When categorising drinks, it's only natural to think in big categories of the things we know. You might like drinks with rum, you might prefer cocktails with tequila or you might like fresh and herbal drinks with gin.
As you begin tasting a variety of different drinks containing rum, tequila, gin or entirely new spirits you never heard of before, you realise there are drinks named Espresso Martinis, Margaritas and Tom Collins which now become your new go to way to describe your preferences beyond just the base spirit.
Any drink served straight up in a stemmed glass we now call "Martinis", like Espresso Martini, Passion Fruit Martini or Dry Martini, any drink with Tequila at its base becomes a "Margarita" as in Spicy Margarita, Coriander Margarita or Tommy's Margarita and any drink served long with or without bubbles now become a simple "Highball" like Watermelon Highball, Strawberry & Peach Highball or Whisky Highball.
Whether you like grouping drinks by their base spirit or by their visible appearance, it quickly becomes obvious that there's a problem with clarity. What actually defines a Passion Fruit Martini, Coriander Margarita or Watermelon Highball beyond the explicit ingredient added to the title?
In other words, we have a problem with the "dimension" we use to describe drinks. Is it grouped by ingredient? Is it grouped by visual character? Or maybe it is grouped by occasion. All of these are valid ways to group drinks. They just don't work very well together for comparing, nor do they describe the structure of the drinks needed to mix them.
This article has a simple goal. To take a walk through the history and evolution of categorised drinks to uncover the right dimension to which we should refer when describing drinks between each other as professional bartenders. The end goal is to have a language which is helpful for the working bartender when it comes to both learning new drinks and memorising existing ones.
From Thomas to Embury in 6 Basic Cocktails
If you are a professional bartender or serious hobby mixer, you might have heard of famous writers like David Embury, of bartending legends like Gary Regan. You might also have heard of influential bars like Death & Co in New York. And if you really like digging into historical stuff, you might even recognise the name Jerry Thomas.
All of these have different backgrounds and different approaches to crafting cocktails, but all of them also have a big thing in common when it comes to mixing drinks. They have all categorised cocktails in one way or another.
It all began in 1862 with the first book dedicated to bartending and the craft of the cocktail. The book "How to Mix Drinks or The Bon Vivant's Companion" was written by Jerry Thomas and includes recipes for punches, juleps, cocktails, crustas, slings, fixes, smashes and more across 200 numbered descriptions for drinks and prepped ingredients.
Jerry Thomas kick-started the cocktail book revolution and soon others followed with many using the same grouping of drinks as cocktails, crustas, punches, smashes and a few new additions depending on the author.
Fast forward almost 100 years, past a short period of prohibition in America, and you now have David Embury's highly influential work "The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks" released in 1948. In this book, Embury outlines 6 basic cocktails from which he continues to build variations;
- Martini
- Manhattan
- Old Fashioned
- Daiquiri
- Sidecar
- Jack Rose
Linking is the Thinking
The differences between Thomas and Embury are important.
Thomas brings up cocktail names without letting the names define them. He links them together like any good educator would by writing things like a Smash being "...simply a Julep on a small plan" or that "Crusta is made the same as a fancy cocktail, with a little lemon juice and a small lump of ice added". This way of linking something new to something you already know is important so we'll get back to that in a bit.
Despite this linking, his list is long and unstructured. In contrast, Embury breaks down the basic cocktails into a list of just six foundational ones and opens with a statement saying that anyone interested in cocktails is better off if they "...can make only two or three and always makes them well...".
This line of course carries multiple meanings. Rote memory of 200 recipes is meaningless if you don't understand why they work and, more importantly, all drinks tend to relate to each other at a foundational level. Again a nod to the importance of linking your knowledge!
Once you understand the building blocks of a few key drinks, you'll soon be able to come up with new variations without having to refer to long lists of recipes.
While Thomas had many named drinks defined according to each other, Embury boiled it down to six drinks, five of which were served up and all of which were quite boozy.
But Embury's categories gives us another problem. We have the Martini and we have the Margarita (via the Sidecar), but where did the Collins go?
Regan Reopens the Question
If Thomas was the spark that inspired Embury to categorise his cocktails, then Gary Regan could well be credited for being the spark that inspired the same categorising in the 21st century.
The first bartending book I ever bought was the 2003 classic "The Joy of Mixology" written by Gary Regan. The book is fantastic all the way through, but one chapter in particular got my immediate attention; "Birds of a Feather: Cocktail and Mixed-Drinks Families"
Regan opens this chapter by describing his motivation for creating these cocktail "families" by saying it "is not merely for the sake of giving them somewhere to hang their hats. In many cases, listing these drinks and their ingredients... makes whole strings of drinks far easier to memorize".
