As it goes, we started out in the late 19th Century with all these drink categories (some a bit stunted, some a bit redundant):
cobbler
cocktail
collins
cooler
crusta
daisy
eggnog
fix
fizz
flip
frappe
highball
julep
negus
pousse café
punch
rickey
sangaree
sling
smash
sour
swizzle
toddy
… and gradually, ‘everything’ became a cocktail (exaggeration, but only slight).
As a curator of relatively large cocktail recipe databases, this sucks.
I feel that there are at least two numerous subgroups of ‘cocktails’ that could be constructively named—if only for the purposes of making digital indexes more useful:
cocktail (sour), such as the Daiquiri, Sidecar, Aviation, Clover Club, Corpse Reviver #2, or a bazillion others that contain significant quantities of citrus and are typically served in a cocktail glass, rather than a sour glass or rocks glass
cocktail (dessert) or somesuch, including the likes of the Stinger and diverse (mostly uncommon) liqueur- and dairy-heavy sweet ‘cocktails’, perhaps omitting digestif (amaro) drinks
Do these seem intuitive? Any other conceptual swaths of ‘cocktails’ you’d like to be able to filter a collection with?
At the very least, I have a few recipes from print that don’t contain “scaffa” in the name and make no mention of ice. In the context of the books they’re printed in, it can seem at least as likely to be an editorial mistake, but who knows? I’m going to add the category regardless, because, hey, it’s a category!
It seems another “unnamed” category of drinks is one that I think evolved mostly post-war, probably as a result of sustained marketing behind the alleged health benefits of drinking large quantities of fruit juices: drinks like the Screwdriver or Salty Dog or various “Sunshine” drinks.
Perhaps these are also related to the various tall drinks drenched in flavored sodas? Is it all a post-soda fountain era era 20th Century brand marketing thing?
I have seen more and more drinks being thrown loosely in the highball category when it comes to this style of drinks even when a lot of other ingredients are added in.
Much like a ‘cocktail’ is sometimes anything served in a cocktail glass, a ‘highball’ is sometimes anything served in a tall glass.
I think one of the earliest important cocktail books to feature Highballs is Charles Mahoney’s 1905 Hoffman House Bartender’s Guide, and some of those are pretty elaborate:
I might add a category to this very useful list for something like “Cocktail (Americano)”, for drinks with booze plus vermouth or the like and (usually) bitters, from the 1880s on. There are of course two branches: one is short and up, the other long and usually with (charged) water and ice. Both are aperitifs at heart. They rarely have added sugar. There is, to be sure, a good deal of overlap between this and the original Cocktail (in a very dry Martini, the vermouth is used essentially like bitters) and this and the Cooler (e. g., the Aperol Sprits, which can be seen as a member of this family–a long Americano with prosecco instead of the booze), but there are overlaps and blurred edges everywhere in this sort of classification. The only way to avoid them is to make utterly useless, arbitrary categories: “any red drink”; “any drink served in a tall glass”; “any shaken drink”; “any drink made with rum.”
I like the “cocktail ‘Americano’”—it makes direct sense to me. The Italian descriptor neatly ties in the outside/European interpretation (literally and figuratively), and perhaps helps remind everyone that it was aromatized Italian (and, through extension, Marseilles) strong wines that got us the Manhattan and Martini.
I’m still tinkering with imposing the idea of a—seemingly complementary— cocktail ‘sour’ category (or is it sour (new school)?) that would be an umbrella for the post-1880 citrusy drinks including the new school daisy and the Daiquiri, and a bazillion 20th Century drinks. I want to keep that somewhat separate from the new school punches (e.g., exotics) and it may just come down to the presence of ice in the serving vessel.
I’m also still tinkering with the dessert cocktail that seems like the natural descendent of the pousse cafe, champerelle, scaffa, egg nogg, and flip: boozy and sweet, with optional cream and egg components, but no generally no bitters or citrus.
If I can make all that work, then the bulk of 20th Century mixology (and later) should be broadly segmented.
Ages ago, Dr. Cocktail also proposed a “veggie/meaty” category to deal with savory drinks. We tried that on the old CocktailDB. Today, I would probably just go with “savory cocktail” (even if some of them more closely resemble salad dressing than a cocktail).
It seems to me there are very few recipe examples of the long version of “cocktail ‘Americano’” with the charged water and ice. There’s the Americano itself, which is a flexible template. After that, I can think of degenerate stuff like the Manhattan-on-the-rocks-topped-with-soda. What am I overlooking?
I am 100% okay with some drinks falling into multiple classes at the same time.
The main thing I had in mind for the “long version” is the Negroni, as it is served (or at least as it was served) in its land of origin, on the rocks with a splash of sparkling water. At the same time, it isn’t considered a cooler or anything like that–it’s a cocktail and an aperitif. You could add the drowned Old Fashioned so loathed by modern cocktail geeks to that class. And the Americano itself, I suppose, although that easily shades over into the plain old highball class.
I like Cocktail Sour for the hybrids that the Bronx and the Daiquiri ushered in.
I’m a little leery of Dessert Cocktail, only because so many people drink a bunch of the drinks that should fit into it as regular cocktails–Chocolate Martinis, Appletinis, Mudslides and the like. But I don’t have a better term, so…
I’ve found the categorization schemes attempted The Joy of Mixology to be generally unsuccessful (n.b. I wholeheartedly applaud anyone who takes a big swing like Gary took there, hit or miss), but one thing I have always liked was his use of ‘Snapper’. I’m away from my bookshelf this month, so I can’t quite remember how expansively he used it, but given how far the term has fallen out of popular recognition, it seems like it’s ripe to be co-opted as an umbrella term for savory drinks. Neh?
It’s a timeline that attempts to simultaneously depict the categorization of drinks, their evolution, and all of the “essential drinks”, over time, even with a little context along the way.
There’s no feasible way to present the timeline here in the thread, so you have to link to it in your browser. It’s nominally viewable on a phone, but will be much more manageable on a personal computer or tablet. (Especially if you happen to own one of those crazy wide-aspect ratio screens.)
Hypothesis, which I’m fairly sure @Splificator has expressed some form of several times, but perhaps less reductively:
It seems there were two essential turning points—or rather transformative periods—in the 19th Century that got us where we are:
The ubiquitization of ice, which was roughly complete by 1850 in the US (and we were exporting vast quantities of ice around world by then). All this ice led to more drinks designed or re-designed around ice (iced julep, cobbler, highball).
The professionalization of mixology, from roughly the 1830s–1880s, dominated by (but not exclusive to) German immigrants, which resulted in more varied, complex, differentiated drinks. These drinks involved technique, equipment, and arcana, that were all professional tools employed to competitive ends. By contrast, while good punch may have required some technique, it was closer to the world of the kitchen and the hostess, and other early drinks likes slings and toddy and even the basic Cock-tail… well, anyone who understood the idea could compound one if they had the supplies. So the new professional mixologists reinterpreted and elaborated (which could also mean streamlining for the saloon) the old drink ideas and then kept going, competitively creating novel variations and finding new ingredients to integrate. The gaps gradually got filled in so there was a “cocktail” for nearly every imaginable drink idea. And then WW1 and Prohibition happened, and it all experienced its first “reset”.
