Amer Picon on the Brain

Now that Absinthe is again made all over the place and readily available in liquor stores and bars, there are few potions in cocktail geekdom that excite the blood of the fanaticist as Amer Picon.

Amer Picon, as Drinkboy described it, "is a bitter cordial made with orange, gentian, and other ingredients." It's an Amaro, which is Italian for "bitter." Amaros are a variety of Italian herbal liqueurs, and have a fairly high alcohol content. Amer Picon used to be readily available in the good ol' U.S. of A., and is a part of many classic pre-Prohibition cocktails. For some time, however, it has an unpurchaseable item Stateside. It exists still, but only over in Europe, and apparently was reformulated in the 1970s, creating a Old Coke-New Coke-like split on whether the new version can hold a candle to the old.

West coast bartender Jamie Boudreau (that's a real bartender's name, isn't it?) last year came up with a formula which he believes replicates the taste of the original Amer Picon, and many of the more prominent Cocktailians seem to agree. I got a hold of the recipe and am in the process of putting the stuff together. It really doesn't take that long, except that that Jamie insists the orange tincture that is one of the ingredients sit for two months. It's been on my shelf for one week and already I'm impatient. His website said I can cut the time by a month if I shake the jar up three times a day, so I may go that route. I'm not promising anything! (The picture is courtesy of Boudreau's site, since I ain't got no bottle to photograph.)

Events conspire to keep Amer Picon on my mind. I was bellying up to the bar at Death & Co. the other night and got to talking with its able bartender Paul. He said the bar used to have some real Amer Picon smuggled over from Europe, but made the mistake of listing it as an ingredient in a featured cocktail. Word got around and the stuff was gone in a flash.

That lesson may soon be learned over again by a recently opened Brooklyn bar. (I'm not going to say which, because I don't want to incite a run on the place.) They possess a bottle of the stuff (old or new, I can't say), prominently on view behind on the bar. Recently, they started featuring it as part of the on-offer Liberal cocktail. (Rye, sweet vermouth, Amer Picon.) I've made Liberals at home, using various substitutes for the Picon, but they never tasted like this. Best Liberal I ever had. The Amaro added amazing and pleasing layers of depth and flavor. The bartender said they won't be serving any Picon Punch, because the bottle would be emptied in a flash.

One thing I'd like to know. Amer Picon is unavailable here, but does that make it illegal to sell it in an American bar. Anyone know?

Amer Picon Taste Test

OK, so more on my homemade Amer Picon.

Being reasonably satisfied with the homemade brew I made based on Jamie Boudreau's recipe for the hard-to-get digestive, I took my clear, unmarked bottle to Jake Walk, a local cocktail joint of my acquaintance where I know they have a bottle of real Amer Picon. By real, I mean the version of the amaro that has been produced in France in recent years—a recipe I am led to believe is different from what was sold in the early 20th century.

As I understand Boudreau's story, he created the homemade Amer Picon to match the taste of the currently sold amaro. But when he took it to the Tales of the Cocktail convention and had some experts try it against a flask of the original, they decreed it matched the Real McCoy.

Ari Form and Matt DeVriendt were on duty when I passed through the door at Jake Walk, and, spotting my plain, bottle-shaped bag, knew what I was up to. They produced the Amer Picon and we taste-tested it next to my home-brewed potion. First of all, color. My stuff was visibly lighter than the legit Amer Picon, with an orangey-brown hue. Then the taste. The store-bought Amer Picon was deeper in flavor with more herbal, bitter and chocolate qualities. The brighter citrus and orange flavors came through in mine—not surprisingly, given at the orange bitters and tinctures that went into it. They were definitely different beasts.

They concluded my stuff to be a success, and we agreed that, while both were good, the homemade stuff—supposedly the original flavor of Amer Picon—was better suited to mixing cocktails. It had more vim and life and wasn't as heavy. It would marry better with other flavors. It would float to the top and sparkle, not weigh the drink down.

Is this the end of my Amer Picon obsession? Maybe not. I have a friend going to Europe soon and she promised to bring me back a bottle of the drink. Stay tuned.

