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?