Created by Bob Butt in 1972, this drink was an entry into an orange liqueur mixing contest. The Long Island carries on the tradition of naming east coast cocktails after regions of New York and specifically gets its name from the fact that Mr. Butt was working at a bar in Long Island at the time.
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Opened in 1893 The American Bar at the Savoy hotel started serving American style cocktails in London to the British upperclass. The American Bar has always been a high end bar but what really set it on the map was when Harry Craddock became it’s head bartender in the 1920s. Harry Craddock was a British born bartender who immigrated to the United States, eventually becoming a US citizen and head bartender of several high end hotel bars, but Harry found himself out of work with the start of prohibition in 1920. He then immigrated back to England and became head bartender of the Savoy Hotel’s Bar. Harry transformed The American Bar from a high end bar to one of the seminal cocktail bars of the 20th century. As the american prohibition was coming to an end the hotel realized it should record all of its most famous recipes and the innovations Harry brought to the bar and a year later they published the Savoy Cocktail Book. Printed in 1934 The Savoy Cocktail Book documents all of the bars best recipes from the 1890s to the 1930s and stands as the pillar of prohibition-era, European cocktail innovation. If Jerry Thomas’s Bartenders Guide is the best cocktail book the 1800s gave us, then The Savoy Cocktail Book is the best cocktail book of the first half of the 1900s. I don’t think I will ever be able to drink there though. A cocktail cost around $250 there and they have one that’s almost $1000, and I’m not the Amazon guy, so good thing we have their recipe book.
How Does The White Lady Taste
The white lady is an amazing velvety smooth cocktail that taste like a gin lemon meringue. The flavor profile is similar to that of the sidecar or margarita but the egg whites add a wonderful texture and smoothness.
Should you use Cointreau or triple sec
You can use Cointreau or triple sec/curacao/orange liqueur. Technically they are all orange liqueurs and the only reason for the different names is because of history, marketing gimmicks, and brand names. Check out my orange liqueur description for a more detailed history on that. Again you don’t have to use Cointreau, any orange liqueur you like will work. On that note though Cointreau is the best and makes for what I think is a noticeably better cocktail. Only downside to Cointreau is its price tag. Its a little pricier than other brands (around 50 bucks for a liter) but it’s worth it. There have been other really good and pricy orange liqueurs to hit the market in the last few years but Cointreau is still the go to.
The Most Important Ingredient
Cocktails with egg whites are actually difficult cocktails to get right and anyone who says otherwise is projecting a false image. Everyone who has made a fizzes or sour with egg whites has had one of these pop open on them while shaking, only to make a mess. The best advice I can pass on to making any cocktail with egg whites is it comes down to 2 things; Technique and chemistry. A common technique that works very well is the dry shake. A dry shake is shaking all your ingredients together without ice first to make forming the foam easier. The foam will still form with ice but you will end up working twice as hard for half the result if you shake with ice first. The first shake is only about 20-30 seconds of vigorous shaking but this is the part that forms most of your foam. A little tip here is to wrap a kitchen towel around the seal of your shaker because no matter how strong you are or how tight your grip it will pop open a little. as the egg whites unfold they can expand up to 8x their original size, thus increasing the pressure inside the shaker and forcing small amounts of the sugary egg mix to squirt out. Wrapping a small towel around the shaker will catch this and keep things clean.
Next and more important is chemistry. For a cocktail with egg whites to properly foam you have to get the science right. Denaturing/unfolding egg protein into a meringue is more science than brawn and a friend of mine who is a baker once gave me this advice for how she made meringue at the bakery.
Keep it room temperature.
Use an acid to help break the proteins hydrogen bonds and unfold it in addition to beating it.
Use sugar to stabilize the foam from collapsing and to form smaller bubbles.
