Do Not Resuscitate

The cocktail world can get pretty sanctimonious about the Mixed-Drink Beforetimes. So it's always pleasure for the ears when some dearly held conventional truths are torn down for shibboleths that they are. During the recent Manhattan Cocktail Classic, the most talked-about panel was called "Do Not Resuscitate." It was packed with some of the most unassailable authorities in the cocktail demi-monde, and they dared to make such blasphemous statements as the Aviation isn't as good a cocktail as we think, and the Brooklyn is, when it comes down to it, not as tasty as a Manhattan.

Shortly after the seminar wrapped up, I met a bartender and told him which cocktails the panelists had trashed. With the mention of each drink, he got more and more agitated. At that reaction, I knew the panel had done its job.

I wrote up the seminar for the Times. Here it is:

Cocktails for the History Books, Not the Bar 

By ROBERT SIMONSON 

A collection of cocktail world figures lined up Saturday at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, the annual New York drinks convention, to shoot down some sacred cows. 

Many a pre-Prohibition libation has been glorified in recent years as the cocktail demimonde began to resurrect and lionize the drinks of Days Gone By. Not every drink deserved the honor. That was a point of the panelists gathered at the Andaz 5th Avenue hotel for “Do Not Resuscitate,” a seminar sponsored by Pierre Ferrand Cognac. The speakers included the legendary barman Dale DeGroff; the owner of the Pegu Club, Audrey Saunders; the mixed-drink historian David Wondrich; the owner of Fort Defiance, St. John Frizell; the tequila and mezcal authority Steve Olson; and the wandering cocktail generalists Robert Hess, Philip Duff and Angus Winchester. 

A few of the darlings of the cocktail renaissance took a heavy drubbing from the panel. Among them was the Brooklyn cocktail. Entirely obscure a decade ago, this mix of rye, dry vermouth, maraschino liqueur and Amer Picon (a French amaro), can now be found on bar menus across the United States. “This is not a good drink,” Mr. Frizell said with unhesitating definitiveness. As the owner of a Brooklyn bar, Mr. Frizell has seen his share of Brooklyn cocktails. Most of said concoctions bend over backwards to make up for the fact that you can no longer buy one of the drink’s key ingredients, Amer Picon, in America. “Drinking a Brooklyn makes you think, ‘Why am I not drinking a Manhattan?’ — a drink for which the ingredients are readily available,” he said. 

Mr. Degroff took aim at the aviation, a cocktail made of gin, lemon juice and maraschino liqueur from the early 20th century. Rediscovered in the early 2000s, it was one of the earliest and most celebrated reclamation projects of the mixologist community. “It was a darling of the Internet,” Mr. DeGroff said. But, “It tastes like hand soap.” And, if you use the blue-hued creme de violette called for in some recipes, “it’s more like hand soap.” 

The Papa Doble — a famous creation credited to Ernest Hemingway that contains much rum, some lime juice and almost no sweetener — also received no love from Mr. DeGroff. “Why should we have our drinking habits dictated by Hemingway’s diabetes problem?” he asked. He added, regarding the novelist’s way with mixing a cocktail: “Hemingway always got it wrong.” 

Of the vesper, the vodka-gin martini variation made famous by fictional spy James Bond, Mr. Winchester said, “I would not be sad if this drink disappeared.” He added that you couldn’t make it anyway, because one of its ingredients, Kina Lillet, hasn’t been produced for years. Ms. Saunders, meanwhile, berated the French Martini. She mainly disliked the blend of vodka, pineapple juice and Chambord for the way it made people behave. That is, badly. 

As the table’s resident agave ace, Mr. Olson trained his sights on the el diablo, a newly popular drink from the 1940s, made of tequila, creme de cassis and ginger ale. “It’s great that bars are starting to think outside the margarita when it comes to tequila cocktails,” Mr. Olson said. “But when they decide to put a different tequila cocktail on the menu, they’re moving to the el diablo. When you add ginger ale to tequila, you kill the agave. What makes it worse is a lot of that ginger ale is coming out of a soda gun.” 

A few of the drinks executed by the panel are still so little known that their deaths would be little noticed. Robert Hess lambasted the snowball cocktail, taken from the famed Savoy Cocktail Book. “When I see equal parts of ingredients in a cocktail recipe, I get suspicious,” Mr. Hess said. “It’s too convenient.” The stomach-churning, gin-based formula for the snowball boasts matching doses of Creme de Violette, Creme de Menthe, anisette and cream. “This may be the only bad cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book,” Mr. Hess suggested. 