Not only do the families make drinks easier to memorize, they serve as wonderful templates for crafting one's own variation on the drinks by swapping out certain ingredients - a technique the team at Death & Co calls "Mr Potato Head Theory" and which Kevin Peterson further proved using the scientific method in his book "Cocktail Theory".
Before defining his cocktail families, Regan drops a line that I would personally call a mind-expanding realisation that every serious bartender should understand. It's a sentence that's at the same time obvious in hindsight but also deeply insightful as it instantly simplifies all cocktails.
"Once you know the formula for, say, New Orleans Sours, the family in which you'll find the Margarita and the Sidecar, you will understand that the Kamikaze is just a vodka-based Margarita, and that the Cosmopolitan, using citrus vodka as a base, follows the same formula, with just a little cranberry juice thrown in for color."
In essence, Regan is advocating the same grouping and linking of knowledge as Thomas was almost 150 years before.
Regan's book, alongside Dale DeGroff's "Craft of the Cocktail", helped kickstart the modern era of cocktail making as a serious profession.
Multi-Dimensional Problems
In his attempt to define the families that encompass all mixed drinks Regan managed to gather a total of 26 families of drinks.
With this many families, it's no surprise they span across different dimensions. He defines drinks by ingredient such as Beer and Cider Drinks or Champagne Cocktails. By temperature such a Hot Drinks and Frozen Drinks. By number of ingredients such as the Duos and Trios. And of course he includes the classics such as Cobblers, Juleps and Punches. The classics are mostly defined by their original 1800s style with occasional notes, such as his wonderful reference to DeGroff "reversing the order of the ingredients" in a Cobbler by taking the extravagant fruit garnishes of the 1800s and now muddling them as a flavourful ingredient at the base of the drink.
Although Regan's families are imperfect, they do form a much better foundational base on which we can continue to develop. His classic Sours are broken down into four helpful sub-families as are his highballs based on the defining mixer used.
More importantly, he defines two categories that are easy to overlook as simply ingredient based of either Vermouth or Campari - the French-Italian Drinks and the Milanese Drinks.
These two groups encapsulate most of the good stuff that lives outside the Sour and Highball families he defined separately. The Martini and Manhattan from Embury lives in the French-Italian Drinks category, as does Jerry Thomas' "Fancy" cocktail after the bartenders of late 1800s started including vermouth. The Milanese family directly includes the Negroni and Americano while, if we expand Campari to mean a bitter ingredient in general, can also include the entire range of Old Fashioned Cocktails and their twists.
From Regan we therefore get the spark that re-ignites the quests for cocktail structure and we get the idea of some drink families having sub-categories, or children.
Cocktail Codex Defines the Drinks
The big structural change for all this happened in 2018 when the team behind Death & Co in New York released a new book. Four years prior, in 2014, they had released the Death & Co cocktail book in which they described a creative process for swapping out similar ingredients in similar templates. They called this the Mr. Potato Head Theory, and now the Cocktail Codex expanded on the theory by defining what these similar templates were.
This book is probably the primary definition of mixed drink categories we have available today. It takes the original definitions of a cocktail (spirit, sugar, bitters), the sour (spirit, sugar, citrus) and the Milanese cocktails (as defined by Regan) along with a few more, and re-packages them all elegantly into 6 basic cocktails in a similar fashion to Embury.
These 6 classics are the Old Fashioned, Martini, Daiquiri, Sidecar, Highball & Flip. For each of these, the team defines a canonical classic recipe followed by their ideal root recipe. To make things even better, they continue to list twists, riffs and variations of all these by swapping out just a few ingredients and only making slight alterations to the root recipe.
They argue that the Julep is considered an Old Fashioned because the mint stands in as a bitter seasoning herb to replace the classic dashes of bitters. Likewise, the Champagne cocktail is just an extension of the classic Old Fashioned cocktail because it's sugar, bitters and alcohol via champagne. Nothing more and nothing less.
Similarly, the Manhattan and Negroni are extensions of the Martini family because all martinis contain spirit, vermouth and some form of bittering, either directly added in separate ingredient(s) or inferred from the vermouth.
This is probably the book I've bought the most copies of and yet somehow I rarely have it on my shelf because I end up giving it away to a young bartender when discussing cocktail structure. If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend it!
There's a saying in statistics that all models are wrong, but some are useful. The Cocktail Codex is a perfect example of this. Is it perfect? No... Is it useful? Definitely!