Amer Picon Packs a Punch

With May comes the fruition of the many potions I embarked on in April. You'll hear about my homemade limoncello and orange bitters attempts in days to come. But for now, let's return to that version of Amer Picon I began in early April. As you may recall, it is based on the well-known recipe devised by bartender Jamie Boudreau.

I could have whipped this baby up in a day if it weren't for Boudreau's insistence that an orange tincture of 40 days of age was required. I dutifully waited the 40 days, shaking the damn thing up every morning. I then mixed it up with the required amounts the Italian amaro Ramazzotti (easy to find), Fee Brothers Orange bitters (ditto) and Stirring Blood Orange Bitters (not easy to find at all!). The resultant potion was a deep tobacco-juice brown. But damn if it didn't taste authentic, and close to what I've heard Amer Picon should taste like.

I set about making myself a Liberal. (The cocktail, I'm mean; I'm already a liberal.) Rye, sweet vermouth, Amer Picon, orange twist. Very nice. I was happy to know I could now make these on a regular basis. Then I tried one more recipe I had been eyeballing for some time: the Amer Picon Punch. This required a whopping two ounces of the sacred stuff, plus 1/4 ounce of lemon juice and 1/4 ounce of Grenadine, served in a high ball over iced and topped with soda water and "seasonal fruit."

As loathe as I was to dispense in one go with so much of my new elixir, which was so hard won, I went for it. And wow! What a drink! I didn't really believe a drink so heavily based on an amaro could be that fantastic, but it was amazing. Potent and layered, yet light and refreshing, with the juice and fruit (I used an orange slice) drawing out hidden flavors in the Amer Picon. I could drink these things all day, particularly during the summer.

I must get to work on my next batch to ensure I can.

Got a Neighborhood? Here's Your Drink

I started noticing the geographic specialization of cocktail names a couple years ago, when I read about the Red Hook, a seeming spin on the Manhattan that added Maraschino liqueur to the rye and sweet vermouth. Then I learned about The Slope, an invention of Julie Reiner. Another spin on the Manhattan, this one added apricot brandy. Hm, my reporter's brain hummed. A trend?

Little did I know. I suggested a story to Time Out New York about such locally named drinks and began to investigate. I found a Greenpoint, a Cobble Hill, a Bensonhurst, a Little Italy, a Brooklyn Heights, an East Village Globe Trotter. Someone said there was a Williamsburg (I never found it). Brooklyn, it seems, is running out of neighborhood to name drinks after, though, strangely, there is no Carroll Gardens cocktail, even though the nabe is surrounded by new cocktails on add sides (the Cobble Hill to the north, Red Hook to the south, The Slope to the east).

The wellspring of most of these concoctions, I learned, is Sasha Petraske's Milk & Honey, where a few years back all the bartenders decided to challenge each other to create new spins on the Brooklyn cocktail (rye, sweet vermouth, Amer Picon, Marascino liqueur). Enzo Errico was the first out of the gate with the Red Hook. The Greenpoint (created by Michael McIlroy), Bensonhurst (Chad Solomon) and Cobble Hill (Sam Ross) followed.

(My estimation that it was a riff on the Manhattan was wrong, but, hey, the Manhattan and Brooklyn are so similar is their bases. It was an easy mistake to make. I should have been tipped off by the name: Red Hook is part of Brooklyn, not Manhattan.)

It took a lot of doing, but I finally gathered all the threads together into an article, which Time Out has run today with a lot of pictures. Here it is:

Local flavor

By Robert Simonson

The New York bartenders of the 19th and 20th centuries showed their hometown pride by giving the world the Bronx cocktail, the Brooklyn, and most famously, the Manhattan. Mixologists of the aughts have gotten even more specific: Drinks are being named after Gotham neighborhoods at a furious rate—most of them descended from those granddaddies, the Brooklyn and the Manhattan (though the Bronx cocktail’s mix of gin, sweet vermouth, dry vermouth and orange juice was a sensation a century ago, it doesn’t seem to be inspiring many tributes these days). Of course, the whole idea of geographical cocktails is arguably a misapprehension. The Manhattan, after all, wasn’t named after the island, but in honor of a swanky club. The Bronx, one story goes, commemorates the zoo, not the home of the Yankees. Still, all that backstory doesn’t mean you can’t show your NYC pride by raising one of these libations skyward.

