / small one-off" vibe of a great many wineries, breweries, distilleries, bars, etc., is little but a show. Though yes, there are also genuine family-owned outfits. They just don't have hundred-million-dollar advertising budgets. Well, except for the Gallos. On Diageo's holdings: "Diageo's brands include Smirnoff (the world's best-selling vodka),[7] Johnnie Walker (the world's best-selling blended Scotch whisky),[8] Baileys (the world's best-selling liqueur),[9] and Guinness (the world's best-selling stout).[10][11] It also owns 34% of Moët Hennessy, which owns brands including Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot and Hennessy.[12][13] It sells its products in over 180 countries and has offices in around 80 countries." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo

Thrymr 12y ago

Not just mixed drinks: Prohibition killed decent American beer & wine as well, and led to decades of industrialized, homogenized mediocrity that we are still recovering from.

nsxwolf 12y ago
I can get all the great beer I want in the US. At this point, if people are still drinking Coors and Budweiser and wondering if there's more to life, that's their own problem.
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  It depends on the state. In oakland California where I live the grocers have phenomenal selections of craft beers. But in Oklahoma City where I used to live the grocery stores can only sell beer with at most a negligible amount of alcohol so even the good grocers have at best Dos Equis and Bud. If you want real beer you have to go to a liquor store or if there's a session beer you really like you have to tell the beer buyer where to get it because they aren't on the state approved list of shitty industrial beers.
- rdtsc 12y ago
  > If people are still drinking Coors and Budweiser and wondering if there's more to life, that's their own problem. It is not all about taste. Marking is 50% of it. For example Pabst Blue Ribbon is an amazing story. It went from cheap crap beer people cooked with to hipster signature within 5 years or so. It is the same crap but marketing turned it into cool "awesome" drink that every tight-jean, flippy-hair, messenger-bag carrying self-respecting hipster would want. Or was 3 years ago and now they are drinking something else... Anyway, a lot of it was due to very clever marketing, product placement and sponsorship.
erikwiffin 12y ago
Not just alcohol. An interesting observation in An Economist Gets Lunch (one of my favorite books on food) is that Prohibition is responsible for putting many great restaurants of the era out of business (restaurants make money on alcohol). The remaining restaurants adjusted to a more "family-friendly" palate, (think grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, and cheeseburgers) and away from more subtle flavors.

lmm 12y ago

The article ended just as I was expecting the meat. The article seemed to want us to blame women for this, but never quite dared to say as much outright. Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one (if you're worried about the nutritional balance of your cocktail, the alcohol will kill you first). A clever name doesn't have to mean a bad drink. The disappearance of federal regulation was interesting, but it doesn't seem like it tells the whole story - it's not like those federal whiskey inspectors have been reintroduced (have they?).

angersock 12y ago
I don't know how you managed to pull misogynist tones out of this--author merely pointed out that, to increase patronage, bar owners moved towards more open and public spaces. It's just what the market wanted. Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one. So, again, you're missing the point: strong mixers (sweet or sour!) cover up bad ingredients and also cover up bartenders being incompetent. It's not a choice between sweet, sour, and whatever else in a good mixed drink; it's a bartender knowing how the flavors fit together in the drink, and knowing how the flavors vary across brands and years of theoretically the same ingredient. For example, there are several different manufacturers and brands of gin, and what works well in a gin and tonic may fail to test nearly as good in a proper martini. It's more economical and requires vastly less skill to dump vodka or well tequila into a sour-mix and thrown in some cubes and give to a patron, than it is to pick the right tequila off a bar, pair with the right liquors, and add just a slight amount of mixer for flavor, and then serve.
jghn 12y ago
FWIW it's often the bitter flavor tones (as well as the actual booze taste) which are viewed as the more True Believer flavors, not sour. In general when you see that sort of talk decrying the "rookies" and "amateurs" they're talking about drinks designed to cover up the booze and classic booze-y flavors, and those tend to be sweet & sour mixers. And no, there's nothing wrong with those drinks, drink what you want.