A mistake I made for a long time is using is using eggs fresh from the fridge. Even if I’m doing a dry shake I’m still starting off with cold ingredients. So take the eggs out and let them come to room temperature first. Cold egg protein is much more stable and difficult to break apart than if it is room temperature. The next tip is to use acid. Bakers will use cream of tartar as the acid helps accelerate the denaturing process along with beating it. In the cocktail we use lemon or lime juice. Without using an acid it is much much harder to form a foam. The last bit of advice is to use sugar to stabilize the foamed protein from collapsing. A sweet liqueur alone isn’t enough. I’ve tried making cocktail with egg whites with just liqueurs for sweeter alone and they have never formed a good foam. This needs actual simple syrup. If you don’t use sugar in your cocktail what will happen is the foam will form but it will collapse back into the liquid-y cocktail just as fast and you will be left with a thin layer of lame bubbles on top. It will still taste the same and be good but that beautiful foam will be gone, and for these drinks the large foam head is the garnish. The sugar also somehow makes the water “wetter” and helps keep the suspended air inside from combining into larger bubbles. This helps form a smoother micro bubble head.
Cocktail with egg whites are some of the most elegant and sublime cocktails but they are not the easiest to make. Eventually you can get to a point where you can make them correctly and consistently but it can take a while and many failed attempts. Hopefully the tips I gave help shorten that journey. Also theres a lot of tips and tricks out there for making eggs foam and I tried to keep mine reasonable and realistic, but see what works for you. I’ve been doing this for a long time and still I have the occasional one that doesn’t foam up well, even though I make them all the exact same. Its just the nature of the egg sometimes and I just accept it and make it again.
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Opened in 1893 The American Bar at the Savoy hotel started serving American style cocktails in London to the British upperclass. The American Bar has always been a high end bar but what really set it on the map was when Harry Craddock became it’s head bartender in the 1920s. Harry Craddock was a British born bartender who immigrated to the United States, eventually becoming a US citizen and head bartender of several high end hotel bars, but Harry found himself out of work with the start of prohibition in 1920. He then immigrated back to England and became head bartender of the Savoy Hotel’s Bar. Harry transformed The American Bar from a high end bar to one of the seminal cocktail bars of the 20th century. As the american prohibition was coming to an end the hotel realized it should record all of its most famous recipes and the innovations Harry brought to the bar and a year later they published the Savoy Cocktail Book. Printed in 1934 The Savoy Cocktail Book documents all of the bars best recipes from the 1890s to the 1930s and stands as the pillar of prohibition-era, European cocktail innovation. If Jerry Thomas’s Bartenders Guide is the best cocktail book the 1800s gave us, then The Savoy Cocktail Book is the best cocktail book of the first half of the 1900s. I don’t think I will ever be able to drink there though. A cocktail cost around $250 there and they have one that’s almost $1000, and I’m not the Amazon guy, so good thing we have their recipe book.
How Does The White Lily Taste
The white lily is an amazing cocktail. It somehow is both clean and strong with a delicate orange and herbal flavor. If you wanted to group it then it’s more along the lines of a vesper or dry martini. The white lily does some many things right that it’s really impressive. lightly sweet, strong, delicate flavor, citrusy and herbal.
The Most Important Ingredient
The most important ingredient in the white lily is the orange liqueur. You have to use Cointreau, no other brand works, and I will tell you why. When mixing any cocktail its best to use a neutral base spirit orange liqueur, like Cointreau, and not one that uses an aged based spirit, like Grand Marnier. Grand Marnier is great stuff and wonderful to drink by itself but the color is off and aged oaked brandy flavors compete with the cocktails other flavors. It’s great for sipping, not so much for mixing drinks. The reason it specifically has to be Cointreau and not another brand of dry neutral orange liqueur is Cointreau has a ton of orange peel oils dissolved in it. What gives this cocktails its beautiful pale white color is the dissolved oils in the orange liqueur braking off the alcohol molecule they are attached to in a process called the Ouzo effect or louching. Similar to how absinth turns pale white when you add water cointreau does too, but to a much lesser degree since it has much less dissolved oils than absinthe. The amount of oil capable of being dissolved in a liqueur will be proportional to the ABV of the liqueur. Sitting in at 40% ABV, Cointreau has far more orange peel oil than an orange liqueur would at 35, 30, or 25% ABV. Obviously the oil also adds a lot of flavor but only Cointreau will give you that beautiful look and intense orange flavor. Again other orange liqueurs will still taste good but will not have the same appearance. Check out my Absinthe drip description for a more detailed explanation of the Ouzo effect.