THE MANHATTAN

One of the most profound mixed drinks of all time, it was reputedly created at the Manhattan Club on Madison Square in the 1870s. By the next decade, it was ubiquitous and wildly popular. Virtually any competent barkeep can make one work; the Manhattan has never gone completely out of style. Try one in the dignified setting of Bemelmans Bar (The Carlyle, 35 E 76th St at Madison Ave, 212-744-1600; $16.75).

Recipe:

2 oz rye whiskey
1 oz sweet vermouth
Dash of Angostura's bitters
Cherry garnish

Pour liquid ingredients over ice and stir. Strain into cocktail glass, serve up (no ice) and garnish with a cherry.


LITTLE ITALY

A classic creation of Audrey Saunders, owner of Pegu Club (77 W Houston St between West Broadway and Wooster St, 212-473-7348; $13) and one of the high priestesses of the cocktail revolution. “I named it the Little Italy as I was using the Manhattan cocktail as a frame for it, and wanted to give a nod to the ingredient Cynar,” she says. This Italian-American Manhattan is bitter, sweet, classic and dramatic—like the people.

Recipe:

2 oz Rittenhouse 100-proof rye
1/2 oz Cynar
3/4 oz Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth
Luxardo cherry garnish

Pour liquid ingredients over ice and stir. Strain into cocktail glass, serve up and garnish with a Luxardo cherry.


THE SLOPE

“I love Manhattans, and am always playing around with them,” says Julie Reiner, Slope inventor and owner of Flatiron Lounge (37 W 19th St between Fifth and Sixth Aves, 212-727-7741; $13) and Clover Club (210 Smith St between Baltic and Butler Sts, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn; 718-855-7939; $11). “Not much of a story, but that’s it.” The Slope is richer than a Manhattan, owing to the apricot brandy and Punt y Mes—a liquid fruitcake (in a good way).

Recipe:

2 oz Rittenhouse rye
3/4 oz Punt y Mes sweet vermouth
1/4 oz Apricot brandy
Angostura bitters
Cherry garnish

Pour liquid ingredients over ice and stir. Strain into cocktail glass, serve up and garnish with a cherry.


THE BROOKLYN

“It first popped up in the 1910s, probably as a response to the Manhattan,” says cocktail historian David Wondrich. As for the drink, it’s like a Manhattan, just a bit rougher and more complex. Sort of like Brooklyn itself. The once-popular Amer Picon, a bitter-orange cordial, has sadly been off the American market for decades. Try the version at Weather Up (589 Vanderbilt Ave between Bergen and Dean Sts, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; no phone; $11). There’s no Amer Picon, which results in a slightly sweeter drink. But three fourths of a good cocktail is better than none.

Recipe:

1 oz rye
1/2 oz sweet vermouth (early recipes use dry vermouth)
Dash Amer Picon
Dash maraschino liqueur
Cherry garnish

Pour liquid ingredients over ice and stir. Strain into cocktail glass, serve up and garnish with a cherry.


RED HOOK

The recent streak of NYC-named cocktails began in 2004, when Vincenzo Errico (Milk & Honey) concocted the Red Hook as a 21st-century answer to the Brooklyn. The drink so wowed other bartenders that they countered with their own riffs. The maraschino defines this one; it’s a Brooklyn with a cherry center. Try it at Little Branch (20 Seventh Ave South at Leroy St, 212-929-4360; $13) or White Star.

Recipe:

2 oz rye
1/2 oz Punt e Mes sweet vermouth
1/2 oz maraschino liqueur
Maraschino cherry garnish

Pour liquid ingredients over ice and stir. Strain into cocktail glass, serve up and garnish with a cherry.


GREENPOINT

Michael Mcilroy, a regular bartender at Sasha Petraske’s taverns, created the Greenpoint as a response to Errico’s Red Hook. The moniker plays on the hue of the chartreuse, which is the key to this beautiful creation, planting a core of herbal notes in a Brooklyn framework. Coincidentally, Mcilroy ended up living in the namesake neighborhood. Order it at Little Branch or White Star (21 Essex St between Canal and Hester Sts, 212-995-5464; $10).

Recipe:

2 oz rye
1/2 oz Yellow Chartreuse
1/2 oz sweet vermouth
Dash orange bitters
Dash Angostura bitters
Lemon peel garnish

Pour liquid ingredients over ice and stir. Strain into cocktail glass, serve up and garnish with a twist of lemon peel.