Mr. Wondrich laid into the bath cure, the house drink at Chicago’s famous Pump House. Resembling an early ancestor of the Long Island Iced Tea, it called for six kinds of liquors, adding up to a full eight-and-one-half ounces of booze. “This drink should not only not be made, it should not even be thought about,” Mr. Wondrich said. 

Charles H. Baker Jr., the mid-20th-century cocktail writer and mixologist, was left bloodied and battered by the speakers. About Baker’s Holland Razor Blade — a blend of Holland gin, lemon juice and cayenne pepper — Mr. Duff said, “To say that the Holland Razor Blade is your favorite Baker cocktail is like saying you ride a T. Rex to work — it’s not possible, and it can’t be pleasant.” 

Mr. Duff further suggested that Hemingway and Baker, who were pals, may have represented the original “axis of evil,” cocktail-wise.

The Other Punch Book

Dan Searing is either the bravest or most unlucky author in the cocktail world at present.

Searing, a Washington D.C. mixologist and partner in the bar Room 11 (and the host of a weekly soiree, begun in 2009, call The Punch Club), has just come out with "The Punch Bowl," a compendium of punch recipes and punch history. This comes about eight months or so after David Wondrich released his "Punch," the first major work in decades (maybe ever) studying the once-popular form of libation. Wondrich's influence in cocktail circles is such that the book's arrival has resulted in high-end cocktail bars across the nation tacking a punch or two onto their cocktail lists. In New York, for example, there were, a couple years ago, maybe three or four places where one could order a traditional punch. Today, there are dozens. There are even a couple (Drink in Williamsburg, Cienfuegos in the East Village) which are devoted almost exclusively to punch.

So what can Searing offer that Wondrich hasn't already provided in his scholarly work? Or, put differently, why would anyone need two books on punch? Well, the books are actually vastly different in character. Searing has basically provided a very attractive recipe book. There are brief sections at the front about the history and proper service of punch, but they are cursory when put next to Wondrich's text. The meat of Searing's book is the formulae for the 75 punches (some modern, but most drawn from ancient cocktail books, including Jerry Thomas') he's chosen to feature. They are easy to follow; a line or two of introduction to Fish House Punch or Spread Eagle Punch or whatever, then straight on to the ingredients and how they're compounded. Searing's volume is also a highly decorative work, full of glossy and attractive color photographs, not only of many of the punches but also of some ancient punch bowls.

In short, "The Punch Bowl" is a book for those civilians out there who simply want to learn to make punch. "Punch" is for the mixologist and cocktailian wonk who desires to learn the subject up and down, and in depth. As I am sometimes one of these people and something the other, I am happy to have both books on my shelf.

Rum and Punch: Two Trends for 2010

I was at an industry event for the Guatemalan rum Zacapa, talking over the cocktail scene with a couple collegues. We were discussing how it seemed that, after gin and absinthe and tequila had all recently gotten their moment in the spotlight, it now appeared to be rum's turn. "Yeah," said one man, "I wonder what will be next?" We thought for a moment. "Nothing," another finally said. "Rum's it. It's last. It's the last major liquor category to be rediscovered."

Late last year, the New York Times ran a big feature story on how rum had come of age in America, and was being newly rediscovered by U.S. drinkers and drink makers. The piece focused mainly on west coast places like Martin Cate's Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco and Audrey Saunder's Tar Pit in Los Angeles. But the article's looking pretty prophetic as far as New York is concerned. 2010 is not even two months old and we have already learned that, before spring is over, we well see Painkiller, a new tiki-rum place on the Lower East Side run by Richard Boccato and Giuseppe Gonzalez of Dutch Kills fame; and, as part of the new East Village Cuban restaurant Cienfuegos, two rum bars overseen by mixologist Charlotte Voisey. No longer can anyone say, "Why isn't there a decent rum bar in New York?"

To my mind, part of this gravitation toward rum is an either intentional or subconscious desire to chill out a bit. The cocktail scene can get rather arch sometimes, with it's insistence on the right way of doing things, its ingredient and behavior snobbery and its sometime rococo new cocktail creations. Rum is all about relaxing and taking it easy.

Both of these new bars also seem to tangentially embrace what I feel is another dawning trend of 2010: Punch. Now, I know that a lot of cocktail geeks out there will balk at that statement, saying "Punch was so 2008." True, Death & Co. and Clover Club have been doing punches for a couple years now in New York, and Prime Meats serves a different punch by the glass every day. But the punch thing never really took hold. It was an isolated, intermittent side show, found only in the most fanatical corners of cocktaildom.

