One of the least surprising things about these most surprising times is that Britain is drinking more alcohol – and specifically, cocktails. Towards the end of April, the Office of National Statistics reported a 31.4% increase in volume sales of alcohol nationwide. Waitrose has since shaded in some detail: tequila sales are up 175%, and as liqueur sales are up 78%, too, we can assume that Margarita production has risen by a similar percentage year-on-year.
My own household’s Negroni output is up 53.6%, annual Sidecar targets were smashed in early May, and all the citrus in my fruit bowl bears the telltale scars of garnish-manufacture. My interest predates lockdown – I wrote a book about cocktails a few years back – but clearly, all the people who bought it are only now getting round to reading it. I keep getting messages along the lines of, “But what else can I make with maraschino?” And, “Is it acceptable to use a whisk when making a Ramos Gin Fizz?” And, “What’s the best vermouth in a Negroni?” For many, clearly, cocktail hour has become an important weekly ritual.
While all the usual health warnings apply – and I genuinely do keep it to one these days – it’s not hard to see why so many of us are reaching for the blue curaçao. Cocktails have an affinity with strange, uncertain times; celebration and consolation in one hit. As the drinks historian David Wondrich notes, the golden age of the cocktail arrived with the Great Depression, while the more recent cocktail renaissance blossomed in post-9/11 New York.
“Since then it feels like we’ve had crisis after crisis,” he tells me over the phone as police and protesters square off outside his Brooklyn apartment. “Part of the reason the cocktail came back is it needed to come back. It’s a little ritual that you can use to hedge against the uncertainty and chaos.”
Wondrich has emerged as a hero of lockdown for his Lo-Fi Lush Hour, a nightly cocktail recipe-cum-history-lesson that he has shared each evening on Twitter. He has now made it through 75 recipes, including Daisies, New York Sours and the labour-intensive Pousse-Café, sharing pictures as his followers shake along at home. “It turned out there were a lot of people looking for something at cocktail hour,” he says. “It gave them something to focus on and a virtual bar experience, too.”
The appeal is as much in the rituals surrounding the drink as the drink itself. “You could just splash some whiskey into a glass, but that’s very functional,” he says. “You end up drinking a lot when you drink like that. This actually seems to be a way of drinking a little less. The ritual contains it.”
A cocktail takes you places in a way that an overhopped IPA simply doesn’t. Few of us are booking a trip to Havana or Venice anytime soon – but an El Presidente or Spritz (a proper one, with Campari please) will make a rough-and-ready mental teleportation device. And the reach of the cocktail is unsurpassed. You can count the amount of wine-producing nations on your fingers and toes, but every nation on Earth brings some liquid, spice or fruit to the cocktail cabinet.
If cocktails evoke the trips we can’t make, they also evoke the people we can’t meet. “A cocktail is a bit like comfort food,” suggests Monica Berg, co-owner of Tayēr + Elementary in London. “It reminds you of all these times when you did have fun. I missed going to bars so much, but it wasn’t so much for the drinks themselves. It was the atmosphere, the hustle, and seeing a place alive.”
Sly Augustin, proprietor of Trailer Happiness in London, agrees. “Lockdown has really given me time to think and it’s shown me that a bar has to be more than bricks and mortar,” he says. “That’s the heart, but you have to be able to connect beyond that. It’s not really about the drinks at the end of the day, it’s about the social aspect – about community.”
In the 19th century, “cocktail” had a specific meaning: a combination of spirit, sugar, water and bitters that we now call the Old-Fashioned. It has since unmoored itself from that definition to become an all-purpose metaphor for the mixing of different things – people, ideas, substances, moods. So I suppose you could argue, after a couple of Absinthe Frappés, that a cocktail isn’t merely a drink, but a physical manifestation of its own metaphor, and thus a rare example of a pataphysical object according to the principles laid out by the surrealist playwright Alfred Jarry in late-19th century Paris. “Pataphysics is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics.” Jarry drank a lot of Absinthe Frappés, to be fair.