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John Collins vs. Tom Collins And The History Of All The Different Collins
While probably not invented by Harry Johnson, his 1882 Bartenders Manual is the oldest printed book I could find to mention the Collins cocktail. There are many sources that say it was invented in 1814 at Limmer’s Old House in London but who really knows. There is no documentation of this and all the sources that state this seem to circularly reference each other. The oldest concrete evidence of this cocktail I can find is the Harry Johnson one. It seems both the John Collins and Tom Collins are invented around the same time and the Bartenders Manual gives a pretty definitive recipe for both the John and Tom Collins. His John Collins recipe calls for genever (dry gin doesn’t really start to get mixed into cocktails till the end of the 1800s/early 1900s) and his recipe for the Tom Collins calls for Old Tom gin. Harry Johnson’s collins recipes and names are clearly defined, but unlike Harry Johnson, Jerry Thomas’s 1887 Bartenders Guide does not follow his recipes. The Bartender’s Guide doesn’t even mention the John Collins but instead uses the name Tom Collins for every variation of the collins. It has 3 different recipes for the Tom Collins. A Tom Collins whiskey, a Tom Collins brandy, and a Tom Collins genever. It doesn’t mention the Tom Collins with Old Tom gin at all and call the one made with genever a Tom Collins too.
To Further complicate this in 1885 a British cocktail book called “The New guide for the hotel, bar, restaurant, butler, and chef” by Bacchus and Cordon Bleu has a recipe for what they call a Fred Collins. Their Fred Collins Recipe is basically a Whiskey Collins with orange liqueur instead of simple syrup. Their Collins section states “I should be glad if our caterers would agree what it is to be perpetually named. One Barkeeper calls it a John Collins – another Tom Collins. There are also Harry and Fred, all members of the same family.” They then go on to say they prefer the Fred Collins name, Thus lends credence to Jerry Thomas’s version of the Collins in that the name is more a style than a specific drink. Hell there was a Harry Collins we have never seen. The Savoy Cocktail Book does the same thing and has both a Dry Gin and Whiskey Tom Collins. Although The Savoy does say that a Tom Collins made with genever is instead called a John Collins.
While The Harry Johnson uses the names as specific cocktails, the Bartenders guide and others seemed to use the collins as a cocktail structure more than a specific recipe. Similar to the Rickey, Daisy, or Fizz, the collins is used to describe a structure of 2 parts base spirit, 1 part citrus, 1 part sweetener, and 4 or 5 parts carbonated beverage. Harry Johnson influence has been permanent and the collins is ultimately both. It is both a specific cocktail like Harry Johnson pushed and a cocktail archetype like others believed. looking at its influence as an archetype there are many popular cocktails which are structurally a collins that you would not think of as a Collins. The Adios Motherfucker, Mojito, French 75, Paloma, etc, are all just fun variation on the Collins form.
How Does the Jean Collins Taste
The Jean Collins is a brandy variation of the John Collins and really really good. The mellow aged sweetness of the brandy perfectly blends with the orange liqueur and lemon juice into a bubbly refreshing cocktail. Imagine this as a lengthened and more refreshing Side Car.
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First printed in the 1862 Bartenders guide by Jerry Thomas, the Brandy Crusta is old as it is delicious. The Crusta is considered one of the oldest fancy sours and is named for decorative sugar crusted rim. It was invented in the 1850s by Joseph Santini in New Orleans Louisiana, USA and was made to try and improve the taste of the standard sour cocktail. You can spot a crusta by its oversized decorative lemon peel that imparts that this is a special elevated sour cocktail.
How Does It Taste
These are fantastic cocktails that taste light and delicate while not being overly sour or overly sweet. While the standard sour is more flavorful and benefits from sharper more intense spirits this one is different a nicer top shelf spirit actually works better. This is because you are not overwhelming the base spirit with a whole ounce of sweetener and citrus and the more subtle finer qualities of a better base spirit can still come through. Make this with the perspective that you are not making a strong flavorful cocktail but rather adding subtle flavor and complexity to an already delicious spirit.