This year may change that. One of the rum bars at Cienfuegos will focus on rum punch. And Painkiller is going to have a Scorpion Bowl menu. That would all be fine and good, but the real clincher to this being a punch year is the arrival of David Wondrich's new book on the matter. Wondrich created quite a stir with his last opus, "Imbibe!," basically an exhaustive history of cocktails in 19th-century America. Fans will be waiting anxiously for his next volume. (I don't know what the title is yet, but I'm guessing, maybe, "Punch!").

Wondrich recently gave a little preview on what the book will contain during a well-attended lecture at Pegu Club on Jan. 25. He had just turned in his manuscript two days beforehand.  He talked about the history of the brimming bowl, and made a few sample punches (there's one below), including one made with ambergris, which anyone who has read "Moby Dick" knows is a once-treasured byproduct of sperm whales. Though something in me tells me that punch will be a harder sell to the general public than individual classic cocktails were (it's labor intensive, requires special equipment, and you need to lay out a fair amount of money to make a good-sized bowl), I'm still betting that the book will inspire plenty of bars to start offering punch.

The Beer That Tastes Like a Manhattan

Last week, I took Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver up on a long-standing invitation to tour the Williamsburg brewery.

I chose a good time to visit. As many have read recently, Oliver—inspired by the bartender Don Lee's bacon-infused bourbon Manhattan at PDT—is in the process of trying a create a bacon-infused beer. Like Lee, he is employing the ballyhooed bacon of Allan Benton. So, when I arrived, the entire brewery on 11th Street smelled of breakfast. Oliver allowed me a whiff of the special, smokey-smelling malt he's using for the beer, as well as the Benton's derived bacon fat, explaining that the two, put together, will create the illusion of bacon.

I'm hoping to tasted some of this Frankenstein creation when it's ready, but that may be a long shot. Oliver explained that he's only making 25 cases and it won't likely be made available to the consumer.

But, that's OK. Oliver is constantly inventing new potions, and many are available to the thirsty masses. The rate of creation is due mainly to the Brewmaster's Reserve series. Oliver comes up with a new beer every two months (that's six times a year), which is released in limited qualities in keg form and available at select bars.

Oliver is apparently currently obsessed with making beers taste like things that they are not, because the next Brewmaster's Reserve, called The Manhattan Project and due out on Sept. 15, is being made to taste like a Manhattan Cocktail.

Let's say that again. It's a beer that tastes like a Manhattan Cocktail.

Oliver said this is the first time he's used a cocktail (his favorite cocktail, FYI) as a model for a beer. (Cocktail expert David Wondrich is providing some counsel and advice.) Here's the plan. Thirty percent of the mash will be rye. Thirty percent of the beer will be aged in rye barrels from Rittenhouse. The wash will also be infused with a variety of herbs commonly found in vermouth. Also, some cherry juice many be involved in there somewhere.

Sounds delicious to me.

Stick to Swizzles

I can't tell you how sick my wife is of hearing me say, with utter seriousness, the word "Swizzle." For the past few weeks, I've been researching this category of West Indies cocktail—talking with bartenders about Swizzles, soliciting recipes for Swizzles, sampling Swizzles. Each time I mentioned a new tidbit of information on the topic, my better half would roll her eyes and walk into the other room.

You can't blame her. It's a funny word. And cocktail people can start to sound a little touched in the head when they start talking with deadly earnestness about things like garnishes and the right kind of ice. Still, she was impressed when she finally sat down and tried a properly made Queen's Park Swizzle.

I was fortunate enough to write about Swizzles for the New York Times Summer Drinks issue. Here's the piece.

It’s Not So Mysterious: The Secret Is in the Swizzle

By Robert Simonson

WHEN Katie Stipe, a bartender at the Clover Club in Boerum Hill, gets an order for a mojito, she recommends that the customer try a Queens Park Swizzle instead.

“We steer them to it as a far superior version of the same sort of drink,” she said. Indeed, the cocktails share many ingredients: rum, citrus, sugar, mint. So why bother converting a customer? What makes one different from the other? Well, the swizzling, of course.

A Queens Park Swizzle is the best-known representative of a crushed-ice-laden and slightly mysterious cocktail category. The genre was born in the West Indies, probably in the 19th century, but has become increasingly popular in New York bars of late. Among other noteworthy examples are the Bermuda Swizzle (still wildly popular on that island) and the Barbados Red Rum Swizzle, a onetime staple at Trader Vic’s.