WillNotDownvote 12y ago

When I worked as a bartender, if we didn't know what a particular drink was, and the customer didn't know what was in it, we just asked "What color is it?". We usually came up with something satisfactory!

Animats 12y ago

That's the marketed, romanticized side of the booze industry. The reality is more like this: A sizable fraction of the liquor on the US West Coast comes from Frank-Lin Distillers Products.[1] They used to be near the San Jose railyards, but now they're in Fairfield, with better rail access. They need rail access because the ethanol comes in by the trainload, in tank cars.[2] One of their major suppliers is MGP Ingredients in Illinois. They used to be called Midwest Grain Products, and before that, Midwest Solvents. MGP provides pure ethanol to both the beverage and gasoline industries. Frank-Lin has their own water deionization and filtering plant on-site, to take all the minerals out of tap water and have just pure water. They do some additional processing on the ethanol to remove trace impurities. Then they mix ethanol, water, and flavoring to produce beverages. They have about a thousand different products - vodkas, gins, brandies, bourbons, rums, and wines, but only about a hundred different recipes. Each brand has its own bottle design and label. The Ball bottle-making factory is conveniently next door. Frank-Lin has an advanced bottling line that can automatically change from one bottle to another without a shutdown. Frank-Lin also does "contract bottling" - they will make your brand for you. They used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy was a virtual company - everything was outsourced, like a app startup. Skyy was bought by a major distiller a few years ago, which pulled production in-house. Once you get past the marketing, that's the reality. [1] http://www.frank-lin.com/ http://www.frank-lin.com/ [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.278159,-121.973672,3a,75y,110.96h,84.71t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s7q5oONBCFi809rGS7PMM1w!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@38.278159,-121.973672,3a,75y,11...

deeferty 12y ago
Are you saying all Frank Lin products are made with the same grain ethanol and just different flavourings? I'd be astounded if that's the case. I thought things labelled as for example 'wine' or 'rum' had legal definitions. Can you really sell flavoured grain ethanol as unqualified 'wine'?
- kyllo 12y ago
  Wine is fundamentally different from liquor, but he's probably referring to fortified wine, which is cheap wine with neutral grain spirits added to it.

mturmon 12y ago

It's easy to write an article poking fun at fern bars and pseudo-naughty drink names like Slippery Nipple. People in the past and their absurd habits - so unbelievably shallow. So unlike you and I, who have discovered genuine connoisseurship concerning drinking habits. But history is unforgiving, and the laugh will be on us. In a few years the term "mixologist" and the whole discourse concerning bitters, muddling, and artisanal gin is going to be ripe for the comedic shredder. I look forward to it.

pedalpete 12y ago
Dare I say it is already here. The mixologist is a pretentious name for a bartender. Though I'd argue there is nothing wrong with bitters, muddling or artisan liquers. I can go to any number of bars in Sydney where a 'mixologist' can't make a simple Belvedere Vodka, a bit dirty (not slutty). Go to a place that has a bartender, and at least you've got a shot at something half decent.

lscharen 12y ago

Somewhat off-topic, but I've really enjoyed the "Bartender" manga over the years and its historical digressing into various mixed drinks. I can't vouch for accuracy, but it's an entertaining read. http://www.mangahere.co/manga/bartender/ http://www.mangahere.co/manga/bartender/

astrange 12y ago
You can learn all kinds of things from Bartender, like how to turn someone's life around by serving them whiskey with water. He truly makes the bar tender.

dredmorbius 12y ago

In related news, a list of what whiskey brands are owned by which of the big-four companies: Pernod Ricard, Diageo, Suntory, and Brown-Forman: "Bourbon or scotch? You may be surprised by who owns your favorite whiskey" Raghu Manavalan, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - 15:53 http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/numbers/bourbon-or-scotch-you-may-surprised-who-owns-your-favorite-whiskey http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/numbers/bourbon-o...