The most Important Ingredient
There isn’t any one important ingredient in this cocktail but instead all the ingredients coming together in the proper balance. but if I tried to narrow it down I would say the brandy, orange liqueur and gum syrup are the most important parts of this cocktail to get right. You want to use a good base spirit for this cocktail as none of the other ingredients are made to mask the flavor of a lower quality spirit. So what ever the quality of the base spirit you use will make a meaningful difference in the final product. The orange liqueur matters too because cheap orange liqueurs are typically not very good. I love buying on value, but I’ve never found a cheaper orange liqueur that also tasted good and with how this drink is structured you will notice a cheap orange liqueur. Lastly the gum syrup. You can use a standard simple syrup if you prefer and what that will change is the texture of the cocktail. Gum Syrup has gum arabic in it and gives the cocktail a velvety texture similar to what egg whites provide. A smooth, meringue-y, velvet, dessert like texture. Standard simple syrup will not add this texture and make for a thinner liquid texture cocktail, but you may prefer that. If you like your sours without egg whites then opt for using standard simple syrup but if you like sours with egg whites then buy a bottle of gum syrup and give it a go.
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I’m a bit torn with this one. I hate this drink but it has its place in history, and there are people in who like it. So here it is. The ultra sweet and synthetic Midori Sour.
Actually this isn’t a true late 70s Suntory Midori sour. The official recipe uses sweet and sour mix but that garbage has no place in this kind of an app so I replaced it with orange liqueur and lemon juice. Sweet and sour is a bad facsimile of those two ingredients. If you were thinking of making this drink or think you like it then I would suggest checking out the two improved Midori Sour recipes I have added. The two improved recipes retain the melon flavor but mellow it out quite a bit and add a bit more herbal or textural complexity to the drink. I actually think those two are decent drinks. This one I took one sip and then dumped it as soon as I finished taking the pictures for it.
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Opened in 1893 The American Bar at the Savoy hotel started serving American style cocktails in London to the British upperclass. The American Bar has always been a high end bar but what really set it on the map was when Harry Craddock became it’s head bartender in the 1920s. Harry Craddock was a British born bartender who immigrated to the United States, eventually becoming a US citizen and head bartender of several high end hotel bars, but Harry found himself out of work with the start of prohibition in 1920. He then immigrated back to England and became head bartender of the Savoy Hotel’s Bar. Harry transformed The American Bar from a high end bar to one of the seminal cocktail bars of the 20th century. As the american prohibition was coming to an end the hotel realized it should record all of its most famous recipes and the innovations Harry brought to the bar and a year later they published the Savoy Cocktail Book. Printed in 1934 The Savoy Cocktail Book documents all of the bars best recipes from the 1890s to the 1930s and stands as the pillar of prohibition-era, European cocktail innovation. If Jerry Thomas’s Bartenders Guide is the best cocktail book the 1800s gave us, then The Savoy Cocktail Book is the best cocktail book of the first half of the 1900s. I don’t think I will ever be able to drink there though. A cocktail cost around $250 there and they have one that’s almost $1000, and I’m not the Amazon guy, so good thing we have their recipe book.
What Does The Satan’s Whiskers Taste Like
This is a very herbal and orange flavored cocktail. It’s good but it reminds me of a strong and herbal screwdriver or calvados cocktails. So if that sounds good to you then the satan’s whiskers is right up your alley.
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The Manhattan 100% of people think of when they order a Manhattan today is the post-prohibition style Manhattan. Bourbon, sweet vermouth, and angostura bitters. A wonderful pairing of flavor but had you ordered a Manhattan in the 1880s to 1919 you would have been served this cocktail instead. This Manhattan recipe is pulled from the 1887 Jerry Thomas Bartenders Guide. Not say Jerry Thomas invented it but this is the oldest printing I could find. The Manhattan remained mostly unchanged till 1919 as documented in the Old Waldorf Astoria Bar Book, which documented all their recipes from 1897 to 1919.
The two changes that changed the Manhattan from its pre-prohibition to post-prohibition form are changing from Boker’s bitters to Angostura bitters and no longer adding 2 dashes of orange liqueur. The change from Boker’s bitters is because the Boker’s company, which was already struggling financially by the 1910s, completely closed the doors around prohibition and those who knew the secret recipe took it to their graves. I believe in the mid 2000s an old unopened bottle of Boker’s was found in a recently deceased mans attic. The mixture was reverse engineered and it was discover to be a primarily cardamom, cinnamon, orange peel bitter. You are now able to find cardamom bitters made in the Boker’s style, but for almost 90 years the closest anyone could get was using Angostura Bitters. The second change was removing the 2 dashes of orange liqueur. This change had more to do with the transition from pre-prohibition mixing ideologies to prohibition era and post-prohibition mixing ideologies. The hallmark of pre-prohibition mixing ideology was to take a nice base spirit and adding complexity and flavor with small amounts of bitters and liqueurs, with the base spirit still the most forward element. Prohibition era and post-prohibition mixing ideology shifted to making flavorful cocktails where the base spirit blended in with the sodas or liqueurs. Not to say these styles were exclusive to any time period but there was a definite shift in what was popular and sold.