These drinks are not shaken or stirred, but rather swizzled with a genuine swizzle stick. Now, if you’re picturing one of those colorful plastic doohickeys that bars and resorts stick into their drinks as a combination advertisement and souvenir, stop right there.

The implement in question is an actual stick. It is snapped off a tree native to the Caribbean. Botanists call it Quararibea turbinata, but it is known to locals as the swizzle stick tree. The sticks are about six inches, with small prongs sticking out at the end, like the spokes of a wheel without the rim, and they are used as a kind of natural, manually operated Mixmaster.

These are halcyon days for behind-the-bar theatrics, and nothing lends the bartender’s art a touch of razzmatazz like a deftly deployed swizzle stick. “It takes a little showmanship,” said Stephen Remsberg, a New Orleans lawyer known for his extensive rum collection (1,300 bottles) and knowledge of rum drinks. “You insert the swizzle stick in the drink. And with both hands moving in coordination, simultaneously backwards and forwards, you simply rotate the shaft of the swizzle stick between your palms as quickly as you can.”

It is believed by some that the success of any swizzle lies entirely in the mixing prowess of the bartender.

“There really isn’t any difference between a simple rum punch and a swizzle except the technique used for making them,” Mr. Remsberg said. All agree that one thing happens when the drink is prepared in this way — and has to happen, for it to be a swizzle. “With the ideal swizzle you get a nice frost on the outside of the glass,” Ms. Stipe said.

Beyond that, what the method contributes to the drink — aside from a lively sideshow — is somewhat open to debate. Wayne Curtis, a cocktail authority and the author of “And a Bottle of Rum,” suspects that the stick’s significance is mainly cultural and ritualistic. Not that that’s a bad thing. “Ritual is fine,” Mr. Curtis said. “There’s a lot of ritual in the cocktail world.”

Richard Boccato — who put the Queens Park Swizzle on the menu at Dutch Kills, a new bar in Long Island City, Queens, that he owns with Sasha Petraske — thinks there’s more at stake. “The act in the swizzling is what makes the drink aesthetically pleasing to the guest,” Mr. Boccato said. “They enjoy watching it, for sure, but it’s also something that integral to the preparation. It’s very much what brings the drink together.”

But Mr. Petraske regards swizzling as simply a more controlled way of stirring. “It’s a way of not disturbing the muddled stuff that’s at the bottom,” he said. “Aside from that, I can’t think of any difference it makes.”

The swizzle is just that kind of cocktail. The more you chase after its essence, the less you understand. The cocktail expert David Wondrich said, “Vague answers are all you’re going to get.” That’s perhaps just as well, because it seems a shame to invest too much analysis in a practice so pleasingly theatrical, and in a drink that’s so easygoing and refreshing. “It’s almost like an adult snow cone,” Ms. Stipe said.

There’s one additional mystery surrounding the swizzle. Despite the demands of the cocktail craze, a real swizzle stick is not easily found in New York. Nearly every bar that serves swizzles gets the needed tools through some Caribbean connection. Mr. Boccato brings some sticks back from Martinique every time he visits his father, who lives nearby on St. Lucia.

“I’m surprised no one’s come out with a plastic version,” Mr. Curtis said.

While you're at it, take a look at the other fine articles in the section, including a A to Z guide to home bartending and a look at the lives of sober bartenders. And Eric Asimov looks at the problems in New York's beer scene.

Savoring Publication

An interview I did with David Wondrich, the author of the wonderful new cocktail biography/cocktail history/cocktail recipebook/Jerry Thomas tribute "Imbibe!" is on the front page of Saveur.com today—my Saveur debut, I'm proud to say.

How it got there is an interesting and amusing story. (Actually, also aggravating, but that's entirely on my end; hopefully it will be amusing to outside observers.) The interview was originally commissioned by another publication that begins with an "S." But in between the original assignment and my turning in the copy, there was a change of editor. An editorial switch is ever the bane of free-lance writers, because new bosses usually make their mark by brinfing in a new crop of writers and sweeping out the scribes associated with the old regime. Additionally, new editors like to assert their new-found power primarily by saying "no" a lot.

And so, the interview I turned in was rejected as not being of interest to a nationwide audience—to which this publication was beholding. (Local, bad; national, good.) This was surprising to me, since Wondrich's book has been written up and hailed by papers, magazines and websites throughout the country. It was on the front page of the New York Times Dining Section, for God's sake! It even landed the author on the Conan O'Brien show!

