Monster in a Glass

The Coffee Cocktail is unusual in that it does not contain any coffee in it, and if you go by the strict rules of what makes a cocktail, it isn’t that either. Jerry Thomas, who seems to be the first person to write the recipe down, calls it a “misnomer” because of the lack of coffee and bitters. He attributes the name to an appearance that sure looks a hell of a lot like coffee, and this seems to be backed up by others sources. Could the name also be a reference a cocktail you drink in the morning to get you going? Some people thought so, but with brandy and port, it doesn’t sound like something would do anything but make you take a nap.

As time goes on the Coffee Cocktail starts ending up with added ingredients, including coffee once you get into the 1950s and 1960s. I guess people started feeling that if you are going to call it a Coffee Cocktail, it should have some in it. We also take a look at drink that actually had some coffee in it, and how it was used to keep soldiers on guard alert.

Join us as we explore this liar of a cocktail that isn’t really a cocktail and has no coffee in it.

Here are the ingredients:
1 oz Brandy
1 egg
2-3 oz Ruby Port
1 tsp Sugar

There is a level in which I’m glad this drink contained no coffee. Coffee is a big, unsubtle flavor that can bully most other flavors into submission and I never find coffee (even iced coffee) refreshing. It’s a beverage with a lot of weight, so an actual coffee cocktail isn’t a “go to” beverage for me.

Notice, however, that this drink also contains a FULL egg; not just the white. That fact would alarm most people setting them on their heels. In American culture, eggs are always cooked unless you are a boxer in training (the scene in Rocky where he drinks raw eggs is a solid part of our cultural identity at this point).

Upon sampling this we agreed this was not a favorite, but it did not alarm Kevin and I so much. Rachel admitted to it making her want to vomit; the raw egginess was a bit much for her palate.

The flavor itself was heavy relying upon the sweet character of the port. And as Jay and I discussed at the beginning of the episode, it had kind of an older world quality.

All in all, I’m glad to have tried it. It’s another piece of history whose flavors and ingredients have passed away through time, left behind with the scrapple and headcheese from our ancestors dinner tables. It’s easy to understand its forgotten nature.

The Chatham Hotel Special is pretty mysterious because it is not altogether clear where the recipe for this cocktail even came from. We had a hard time even finding any mentions of this drink anywhere, so it made it a little difficult to discuss something that doesn't seem like it really exists. But that didn't stop us from talking about this cocktail that resembles a heavy dessert. There isn't a tremendous amount of information on the history of the hotel either. We had a name of a place at least, so we took a look at this New York hotel that might have been overshadowed by other fancier hotels of the time. In our research we found that the hotel got in a little trouble serving during dry periods of prohibition, was somehow in a legal suit with Bacardi, and most interestingly might have been the home to the first Moscow Mule. Join us as we try to figure out more about the Chatham Hotel Special, which doesn't seem to be all that special.

The drink itself was definitely more on the fluffy side, using cream and chocolate liqueur.

I would also like to add that this episode features a little more of Michael Donnelly, our Brixton bartender, working his magic and talking about how the ingredients are working together in this cocktail.  Thank you Michael!

We made it to 50 classic cocktails!! This is one of the lost COVID episodes and the final episode to be reproduced to replace an older version that didn't follow our usual format. This was done remotely with the usual team and a special guest Kristen Burton to give her input on the colonial aspects of the story we tell. The tasting team however was three of our regular cast of characters in a whole new Ward Eight bar post-pandemic. This all swirls around the Stone Fence, a colonial classic which was essentially cider and rum in a big cup supposedly popular with early American hero Ethan Allen, whose story we delve into with some depth. Enjoy!

Clearly the Blue Moon is named after the song, right? Nope, and if you run through the other references to blue moons it probably isn’t any of those either. Don’t try to figure it out, just drink it.

The first place it is printed in a cocktail book is in Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1917) by Hugo R. Ensslin. However, it may have actually been the work of Joel Rinaldo, a proprietor of a Bohemian café during the early 1900s. Rumor has it that the Blue Moon was sort of a signature drink in this haven for artists, writers, entertainers, and revolutionaries. According to David Wondrich, he never recorded what was in it, so we have to rely on the Ensslin recipe for this one.

