What is a cocktail?

Different times have different answers.

Today we refer to cocktails as any mixed drink that contains alcohol. You could probably argue that cocktails have been around almost as long as booze itself, and that human beings, evolving through curiosity and invention, must have naturally added something to their drinks – whether the results were pleasant or not. What you need to know, however, is that no matter which ancestor was the first to try it, cocktails became a culture, and eventually a popularity, in the United States.

The definition of a cocktail was much narrower in 18th-century America, where a wide variety of alcoholic mixes were available. There were different names for the drinks made with different concoctions, such as “punch” made with spirits, sugar, water, lemon juice, and tea (or spices), “sling” made with spirits, sugar, and water, and “cocktail” made with spirits, sugar, and water. Cocktails, on the other hand, are mixed drinks made with “spirits, sugar, water, and bitters (and later, liqueurs)”.

It is easy to see that the Cocktail uses only one more bitters than the Sling, and in fact some people did call the Cocktail a “Sling with Bitters” at the time, so it can be said that bitters are an important feature of the cocktail. While both punch and sommeliers were popular at the time, cocktails were the most evolved and numerous of the “families”, with recipes that pushed the boundaries of the old ways and blurred the differences between the families, so that today cocktail has become the umbrella term for all alcoholic mixed drinks.

The Old-fashioned (meaning old-fashioned, old-school; many bartenders refer to it as the “classic cocktail”), which you’ll find most often in bars, is so named because it’s the “proper” recipe, distinguishing it from the “new school” cocktails that have come since. It is also named for the fact that the recipe is “orthodox”, distinguishing it from the later “new school” cocktails. Other common cocktails in the “cocktail” family include the Martinez, Manhattan, and Sazerac.

The name “cocktail” can be traced back as far as 1788, but the question of why cocktails are called “cocktails” is probably one of the most difficult to prove in the history of the drink. One of the more plausible explanations for the cocktail’s name is that a mixed racehorse was jokingly referred to as a “cocktail,” which led to the concept of “mixing” being borrowed for the drink.

While the Cocktail reigns supreme, the other varieties have retained their names and presence on the list. So today, when you look at a cocktail list, you’ll still see some strange names, in addition to the punch, the Sling, the julep, the toddy, the sour, the fizz, the cobbler, the frappe, the flip, and so on. Although the name and the recipe have a certain degree of correlation, but do not forget that creative bartenders are not willing to stick to the rules, bartending is not math.

Some names of cocktail clans you may encounter (or never encounter):bombo/bumbo, buck, cocktail, collins, cooler, crusta, daisy, flip, fizz, fix, frappe, grog, julep, highball, maid. mule, nogg, sling, skin, smash, sour, toddy ……