I appealed the decision, but I soon knew my cause was sunk. The editor, while considering themselves an eager and interesting cocktail person, referred to Jerry Thomas as a little-known bartender on no interest to common folk (which may be true in certain respects—certainly he's not a household name—but in the cocktail world, he's kind of a secret god and saying he wouldn't be of interest to drinking readers is sort of like saying Thomas Edison would be a bore to light-bulb buffs). What's more, they didn't know what a Sazerac was! CHRISTMAS ON A CRACKER! WTF! This person is in charge of drink coverage!

So we'll leave this person to their Appletini and applaud Saveur for its educated save. Here it is:

A Spirited Fellow
by Robert Simonson

Certain names take on meaning only when spoken in context. Shout the name Jerry Thomas in a subway car or a crowded movie house, and you'll be paid back in blank stares. But say it at the Pegu Club in Manhattan, the Zig Zag Café in Seattle, or the Swizzle Stick in New Orleans—any deep-thinking cocktail emporium, actually, where cocktailians gather to knock back drinks and knock around mixology concepts—and eyes will brighten. Moisten, even.

Thomas, a 19th-century American bartender and man about town, is a kind of Shakespeare of the cocktail world: the details of his life are sketchy, but the importance of the work he left behind demands that we study him. That work is found primarily in his 1862 tome How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant's Companion, the world's first compendium of mixed drinks. Before Thomas, no one had bothered to write down drink instructions on cocktail napkins, let alone in book form. These days, though, anyone who's serious about cocktails eventually works his way back to this Old Testament of tippling.

One such aficionado is the cocktail scholar David Wondrich, who has written extensively about spirits for Esquire and other publications. In his new book, Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar (Perigee, 2007), Wondrich takes the Jerry Thomas pilgrimage ten steps beyond what your average tippler would, beginning wiith fleshing out the life story of the libation wizard and then dissecting and interpreting many of the recipes he left behind. Along the way, Wondrich leads readers down many a beguiling side path, expounding on various histories and mysteries central to the barman's trade. It's no wonder that Thomas is still shaking things up.

How do you go about researching the life of a little-known 19th-century figure like the bartender Jerry Thomas? There can't be that much information out there.

No, there's not. They didn't have diaries. There aren't memoirs about them by their kids; just a lot of newspaper stuff and city directories. What I did is I built a chronology and kept revising it as I got new information until I got a framework that was solid. Once I had that, I read travel accounts of the places he was, to fill in the background. Doing that, you read hints that you didn't first recognize as hints. You realize, Oh, that's why he was there. This is what was going on. It's a complicated process, and in the end you don't have that much. But at least I got a full picture of his life.

Did you make any breakthroughs?

Yeah, I found a few really good things. Just by chance, I was looking through a trade journal from the 1870s for the liquor trade, and they had a long article on his bar and his liquor cellar. It talked about how popular his bar was and how important and how much money he was making. That told me the kind of things that he was mixing into his drinks. Also, I found an interview with him toward the end of his days, from the 1880s. And there were a lot of obituaries.

Obviously, he was well enough known to command all those death notices.

Oh, he was very famous, but not famous with the general public. He was famous with the sporting fraternities, as they called themselves: the club men, boxers, baseball teams.

How much experimentation went into putting together the book?

I tested every drink. Some of them repeatedly. Most of them repeatedly. This is over the course of years, and some of them I'd been testing and working up over time. Others, I found new recipes and sorted them out and tried to get them to be balanced drinks.

Did you test them at home?

At home, yes. I have a house full of booze. There was a whole section of Thomas's book that I had to remove because it was far too long: punch bowl drinks. Those I tested for large groups of people, frequently in backyards, at weddings and press events. The polling process was very informal. My friends are a fairly sporting group and willing to try punch. I made 40 different kinds of punch at least. But the cocktails I'd also try out on people at the drop of the hat.

Jerry Thomas boasted that he invented various drinks, like the tom and jerry and the blue blazer. But basically you debunk his claims one by one. Did he invent any cocktails?

(Laughs) He must have. In the last interview I have with him, he made this very astute comment that made me think he wasn't a total bullshit artist. He said, "I've invented lots and lots of drinks. The hardest part is finding a name for them, and that's the most important thing for a drink." And he's completely right. It's easy to mix a couple thises and that's, but to make an actual drink out of it that people will drink and pass around, it has to have a little backstory or a handle. He clearly had some experience with it. I just think people would ask him, and what was he going to say? "No, I didn't invent it"? It's not good for his PR. And he wrote the book! He put it down. He probably believed he had as much claim to the drinks as anybody.