I am unable to find any specific genesis of the Manhattan or who maybe created it. Often with very old cocktails the creators were never credited and many people claim they invented the drink. I can’t find any reference to it prior to the 1880s and it was most likely invented in New York. In New York during the late 1800s and early 1900s it was trendy to name drinks after cities or popular locations in New York. This is what gives us cocktails like the Bronx, the Oyster Bay, Brooklyn, etc. So there is no real reason it’s called a Manhattan other than it being a popular New York cocktail naming convention of it’s time.
How Does This one Taste
Bourbon and Sweet Vermouth are a match made in heaven. The two ingredients flavors profiles pair perfectly. The sweet vermouth adds just enough sweetness to soften the bourbon and the bourbon adds just enough sharp toasted oak volume and flavor to bring down the vermouths strong herbal notes. The addition of just a few dashes of orange liqueur and cardamon bitters adds a nice gentle citrus and spice complexity to the cocktail that Angostura bitters does not provided. On their own these are all wonderful ingredients and combined they make a wonderfully sweet and spicy cocktail. Personally I like the modern Angostura bitters Manhattan a bit better but this one is very good. If I were to equate the two to sipping spirits I would say the original pre-prohibition one is like sipping rye whiskey and the current one everyone knows is like sipping bourbon.
Manhattan vs Old Fashioned
Whether its the pre-prohibition or post-prohibition style, the Manhattan and old fashion are for the most part very similar cocktails. The main difference between the two is since the old fashion uses simple syrup/gum syrup to cut the strength of the bourbon, the taste is still a very clean, bourbon forward cocktail. The Manhattan on the other hand comes across with a more mild bourbon taste that is balance against a lightly sweet herbal flavor. So the Manhattan is a slightly sweetened bourbon and herbal flavored cocktail and the old fashion is a slightly sweeter but clean bourbon tasting cocktail.
The Most Important Ingredient
The most important ingredients in the pre-prohibition style Manhattan is both the sweet vermouth and the cardamom bitters. Boker’s Bitters was one of the quintessential taste of the 1800s cocktail and you can finally get that flavor again with cardamom bitters. It’s like tasting history. A little bit more than the bitters though is the sweet vermouth. Vermouth is the defining flavor of this cocktail and for not much more you can buy some amazing sweet vermouths. There isn’t a “bad” sweet vermouth, the cheap stuff is still pretty good, but for 5 bucks more you can buy some top shelf amazing vermouths that will elevate this cocktail to new heights.
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This is the tequila variation of the Sidecar, swapping out the brandy for tequila and the lemon juice for lime juice. Practically every old bar in Mexico that dates back to the 1930s claimed to have invented the Margarita and has some amazing story of how it was thought up. I’m going to go with something a bit more controversial and say the margarita was invented by William J. Tarling in London. He called it the Picador, but it is the exact same recipe. To his credit he did publish one of the oldest recordings of it in his 1937 Cafe Royal Cocktail Book, and he was know for being one of the earliest Bartenders to mix with tequila. He’s the creator of the Matador, the Picador (the margarita), and several others. Perhaps the name margarita was applied to it in Mexico, who knows. It’s hard to pin down old information about a cocktail as ubiquitous as the margarita that is also trust worthy. Thats why I personally feel this was actually an English Cocktail originally. The region make sense with it being a variation of the French sidecar. It’s the oldest printed record of it. The bartender was know for experimenting with tequila.
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Invented in the 1970s in San Francisco by Norman Jay Hobday, this drink is essentially a fancy Vodka Sour. It replaces the simple syrup with orange liqueur and has a fun catchy name too. I leave the word martini off this intentionally because there is nothing martini about this. This is a sour through and through and has more in common with the Sidecar than a Dry Martini. Bars just like putting this drink in a Martini glass for some reason, thus the confusion.
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