Some cocktail origin stories are almost too good to be true. The Seelbach’s actually is too good to be true, dreamed up by a Louisville bartender in 1995 who claimed he’d rediscovered a lost 1917 house recipe, and got away with it for over twenty years. Bourbon, orange liqueur, bitters, and champagne, with a story
Prohibition drinkers didn’t wait around for the law to catch up. The Twelve Mile Limit is named after the exact stretch of water where American booze law stopped and the real party started, a three-spirit knockout of rum, rye, and brandy, sharpened with lemon and grenadine. Strong enough to justify the boat ride. The Twelve
Named after one of the strangest medical fads of the 1920s, the Monkey Gland pairs gin and orange juice with a splash of absinthe and grenadine, and somehow makes the combination work beautifully. It’s one of the odder cocktail origin stories out there, and one of the tastier reasons to keep a bottle of absinthe
Not every classic cocktail needs a full pour of spirit to earn its place in the pre-Prohibition canon. The Chrysanthemum leans almost entirely on dry vermouth, dressed up with Bénédictine and a whisper of absinthe, and it has been quietly overlooked since it first appeared in 1916. The Chrysanthemum first turns up in Hugo Ensslin’s
The Widow’s Kiss first appeared in print in 1895, in George J. Kappeler’s Modern American Drinks, one of the earliest American cocktail books and a document of just how sophisticated bar culture had become before Prohibition. Kappeler was headwaiter at the Holland House hotel in New York, serving a Gilded Age clientele who expected their
Some bars have been around for so long that the world outside their doors has changed completely. Empires have risen and fallen, cities have been rebuilt, and generations have come and gone. Despite that, people continue to walk through these doors for the same simple reasons: to have a drink, take a seat, and socialise.
The word “grog” has a naval pedigree long before it ever got near a tiki mug. In 1740, British Admiral Edward Vernon, nicknamed “Old Grogram” for the grogram cloak he wore on deck, ordered that his sailors’ daily rum ration be cut with water. Sailors being sailors, they named the diluted stuff after him. Grog
From 9pm, every classic martini arrives with a little something extra – a Kensington Blue cone of house-made, Irish-inspired crisps The K Bar, the award-winning cocktail bar nestled within five-star hotel, The Kensington, is introducing Kensington at 9 – a new nightly ritual celebrating the art of the perfectly poured martini and the warmth of Irish hospitality.
There’s something wonderfully theatrical about the Corn ‘n’ Oil. It’s a drink built to be looked at before it’s stirred, with the dark rum settling on top of the falernum like oil floating on water. The name comes from that visual, corn syrup and machine oil separating in a jar, though thankfully what’s actually in
NOILLY PRAT Original Dry is rumored to have been one of the original components of the first classic dry martini cocktail, created by Martini de Arma de Taggia’s at the Knickerbocker Hotel, New York in 1911, and this classic is the ideal start to an evening of traditional Christmas fare. What Is a 50/50 Martini?