That's the story in your field, isn't it? Disputations on everything: who invented the martini and where the term cocktail came from. Is that frustrating to you that you can't get to the bottom of so many major questions?

It used to be. Now I've come to accept it as being the nature of the field and sort of the beauty of it. There's an endless historical game. I'll never find the origin of the martini. It was not recorded in the journals of the time. People didn't get interested in the histories of these drinks until the 1890s.

Some people say the sazerac was the first cocktail, but in your book you refute that completely.

No! It wasn't. It's not possible. It's absolutely not possible. Myth is so powerful with this stuff. I've been yelling my fool head off about the manhattan's being invented by Lady Jennie Jerome [Winston Churchill's mother] for at least five or six years. There's a story that the manhattan was invented by her. It appears in the New York Times from time to time. Totally wrong. Easily disprovable. But people get into it. They like the stories. I think there are better stories out there, unrecorded, that are also actually true.

What's your favorite story?

My favorite story I came across in researching the book was in the New York Herald. It concerns the contest of cocktails held at the New York Hotel sometime in the 1860s, where an Irish peer met a Mr. Tracy from Buffalo at the bar, and they were both large men who liked to drink. They got into a disputation about their capacities and said, "All right. Tomorrow we'll have a contest." Panama Joe Fernandez was the bartender, and he made whiskey cocktails for them. He made them two at a time; they drank neck and neck until Mr. Tracy finally retired. The accounts are disputed. It was either 35 or 45 cocktails per person. Afterward they sat down to dinner, had a bottle of champagne and a little bit of port, and went to bed. Mr. Tracy was not seen again for two days. The Irish lord went on his merry way.

Jerry Thomas Gets His Due

Jerry Thomas, the 19th century cocktail wizard who has become the Joseph Smith of the religion called Mixology, was recently the subject of a massive article on the front page of the New York Times Dining Section. Or, rather, he is the subject of a new book by cocktail expert David Wondrich, and that book was the subject of the Times article.

The piece was fascinating—particularly the ways in which Wondrich translated 19th century ingredients and measurements into 21st century language—and I'm sure the book will be equally fun. I personally can't wait to read it. Here's the article in full for those who missed it:

The Bartender Who Started It All

By WILLIAM GRIMES

IN 1863, an English traveler named Edward Hingston walked into the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco and stepped up to the bar. There he beheld a magnificent figure wielding two mixing glasses and “all ablaze with diamonds,” a jewelry display that included a clustered stickpin in his shirtfront, diamond cufflinks and an array of diamond rings. Just as dazzling were the drinks, unheard of in Britain: strange mixtures like crustas, smashes and daisies. Here was something to write home about.

Hingston was looking at none other than Jerry Thomas, “the Jupiter Olympus of the bar,” to lift a phrase from the bartender’s own drink book, the first ever published in the United States. In a cocktail-besotted era, Thomas was first without equals, an inventor, showman and codifier who, in the book known variously as “The Bar-Tender’s Guide,” “How to Mix Drinks” or “The Bon-Vivant’s Companion,” laid down the principles for formulating mixed drinks of all categories and established the image of the bartender as a creative professional.

Like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill Cody, he was the sort of self-invented, semimythic figure that America seemed to spawn in great numbers during its rude adolescence. More than a century after his death, he still casts a spell, a palpable influence on Dale DeGroff, chief animator of cocktail’s new wave, and his many progeny, from Eben Klemm of the B. R. Guest restaurant group to Audrey Saunders at the Pegu Club.

Thomas finally gets his due in “Imbibe!” (Perigee Books, $23.95), a biography and annotated recipe book by David Wondrich. Mr. Wondrich, a former classics scholar and the drink correspondent for Esquire, was intrigued by the often-puzzling recipes in Thomas’s book, and frustrated by Herbert Asbury, whose fancifully embellished version of Thomas’s life, presented in a reprint of the 1887 edition of “The Bon-Vivant’s Companion,” wraps sparse facts in a thick layer of myth, conjecture and purple prose.

Mr. Wondrich puts the drinks in context, with their ingredients explained, their measurements accurately indicated, and their place in the overall cocktail scheme clearly mapped out. At the same time, Thomas himself appears, for the first time, as a living presence: a devotee of bare-knuckle prize fights, a flashy dresser fond of kid gloves, an art collector, a restless traveler usually carrying a fat wad of bank notes and a gold Parisian watch. A player, in short.