There is nothing totally remarkable about this drink outside of the Crème Yvette, a purple liqueur made with violet petals, spices, a variety of berries, honey, vanilla, and other botanicals. Holy sweetness, Batman! That folks, is what the gin, lemon juice and bitters are for.

Join us as we toss around the many possibilities behind the name, and eventually give up trying to figure out why a sometimes purple drink is called a Blue Moon. We also dive into Bohemians in Europe, the “Bohemian culture” in the U.S. and how Bohemian Cafés brought together a variety of people that Americans just didn’t trust all that much.

The ingredients for the Blue Moon today are real simple:

The drink was good, very tart with a strong floral taste. It wasn’t amazing for me because of the lemon juice, but I enjoyed it for the otherworldly feeling of drinking the juice of a flower.

If someone handed you a drink and told you it was called a Rattleskull, it would probably make you pause for a second, right? How could you not assume that you are about to drink something with the sole function of delivering blackouts and hangovers. Rum, brandy, and porter is surely no light concoction, but the name might be scarier than it actually is.

Everything you find online about the Rattleskull lists this as an American colonial drink. Yay! History! Except there isn’t really any direct evidence that points to American colonists drinking anything by this name. So, why does everyone seem to state this as fact? A good amount of copypasta is at play, but there may in fact be some truth to this story.

Join us as we head in the way back machine to sort out this ominous sounding drink. We explore colonial drinks, how the ingredients help point to the origins, and why the name might not actually mean what we think it means.

This mixture was quite delightful.  The smell of the nutmeg hits your nose as you drink but then the drink itself is a complex interplay of bitter from the beer, sweet from the rum, and sour from the lime. For something so easily put together there was a whole lot going on.

The idea for the Rattleskull came from Kristen Burton, an alcohol historian I have connected with on Twitter.  She turned me on to all of these colonial drinks and the drinking culture for that time.  Check out her site at: http://kristendburton.com/ and follow her on Twitter @kristendburton. She’s a wealth of information and I hope to plumb the depths of her knowledge as we embark on more historical aspects of the project.

The Blackthorn Cocktail is a real puzzler. It's an example of another cocktail that has multiple versions, which is not that unusual, but in this case the resource we're using has the outlying recipe. The name of the cocktail sounds sinister but it's nothing more than a connection to a berry bush indigenous to the British Isles...a plant festooned with small plum-flavored berries commonly used to make a liqueur called sloe gin. Learning that I was excited because...plums...YUM! But in our book, the recipe uses no sloe gin, no sloe berries, not even any plums, yet is supposed to remind of plums...and it's not even (as far as we can tell) the original recipe for the cocktail that actually contained sloe gin. We can't find the recipe that's listed, but we did find several others, one containing sloe gin, and one containing Irish whiskey, which at least has a circuitous connection to blackthorn. So we're kind of at a loss as to why this cocktail appears as it does. We assume a reason; we just don't know what it is. But this drink definitely has some age, appearing in Harry Johnson's book in the late 19th century. The recipe we tried from Ted Haigh's book is as follows:

We all roundly disliked this drink. It looks beautiful, but it was unexpectedly harsh and not really very plummy at all. Generally speaking, we've decided that kirschwasser is a ruiner of drinks and we're anxiously awaiting the kirschwasser drink that doesn't taste like ass. Because Jay revealed the other two versions of the blackthorn, we also wanted to try those. The version of the blackthorn that contained the sloe gin was remarkably better. It tasted of fruit, though some of the tasting team preferred the sloe gin straight. The second alternate version was Irish whiskey and absinthe which everybody swooned over (though nobody reported any hallucinations as per Jay's story at the end of the history section)

Episode #45 I convinced Jay to come to the Brixton and record the history portion of the show. We sat down and Michael made us a couple of Bebbos. Our book tells us the word comes from an Indian dialect and means “toad”.  If that’s true, there better be a reason, however, there is none we can find. Even if it’s a mistaken translation from bebdo (which means “drunk”), there needs to be an explanation why we’re delving into Konkani to name cocktails. Otherwise, it could be an African word or an Italian surname, or a small child drooling on himself.  Nicole suggested that it's as simple as the Spanish word to drink, conjugated to "I drink" --> bebo, which to me seems the most reasonable. Nevertheless, it appears we have no certain access to where the name comes from, so if anybody has some insight, send us an email with your explanation. This is also the first drink we’ve tried that uses honey as the sweetening agent. Jason suggested that reduced access to sugar at the time might have forced honey as a substitute, which makes me wonder, if that’s true, how often honey was used instead of simple syrup during that era, which would have changed the flavor profile of many classic cocktails during that time.