BROOKLYN HEIGHTS

Maxwell Britten, head bartender at Jack the Horse Tavern (66 Hicks St at Cranberry St, Brooklyn Heights, 718-852-5084; $10), was well aware of the Red Hook, the Greenpoint and every other borough-inspired drink out there when he invented this spin on the Brooklyn cocktail last year. “The idea came after many nights watching the seasons out the window of the bar,” he says. It’s a complex, yet calming wintertime treat, a Brooklyn edged by the bitter Campari and warmed by sparks of cinnamon and allspice coming off the Abano.

Recipe:

Campari in a spray bottle
1 1/2 oz Rittenhouse 100-proof rye
1/4 oz Luxardo Amaro Abano
1/2 oz Luxardo maraschino liqueur
1/2 oz Noilly Prat dry vermouth
2 dashes Regan’s orange bitters

Spritz glass with Campari. Pour remaining ingredients over ice and stir. Strain into a cocktail glass, serve up.

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.

Experimenting with Baker's Bitters

As I was fixing up my homemade Amer Picon a couple months back, I noticed that on the same sheet that bore the recipe for said amaro (given to me by a worker at LeNell's) there was a recipe for an orange bitters by Charles H. Baker, Jr., the author of the well-known (among cocktail people, anyway) "The Gentleman's Companion." It didn't look so hard, so I decided to give it a shot.

The first stop involved soaking in grain alcohol (I used vodka) for 15 days: chopped up dried orange peel, and 1/2 drachm ("Drachm"?! Jesus Christ! Had to look that one up!) each of cardamom, caraway and coriander seeds. After 15 days, I poured off the spirits through a cheese cloth and sealed them again. I then took the seeds and peel, put them in pan, muddled them a bit, covered them with boiling water and simmered for five minutes. The whole mixture was then bottled and set for two days. I then drained it off and added it to the spirits. Burnt sugar was added for color. The whole shebang was then filtered an extra time and allowed to sit until it was clear.

I tried it. Smelled good. Tasted good. I was amazed how relatively easy it was to make bitters. I always imagined the stuff impossibly complicated. (The really good ones probably are.) I'm told this was the recipe that Gary Regan used as the base for his orange bitters. Trying Baker's bitters next to Regan's and the Fee Brothers orange bitters, I realized it was a bit simplistic. Both of the others had more depth; Regan's was more bitter and herbal, while Fee's highlighted the bright orange flavor. But Baker's was pleasant. The cardamom comes through strongly, and the potion had a light touch.

I then wondered what to do with the stuff. Were there some old recipes that called specifically for it? I consulted St. John Frizell, a NYC bartender and writer who will be presenting a seminar on Baker at this years Tales of the Cocktail. When he gave me the obvious answer—use them in any drink that calls for orange bitters—I realized how dumb my question one.

I gave Baker's bitter three tries. Once in a Martini, served the old-fashioned way, when it's thought that orange bitters were part of the drink. Then as part of a Pegu Club. And finally as a component of a Bourbon Crusta. All three worked splendidly, and I really felt the delicate flavor of the bitters was an asset, complimenting each drink like a gentle grace note. I was quite pleased.

I also realized how much improved my mixing skills were after taking the B.A.R. course two weeks back.

More NYC Neighborhood Cocktails

If you're a bartender and you're thinking of creating a cocktail called the Gravesend, you better hurry. Brooklyn neighborhoods, as cocktail names, are at a premium.

My current feature in Time Out New York about the new breed of libations named after NYC nabes has unearthed yet more drinks with localized labels. I had bemoaned in a previous post that there was no cocktail named after my Brooklyn neighborhood: Carroll Gardens. I was wrong. Bartender Joachim Simo of the East Village's Death & Co. wrote to notify me that he himself had invented a Carroll Gardens cocktail a year ago, and it's been on the menu at both D&Co and the Flatiron Lounge.

Furthermore, Joachim's colleague Phil Ward has a cocktail called the Buskwick.