“Before, especially coming from Asbury, I had a sense of Thomas as a magisterial, godlike creature,” Mr. Wondrich said in a telephone interview. “Now I see him as a sporty, Damon Runyon type.”

The sporty types can be hard to pin down. “Bartenders, then as now, were itinerant, and the sporting life was not big on documentation,” Mr. Wondrich said. “There’s only one bartender’s diary for all of the 19th century, and most of that consists of the author drinking a lot and being sick the next day.”

Mr. Wondrich tracked Thomas from his birthplace in Sackets Harbor, N.Y., to California, where he worked as a bartender, gold prospector and minstrel-show impresario, and back to New York, where he presided over a series of bars before going broke — probably, Mr. Wondrich theorizes, after buying bad stocks on margin. Along the way, Thomas plied his trade, by his own account, in towns as various as St. Louis, New Orleans, Chicago and Charleston, S.C. One newspaper obituary placed him, improbably, in Keokuk, Iowa.

As he wandered, he picked up on the latest developments in the art, inventing new cocktails and building a serious following for his particular blend of craftsmanship and showmanship, epitomized in his signature drink, the Blue Blazer, a pyrotechnic showpiece in which an arc of flame passed back and forth between two mixing glasses. At the Occidental, Thomas was earning $100 a week, more than the vice president of the United States. When he died, in 1885, newspapers all over the country observed his passing in substantial obituaries.

Thomas’s most celebrated bar was at Broadway and 22nd Street, occupying the basement and one bay of what is now Restoration Hardware. “They really ought to put some sort of plaque there,” Mr. Wondrich said.

On the walls of Thomas’s saloon hung caricatures of the political and theatrical figures of the day, many of them executed by Thomas Nast, including one, now lost, depicting Thomas “in nine tippling postures colossally,” as a newspaper reporter described it. Customers could look at themselves in fun-house mirrors that made them look fat or thin. By this time Thomas was middle-aged, with a wife and two daughters, and at 205 pounds one of the lighter members of the Fat Men’s Association, but still, undeniably, a sport.

Thomas’s life spanned the three great ages of the cocktail, the archaic, the baroque and the classic, a helpful chronology proposed by Mr. Wondrich.

In 1830, the probable year of his birth, the main American mixed drinks were punches, toddies and slings — nothing more than brandy, gin or whiskey sweetened with a little sugar. Thomas found his professional footing in an age of flamboyant creativity, when bartenders experimented with a bewildering array of ingredients and styles, and by the time of his death in 1885 he had seen the birth of the more streamlined modern cocktail typified by the manhattan and the martini.

It is the baroque cocktail that occupied most of Mr. Wondrich’s attention. Thomas, however, could be maddeningly vague in his recipes. Mr. Wondrich was able to determine that a wineglass, as a unit of measure, equaled two ounces. He also discovered that most of the gin recipes envisioned the strongly flavored, malty Dutch gin, not the style known as London dry, which did not take off until the 1890s. Sugar, in Thomas’s age, came in a dense loaf and was less refined than modern white sugar but not as raw as raw sugar (Mr. Wondrich compromises by using Demerara or turbinado sugar, pulverized in a food processor.)

Ice was an art. Bartenders, working deftly with a pick or shaver, went to work on a solid frozen block and, depending on the drink, extracted fine shards or large lumps or any size of piece in between.

Bartenders did not use cocktail shakers. Instead, they tossed their ingredients back and forth between two mixing glasses. They also used gum Arabic, an emulsifier, in their simple syrup, which added a velvety mouth-feel to certain cocktails. “It really smooths off the edges in all-liquor drinks,” Mr. Wondrich said. “They just slide right down.”

The universe of drinks, in the middle of the 19th century, did conform to certain patterns, reflected in the organization of Thomas’s bar book. The old-fashioned punches, often hot and mixed in large quantities for communal consumption, gave way to a variety of individual drinks, all of them iced, and all involving fruit: the Collins, the fizz, the daisy, the sour, the cooler and the cobbler. The punch, too, began appearing as an individual drink. The daisy, a sour sweetened with orange cordial or grenadine, merits special attention because in Mexico it encountered tequila. The Spanish for daisy? Margarita.

The sling developed complications, incorporating ice and bitters, and became the cocktail, which Thomas made in three styles, plain, fancy and improved.