We tried this drink and I have to admit I was surprised. I expected the honey to run over the other flavors and make it heavy and cloying. Instead we found it to be light, sweet and refreshing and the honey gave the sweetness an identifiable character that most sweet cocktails lack. We all agreed that more cocktails should be made with honey, though I imagine this would not make many bartenders happy, as it's kind of a difficult ingredient to work with.

Episode #44 features a popular personality from the cocktail era: Mr. PT Barnum. The name of the cocktail refers to Barnum's supposed famous saying that a "sucker is born every minute." But even as we look into this cocktail we can't verify much of anything and even the attribution of that phrase seems off. Given that Barnum was a temperance speaker from 1850 to his death, an attribution from him directly seems unlikely. We doubt he was making cocktails or ordering cocktails for himself or anyone else. Strangely enough, Jerry Thomas, the bartender who first published his recipes in 1862, owned a saloon beneath Barnum's American Museum on Broadway in New York and it seems that they did in fact know each other, but Thomas doesn't have the cocktail in his book which seems unlikely if he was the original creator. The first place Jay does find the Barnum Was Right Cocktail is in Trader Vic's cocktail book, published much later than would be expected from a cocktail bearing Barnum's name. Because of its nonexistence, even by mention, prior, Jay considers Vic Bergeron as the creator of this cocktail. Now lack of evidence isn't proof of what is actually the case...if anyone knows the origin story to this cocktail better and can point to evidence, we'd love to know it and amend the discussion. Getting into the conversation of the name of the drink, it appears even that is up for debate. There is no place where we can find "a sucker is born every minute" as being spoken by PT Barnum. In fact, many people suggest that Barnum's big top competitors at the time told people Barnum said it to discredit him. But even if that were the case or Barnum had said it, the concept goes much further back historically, so it's not an original idea, having Barnum say it just made it sound better, as was the case with everything he did. Here’s the recipe:

This cocktail was more or less fine. It didn't offend, it didn't impress. It merely existed. We all had it and we enjoyed it for what it was, but it comes from the classic style of gin, bitters, and one other ingredient that sets it apart from a Tom Collins or many other drinks we've had. It was excellent to try, but for my money, the story here was the best part.

Initially we all figured that this cocktail history would be a slam dunk. It has a name of a person...it's named after someone. It has to be easy to find out. We couldn't have been more wrong. This drink was a complete mystery. Jay could not find any references to it anywhere prior to our source book from 2009. So we couldn't find the source...and from there we couldn't identify the origin of the name. Looking at the name Barbara West itself, we searched for Barbara Wests of note. There is a Barbara West Titanic survivor. There also is a book with the title of Barbara West. None of these helped to shed light on the origins of the cocktail. This in and of itself is amazing. How does this drink fail to have any sort of background? How did our source book, Ted Haigh's Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails know about this cocktail to be able to list it? We would welcome anybody with some hard sources to share to end this mystery. The ingredients for this drink are:

We all decided that the cocktail was rather ordinary. Quite a bit of lemon with a hit from the sherry, but otherwise like many drinks we've already tried. We spent most of our time at the Brixton this episode discussing names and all of the ins and outs of naming people and pets. I would say one of the key themes we kept returning to throughout the episode is how names, books, movies, etc. that we think are amazing and perfect now may not resonate with culture in the future, so much so that the connotative meaning of an idea or story is completely lost much later. A theory was put forth that such might have been the fate of Barbara West. Is it possible that a cultural sensation got a drink named after it, but then quickly went away and was forgotten completely? Will anybody know or care about Harry Potter in 100 years? or Star Wars? Will 9/11 earn a footnote in the 21st century's historical record? It's hard to know what people will care about in the future.