But if it isn't perfect... Is there a better model we haven't yet considered?
What's the ideal dimension on which we should define our drinks?
The Right Dimension
The Cocktail Codex defines almost all their families by a single dimension.
A dimension based on the common combination of base tastes such as the Old Fashioned combining spirit, sugar, bitters (and water) or the Daiquiri being defined as a classic Sour via spirit, sugar and citrus. The Sidecar is a continuation of the Sour by addition of a sweet, and often flavourful, liqueur and the Flip is partly defined in similar dimension as a core of alcohol balanced with "rich" ingredients, such as dairy, eggs or dense ingredients like coconut milk or heavy sweeteners.
The problem arises with the Martini and the Highball.
I'll be brief on the Martini as I've already made a long rant on this via my argument that a wet martini doesn't exist. The Martini and its extended family is defined in the Cocktail Codex as alcohol and aromatized wine. The problem with this definition is twofold. For one we technically lose the Negroni and Manhattan as they explicitly add bitter ingredients, but more important, although aromatized wine is delicious in drinks, it's a different dimension. It's little more than saying "drinks with rum".
Similarly, the Highball is universally a terrible definition of a drink because the very name is a dimension of glassware and visual appearance rather than what goes inside it. Regan partly handled this with his sub-categories categorising the mixers but that's still just changing the dimension from glassware to ingredient label.
So what now?
Balance Comes First
I started out by talking about the "dimension" of grouping being important. Listing drinks by spirit category, occasion, style of glass, mood or even flavours like "tropical" or "fun" can be useful when talking to guests, but less so when speaking internally among professional peers.
The way forward is to understand that recipes are inherently chaotic because they are bound by human languages to describe them. The solution to this problem, at least in my humble opinion, is a multi-layered approach that begins with taste.
By taste, I mean the five basic tastes that can be identified by the receptors on your tongue, and not the vast array of flavour descriptions we use on a day to day basis. This definition of taste can itself carry many articles of argument so is best kept brief.
When Kevin Peterson released his book Cocktail Theory, he had spent an enormous amount of time testing out the Mr Potato Head Theory in a more structured way. After tasting hundreds of variations of sours, cocktails and highballs, he concludes that
The balance of a drink is determined by the ratio of taste components - bitter, sour, salty, sweet, and umami - and is independent of the aroma.
Therefore the next natural step in defining cocktails must remain firmly grounded in the first dimension of balance. Namely, the five base tastes.
And Cocktail Codex has indirectly done this already. It just needs to be limited to three categories of drinks which aligns almost perfectly with their Old Fashioned, Daiquiri and Flip.
Three Ways to Balance a Drink
Let me conclude this by adding my own two cents on this little trip through history.
Every mixed drink you serve is a battle of balance. It's about managing the bite of alcohol with sugar and then counter-balancing that sugar with something else. If we stay firmly grounded on the five base tastes, that leaves us with sour, salt, bitter and umami to play with.
For a classic "cocktail", as defined in 1806, this counter-balance is done using bitter. Ie. this is the Old Fashioned template of spirit, sugar & bitters.
For a sour cocktail, this is done using sour, such as the classic Daiquiri template of spirit, sugar & citrus.
Now, we are a little bit stuck because we have a large volume of drinks that doesn't fit into these two categories. According to The Art & Science of Foodpairing, alcohol interacts with sweet, sour and bitter by enhancing all of them but has no direct impact on salt and umami. Salt and umami are also rarely used in cocktails beyond a minor addition as salt tames bitterness while enhancing sweet and sour.
So as a slight cheat here, I'll extend the base tastes in the same way that both The Art & Science of Foodpairing has done, by including mouthfeel and texture via fat, which is secretly a way to further agree with the Cocktail Codex.
The missing key here is fat. We get this from both dairy via cream and egg via the yolk. The key for eggs in Cocktail Codex is of course the Flip while the historical key to cream is what's called a "Zoom". It's spirit, honey and cream!
Once we realise the key is to define either sour, bitter or fat then we can recognise that the Martini is little more than an old fashioned served in a fancy stemmed glass. The vermouth is the stand-in for both sweet and bitter.
The Negroni is similarly just an Old Fashioned, in the sub-family of Milanese cocktails, as the Campari itself is just an undiluted combination of spirit, bitter and sugar. Like a drink within a drink.
We don't need more cocktail families, defined by ever expanding dimensions of new words. We need fewer families on a single dimension of balance to start.
It's not a hard decision between a hundred descriptive words, but a decision between just three rules of balance.
Do you prefer sour, bitter or "creamy"?
Choose wisely 🍸