Imbibe! rescues barman Jerry Thomas, an American hero, from the dustbin of history. We drinkers and readers are in the debt of his scribe, Dave Wondrich, who proves an engaging and intellectually curious guide to the barroom netherworlds where bottle conjurers and other neer-do-wells carved their deeds in ice.
John T. Edge,
author of Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lovers Companion to the South
David Wondrich has drunk his way through two centuries of American cocktails and other mixed drinks. He emerges to tell us, with clarity and wit, what he encountered, how it was made, and how to make it now. In his re-creations of the drinks of yesteryear, he stops at nothing, even growing his own snakeroot to make Jerry Thomass Bitters. Thomas was called the Professor in his day. If this title belongs to any living expert on the cocktail, it belongs to Wondrich.
Lowell Edmunds,
author of Martini, Straight Up
David Wondrich is such an envy-producing polymath that it drives me to drink. Brilliant historian, beautiful writer, former punk rocker, absinthe maker, mixological marvel, and perhaps, yes, even wizard. Plus he can grow an amazing beard. There are few people in the world I rely on to be so authoritative and so entertaining all at once, and to mix an amazing cocktail at the same time. And those few people are David Wondrich.
John Hodgman,
author of The Areas of My Expertise
BOOKS BY DAVID WONDRICH
Esquire Drinks
Stomp and Swerve
Killer Cocktails
Imbibe!
Punch
A PERIGEE BOOK
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright 2007, 2015 by David Wondrich
Parts of this book have appeared, in greatly altered form, in Esquire, Imbibe, and the Whisky Advocate.
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Revised Perigee hardcover edition ISBN: 978-0-399-17261-8\
eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18185-4
The Library of Congress has cataloged the first Perigee hardcover edition as follows:
Imbibe! : from absinthe cocktail to whiskey smash, a salute in stories and drinks to Professor Jerry Thomas, pioneer of the American bar / David Wondrich.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-399-53287-0
1. Cocktails. 2. Drinking customs. 3. Thomas, Jerry, 18301885. I. Title.
TX951.W5663 2007
641.8'74dc22 2007027096
PUBLISHING HISTORY
First Perigee hardcover edition / November 2007
Revised Perigee hardcover edition / April 2015
The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
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FOR MARINA
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
S ince November 2007, when the first edition of this book came out, Ive had the pleasure of visiting a great many new craft cocktail bars, as theyre generally knownplaces that specialize in drinks assembled carefully from top-quality ingredients according to classic formulas (along, of course, with a lot of creations of their own, some of them decidedly odd). Quite often, Ive spotted a copy of the book nestled on a high shelf behind the bar, among the clutch of reference works such places tend to keep. Indeed, Ive had a surprising number of young bartenders tell me that reading the book was a precondition for their employment in such a place. To an author, these things are of course immensely gratifying and flattering. Yet they also confer a certain obligation: If your book is being used as a textbook, then youve got to make sure the information in it is up to date. Otherwise, you look bad and, even worse, the people relying on you look bad.
By 2012 or so, there was a fair amount that needed updating. The entire section on ingredients was obsolete: All of the obscure old spirits whose loss I lamented, and for which I spent so much space describing (often dubious) work-arounds, were now available. Also obsolete were all the words I used to try to talk up old-school drinks as something one might want to try, as well as the sixteen Jerry Thomasthemed drinks kindly contributed by my friends and fellow enthusiasts in the hope of convincing people that the Professors style of mixology had its uses in the modern age. Nobody needs convincing anymore. (Indeed, most of those contributors have since gone on to write their own books, if they didnt already have them.) And as long as I was cutting dead wood, I could also lose the vestigial section on punch-bowl drinks, since superseded by the book I wrote on the subject in 2010, and the closely argued, small-print appendices that addressed arguments nobodys having anymore.
Naturally, there were also errors to correct. Some of them were embarrassingWilliam Henry Harrison was the president whose favorite Egg Nogg I had included, not Benjamin Harrison, and it would be better for everyone if the Collins actually appeared in the chapter where its listed in the title, rather than the next. Others were committed through ignorance; through misinformation or a lack of information, and further research made them apparent.
In fact, in the years since the book came out Ive amassed a great deal of new information: on Jerry Thomas and his life (including colorful new anecdotes and details on his now-lost second book), on the history of the American bar, on the bartenders tools and techniques, and on the drinks and their provenance. As long as I had the hood up, that gave me the opportunity to incorporate all these tidbits. And why not add some more drinks, and not just American ones? Jerry Thomas intended his book to be a register of the worlds drinks, and if I could help him posthumously achieve that goal, it would be churlish to say no. Accordingly, among the twenty-odd drinks Ive added to the second edition, youll find the Singapore Gin Sling, the Caribbean Green Swizzle, the Peruvian Pisco Sour, and the Argentine-Uruguayan San Martn Cocktail, all of them dating firmly to the pre-Prohibition age. Ive also taken the chance to rearrange the sections devoted to the cocktail proper, so that the evolution of the drink is presented a little more clearly, and to spend some more time with the Mint Julep, unfairly neglected in the first edition.