But perhaps it’s as simple as cocktails make people feel a bit special. “It’s a proxy for all the stuff you can’t do,” says Wondrich. “Here is something I can do. It’s like, bang, here is this lovely thing. I take a sip and for a few minutes here, I’m living a pleasant life.
How to improve on your home cocktail production
“The first thing I’d say to anyone wanting to make cocktails at home is don’t go off and buy a bunch of stuff,” counsels Sly Augustin. “Start off with the things that you have that you already know you like. If you’ve got pineapple juice in the fridge, great, use that. Every household has the ingredients to make cocktails.”
The most important ingredient is ice, which if you have water, a freezer and some plastic containers isn’t much of a problem. Devote a whole shelf to ice production – and freeze your glasses, too.
The next most useful ingredients are sugar (stir two cups of raw cane sugar into one cup of water for an all-purpose sugar syrup), and then things like lemons, limes, grapefruits, raspberries, eggs, mint and fizzy water.
Once you do start buying other ingredients, there’s no need to break the bank. Beefeater gin at £15 is absolutely fine for most cocktails. The next useful alcoholic ingredients are Angostura bitters (£10) and vermouth (also about £10). If you’re strategic, you will find cocktails work out far more economically than wine or beer. A Negroni, for example (equal parts gin, Italian vermouth and Campari), works out at about £1.50 per drink.
A cocktail is usually a balance of up to five elements: sweetness, sourness, alcohol, dilution and spice. If you think of each ingredient in these terms instead of mere “flavour”, then it becomes easier to make substitutions. You can substitute any base spirit for any other and the cocktail will still “work”. If you have no limes, lemons are fine – both provide sourness. If a recipe calls for orange liqueur, it’s usually providing sweetness – so sugar syrup, marmalade or honey will make a better substitution than orange juice (which provides more dilution than sweetness).
A mix of 50ml spirit, 15ml lemon/lime, 10-15ml sugar syrup is a great all-purpose sour recipe, to be shaken with lots of ice. Add fresh herbs or soft fruit, 10ml of pretty much any liqueur, top up with sparkling water, champagne or fruit juice and it will start to taste great.
A mix of 50ml spirit, 25ml fortified wine, and a dash of Angostura bitters is an all-purpose aromatic cocktail recipe, to be stirred patiently over ice. Again, 10ml of Campari or peach liqueur or that weird bottle of Latvian Balsam that your uncle bought round once will take it in an interesting direction. Cin cin!
Peach Smash
Jam is a handy way to add fruity depth to cocktails. The peach/bourbon/mint combination is inspired by the original Mint Julep (once made with peach brandy), but you can experiment with whatever you have lurking around.
peach jam 1 dessertspoon
bourbon 50ml
lemon juice 25ml
fresh mint leaves a handful
sugar syrup a dash (optional)
Hanky Panky
The Hanky Panky was created by Ada Coleman, bar manager at the Savoy’s American Bar from 1903-1924. Her original contained the bracingly bitter herbal liqueur Fernet-Branca, but it’s a good template for using ‘difficult’ spirits, including the dreaded Jägermeister, should you ever weary of Jägerbombs.
gin 35ml
Italian vermouth (eg Martini rosso) 35ml
Jägermeister 5-10ml
Stir everything patiently over ice and strain into a frozen cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange zest twist. Stir the jam into the spirit, then add everything else and shake hard with plenty of ice. Add a dash of sugar syrup if it needs a little more sweetness. Fine-strain into a tumbler filled with ice cubes and garnish with lemon slices and mint.
Kerala Fizz
Pineapple + cardamom + rum =
a heavenly combination.
cardamom-infused light rum 50ml
pineapple juice 50ml
lime juice 20ml
golden sugar syrup 10ml
fizzy water
To make the cardamom rum, toast about 12-15 green cardamom pods in a dry pan, transfer to a jam jar, and pour over 200ml light rum. Leave overnight, then strain. For the cocktail, shake everything except the fizzy water with ice then strain into a tall glass filled with more ice. Top up with fizzy water and garnish with a pineapple frond.
The Spirits: A Guide to Modern Cocktailing by Richard Godwin is published by Penguin
