Why drink all these drinks?

Why drink every cocktail in a 1909 bar manual? Why not drink every cocktail in a 1909 bar manual? That’s just as good a question. Or, even better, “Why just drink Miller High Life all the time?” “Why do anything at all?”

It is possible that we are all destined to assume that our era is the least glamorous of all. I can easily imagine hipsters in 1909 yearning for the New York of the 1890s, before it sold out and stopped being cool.

The 2000s, though, were pretty bleak. Politics were an unmitigated disaster through the Bush years, and while the Obama era promised a respite, hope and change quickly began to feel like more of the same.

I think this is a partial explanation for the resurgence in all things quaint. It seems as though as social conditions more and more resemble the Great Depression, our entertainment conditions do, too. New Orleans, at the very least, has retro cocktail bars and burlesque shows sprouting up like mushrooms. I expect this is a particular trend of escapism--let’s live anytime at all besides this one.

The cocktail trend is also part of broader currents within our eating and drinking habits. Just as health, taste, and environmental concerns drive more people to an interest in locally produced foods, a similar impulse is driving a desire for handcrafted beverages. Yes, it’s nice to know that I can show up almost anywhere and cold, familiar Budweiser will be available to me, but isn’t it nicer to drink something carefully prepared for you, with style and personality?

Cocktail culture is also a sort of last-refuge for booze snobs, so its development was probably inevitable. My father was part of a wave of expansion of the American wine industry, vinting in southern Oregon in the 70s and 80s. Shortly thereafter was a huge expansion in microbrews and craft beers. Having only been drinking myself for about a decade (and for most of that, strictly as an amateur), there were doubtless plenty of trends that passed me by. But, cocktails became particularly flashy in the 90s. Every restaurant and bar in New England, where I went to college, tried to cultivate an aura of “hip” by featuring signature martinis. None of these drinks were martinis in the classic sense--they were fruity, vodka-based elixirs served chilled in a martini glass. I think this era at least let people acclimate to the idea of cocktails more complicated than the party-standard “something and something” drinks we all swilled in college dorms.

I think the current trend toward looking to what folks were drinking a century or more ago is much more exciting. I like the sense of continuity with an older era. I also enjoy any trend that seeks to pull back some aspect of human life from the realm of mass production and back into the world of craft. I’d like to be part of that, if only in a small way. I’m not sure that I’ll develop any particular insight or understanding of our forebears, but I do know I’ll be drinking a lot of interesting drinks, and that is itself a worthy purpose.