Here are the recipes for those who want to try them at home:

Carroll Gardens (Joaquin Simo)
2 oz Rittenhouse rye
1/2 oz Punt e Mes
1/2 oz Nardini Amaro
tsp Luxardo Maraschino

Squeeze lemon twist over the drink, wipe the rim with the peel and discard.

Bushwick (Phil Ward)
2 oz Rittenhouse rye
3/4 oz Carpano Antica sweet vermouth
1/4 oz Luxardo Maraschino
1/4 oz Amer Picon

Stir over cracked ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. No garnish.

Suze to Finally Reach U.S. Shores

Peruse the back bar of the better cocktail haunts in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere and you'll predictably spot a few bottles that aren't sold in this country, liquors determined mixologists have smuggled in from Duty Free shops around the world. Havana Club, the Cuban rum, is one. Amer Picon, the French aperitif that is a critical ingredient in a Brooklyn Cocktail, is another. A third is Suze.

Suze, a bitter, wine-based French liquor flavored by yellow gentian, has been produced since 1889. It was invented by Fernand Moureaux, and Picasso immortalized it in 1912 in his Cubist work "Verre et bouteille de Suze." It is still fairly popular in France and Switzerland. And in the U.S. you'll sometimes see a bartender slip it in as an ingredient in a new cocktail. But mere mortals can not purchase it at the local liquor store.

Finally, however, the Suze drought it over. Domain Select has decided to import and distribute the Pernod-owned product. (Pernod bought it in 1965.) It will start showing up on shelves in January 2012. 

According to Domaine Select, the Suze recipe isn't exactly what it was in 1889. Like so many other French and Italian liqueurs and aperitifs, it "evolved" into a more "consumer friendly taste." Which is another way of saying: sweeter, lighter, less bitter. But, for the U.S. launch, Suze is getting back to its roots. Domain Select will be importing Suze d'Autrefois, which is described as "a return to the original intensity and flavor profile." It will be modeled after the original 1885 recipe. 

$30 will be the price.

Drinking in Brooklyn

I spent a good deal of the early part of the year talking to anyone and everyone who has anything to do with the cocktail, beer and coffee scenes in Brooklyn. The canvasing was in service of a feature on the Brooklyn drinking scene for Imbibe magazine. It wasn't difficult to research; a Brooklynite for 16 years, I had been doing casual, unscripted research for such a survey two or three years by simply paying calls on the new Brooklyn bars and cafe as they opened in waves in 2008 and 2009. And most of the people I interviewed for the piece I had already come to know. Nothing quite as pleasurable as doing an in-depth piece on your own hometown.

Here's the article. There are also lists of places to go for  cocktails, coffee, beer and wine (yes, wine does get a mention in the piece, though not a thorough going over, thank God—adding that aspect to the article might have killed me), all put together by yours truly. But I won't print those here. I have to leave some reason to go out and buy the mag.


A SCENE GROWS IN BROOKLYN

By Robert Simonson

IN THE LATE 19th CENTURY, BROOKLYN WAS A GLORIOUS PLACE TO DRINK. The borough (then a full-fledged city in its own right) boasted 48 breweries and lent its name to The Brooklyn, one of the country’s most popular cocktails at the time. Two of America’s largest coffee roasters of the area—R. Buckle Brothers and the A & P company—called Brooklyn home, and the venerable, gas-lit Gage & Tollner restaurant on Fulton Street served coffee so strong, some customers asked for it to be diluted.

Then came Prohibition, the Depression, high taxes and rising labor costs. The Breweries—Trommer’s, Piels, Rheingold—closed one by one. The last, Schaefer, turned off its Brooklyn taps in 1976. The Brooklyn Cocktail died from memory as an essential ingredient, Amer Picon, fell into obscurity. Gage & Tollner closed, its landmark interior eventually invaded by TGI Friday’s and then Arby’s.

In the last decade, however, craft breweries, cocktail lounges and coffee bars have been cropping up from Greenpoint to Bushwick. The shift took root in the ’90s, when New Yorkers crossed the East River in droves to escape rising rents and encroaching homogenization bred by Manhattan’s bear hug of chain stores and luxury condos. Some of those transplants became entrepreneurs, opening bars and cafés over the years to slake the thirsts of the new locals. That trend has steadily gained steam, and today Brooklynites have reclaimed one of the most enviable drink cultures in the country.