To make an improved brandy cocktail, for example, you strained the plain version (brandy, bitters and gum syrup, plus one or two dashes of Curaçao) into a fancy wine glass, moistened the rim of the glass with lemon and added a twist of lemon to the drink. (Thomas’s book was the first to mention the twist, which replaced grated nutmeg as the final flourish to a drink.) In the improved cocktail, maraschino liqueur was substituted for Curaçao. Add fruit juice and the cocktail became a crusta.

From the basic cocktail repertory of Thomas’s youth developed the myriad mixtures that Mr. Wondrich calls evolved cocktails. Their name is legion, and most of them, in the inspired early decades of the baroque age, came from the West Coast, source of the zany drinks that astounded so many foreign visitors — cocktails like the fiscal agent and the vox populi. Thomas, a young man on the scene, picked up the new recipes and carried them back East.

Toward the end of Thomas’s glorious reign as king of the bar, a new kind of cocktail was emerging — lighter, less alcoholic and usually involving vermouth, a key ingredient in the manhattan and the martini.

The final, expanded edition of “The Bon-Vivant’s Companion,” published two years after Thomas’s death, trembles at the dawn of the cocktail’s modern age. The manhattan makes its appearance, as well as a cocktail called the Martinez, which has caused no end of confusion, since it looks like “martini” but calls for maraschino, sweet vermouth and the sweetened gin known as Old Tom. On the other hand, the original martini, often made with gin and vermouth in a 50-50 ratio, and almost always with orange bitters, does not look very much like the mercilessly dry vodka martini of the present day. But here we step into a world that Thomas never lived to see, even if he built its foundations. As Mr. Wondrich justly observes, Thomas, by departing from the code of the bartending fraternity and sharing his secrets, earned his place as “the father of mixology, of the rational study of the mixed drink.”

Dale DeGroff, who has done more than anyone to bring baroque standards back to the bar, encountered Thomas for the first time in the early 1980s, when Joe Baum, who wanted a different kind of bar for his new restaurant Aurora, directed him to “The Bon-Vivant’s Companion.”

It was a revelation. At a time when bartenders relied on powdered mixes, canned fruit juices and a narrow repertory of perhaps a dozen drinks, Thomas imparted a lofty sense of the bartender’s vocation. The recipes, embracing categories of mixed drinks and exotic ingredients not seen since Prohibition, opened up a dizzying range of possibilities that Mr. DeGroff explored at Aurora and, most influentially, at the Rainbow Room.

Mr. DeGroff, now a consultant, no longer tends bar, but the little revolution sparked by Thomas’s book continues to shake things up, carried forward by a new generation of bartenders inspired by his example and by a book written when Abraham Lincoln was president. Out of the remote past, Thomas’s finger still points the way to the future.

Napoleon Is In The House

There are worse places you could start your Tales of the Cocktail itinerary than The Napoleon House, the iconic saloon at the corner of Chartres and St. Louis streets. That's where I chose to attend my first official function of the week, to take in the David Wondrich-hosted history lesson about the famous tavern.

I arrived early and didn't wait for permission to order a Pimm's Cup, the NH's signature drink. Everyone there seemed to be waiting for the talk to begin, but no one was complaining, since it was a good place to wait. Soon enough, we were ushered upstairs, once the living quarters of the Impastato family, longtime owners of the building.

The gathering was a much more casual than I expected. TOTC invitees and paying guests milled about happily gabbing for a half hour or more. Finally, around 5:45, Wondrich took the floor, exuding a very personable charm. He told how, a while back, Esquire asked him to put together his list of the top ten greatest bars. Napoleon House topped the tally. Reasons? "No TV," for one. Two: they make a few simple drinks very well, rather than a lot of complex drinks badly. He then rattled off a list of "Things I don't think about when I'm at the Napoleon House." Among the items: "Blackberries, i-pods, blogs, bloggers, celebutards, Lohans" and my favorite, "vodka."

Wondrich then introduced NH owner Sal Inpastato, a modest, moustachioed man, who related his family's long history with the address. We learned that his father was a religious man and this was one of the reasons he pushed the low-alcohol Pimm's Cup. It's a "conversational drink." The recipe for the renowned thirst-quencher was taken from the back label of an old bottle of Pimm's. "Probably Pimm's itself doesn't know the recipe now, because they stopped printing that label," he said.

The drink is the bar's most ordered refreshment. (Duh.) The second most popular? The Sazerac. (Also, duh.) Interestingly, he referred to a Sazerac as a conversational drink, too, even though you can can hammered a lot quicker on rye than you can on Pimm's.