[EDIT - That got really long, sorry! Hope it makes sense]
It’s such a hard puzzle to solve and it really comes down to where your line is on what qualifies as different. If Grog isn’t a category, then I would argue that neither is a toddy, cobbler, swizzle or sangaree (all just watered down booze with occasional sugar added, so let’s put them neatly under Sling).
I’m trying to solve this quite actively at the moment as part of a training piece going on top of the Barchive Project so am reading into a lot of lateral references for simplifying large unwieldy systems. (Carl Linnaeus and biological taxonomy, Darwin’s theories of evolution, James Murray’s approach to the Oxford English Dictionary, Dmitry Mendeleev and the Periodic Table, etc.)
The problem with drinks is similar to the Boundary Paradox of biological taxonomy where Binominal Nomenclature (Homo Sapiens, Tyrannosaurus Rex, etc.) breaks down due to it’s linearly hierarchical nature. Once you take into account multiple dimensions (DNA compared to the original approach of just physical appearance) it quickly gets out of control.
Similarly in mixed drinks, as you pointed out when referencing @Splificator 's work, there was the era of ice changing things up and later the move to “fancy” as the posh wine drinkers started moving out of the private parties to the public drinking rooms which brought in another glassware revolution. We now have ingredients, ice and glassware on multiple dimensions and this is before considered that the ingredients again have their own system where a decision must be made on which dimensions to use (ABV, raw material, sugar, titratable acid, bittering, flavouring, etc.) and when it A is different from B.
This moves nicely into the concept of clades (now used in biology for more specific DNA approaches beyond the Linnaean taxonomy) where an entity can have multiple, previously considered different, ancestors. The problem is that this further complicates things because then you have almost infinite variations. This new approach is what’s caused the (technically true) conclusion that there is no such thing as a “fish”. I’ll get back to that in a second…
This contrast between high level concepts and very fine tuned specifics is also called the “problem of universals” on how to define objects. Plato argued that truth only exists on the plane of abstraction (Ie, tidy high level conceptual boxes such as sours, cocktails, highballs) whereas his pupil Aristotle was on the far opposite side stating that only by studying the finer details do we understand truth. (Ie, a Dry Martini with Tanqueray has “nothing” to do with a Dry Martini with Beefeater because they are different ingredients via different ABV, botanicals, etc. so should be considered differently)
Ultimately it comes down to what you’re trying to achieve with the groupings. If it’s for a “search” problem then I’d love to chat nerdy about it but I feel this is the wrong forum for that. (Very happy to discuss this separately though. I think something like word2vec for semantic word understanding would be a “break through” if done purposefully for food science…)
If, on the contrary, the goal is teaching and education then I am firmly in the camp of abstractions with fewer dimensions.
Back to the “Fish” not being real.
The modern age of DNA has concluded there is no such thing as a fish due to multiple species having separately evolved to survive under water as it’s hugely beneficial from a survival perspective. Does this mean the word “Fish” is now meaningless? Of course not! It’s a super helpful concept for teaching kids (and discussing among adults) about aquatic animals.
Similarly, “Cocktail” is traditionally well defined but is nowadays basically a synonym for the term “Mixed Drinks”. Same goes for “Martini” although that’s glassware dependant.
Does this make the terms “Cocktail” and “Martini” useless? Absolutely not (But it does complicate discussing drinks categories with guests…)
What Gary Regan did with the “Birds of a Feather” chapter in Joy of Mixology followed by the Cocktail Codex by the Death & Co guys has been a brilliant foundation, but it’s still something that has big room for further development.
For learning purposes it’s useful to go down the route of actual taste (the sense, not flavour perception) as a foundation. Almost all drinks have sugar added in some form so a foundation of balance with the Sour (Punch) and Bitter (Cocktail) category works as have been pointed out by many others before. Another balancing element to sweet is fat. Cocktail Codex referred to these as “Flips” to cover all egg/dairy drinks and UKBG had a “Zooms” category which was spirit, honey and cream. Gary Regan didn’t have a category for covering this use of dairy.
It sounds silly, but those 3 (Sour, Bitter, Dairy) cover the highest level of conceptual balance understanding. Then there’s two primary ways to go from here;
- We can look at changing up the sweet element which gives us Sidecars, Margaritas, etc.
- We can look at defining the boundary between the 2 key ones (Sours, Cocktails) which bring us to drinks such as Crusta, Casino, Journalist.
(When defining this middle category we are also conceptually moving onto split based Cocktails such as the American Trilogy. Unless “Spirit” is a satisfying category, in which case “Sweet” or “Bitter” should also be and now we’ve broken everything)
I’m assuming most of us on this forum (And a lot of senior bartenders) would love to dissect in detail the specific nuances between using 5ml more of less of various citrus juices with different ice in different glasses and declaring them different drinks with varying names such as Gin Fix, Gin Sour, Gin Crusta, Gin Thing, Fitzgerald, West Indian, Bennett, Fresh Gimlet etc. but in the world of usefulness this is terrible.
It’s fun, yes! But terribly unhelpful…
And as much as I love spending hours digging into the internet archive or newspapers.com, I have to stand with the simplistic foundations of Carl Linnaeus when he wrote in the introduction to his first edition of Systema Naturae:
“The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.”
Mental models, abstractions and neatly labelled categories just always wins when it comes to usefulness for learning.
