The Historical Origin of 5 Cocktails

The historical origin of the 5 most requested cocktails in the world. Are you a restaurateur, a bartender or a waiter? Showing some cultural knowledge about what you serve on occasion is an excellent way to make a good impression in front of a customer and to give a more professional image to your place.

You don't want to read a dusty history manual or scroll through a thousand Google pages and you want to have a ready answer that will impress your listener?
In the article you will find a brief historical excursus on the 5 best-selling cocktails in the world in 2018.

A cocktail is a type of mixed drink that originated in America during the early 20th century and became popular with the Prohibition laws. Typically contains spirits such as vodka, gin or rum along with various other ingredients such as fruit juice (eucalyptus), added liqueur(s) syrup sweetener instead soda water brown sugar alcohol Classifications vary depending on how they are made but usually fall into one group by classification below: Martini - light colored vermouth; Cosmopolitans - wells drinks often consisting exclusively of whiskey cola antidote Cuba Libres - strong black beer served Kahlúa Coffee Fizz Tequila sunrise Vieux Carré Sidecarrogat.

1. OLD FASHIONED COCKTAIL

It was born at the end of the 19th century as a whiskey cocktail served the old fashioned way, that is, with a lump in the glass, two drops of Angostura, a drizzle of soda to dissolve it and the addition of ice. It takes its name from the glasses in which it is served, called "old fashioned". In 1931 it appeared for the first time in a recipe book of the Waldorf-Astoria, a famous luxury hotel in New York, with a strong racist connotation. Just to make you understand the caliber of the place, I inform you that it has hosted people such as Nikola Tesla and Marilyn Monroe. And when the Titanic sank, the investigation into the tragedy took place right inside its walls.

We can say that the famous cocktail owes its diffusion above all to the importance of the hotel. To date, according to the rankings, it is the most popular cocktail in the world.

2.NEGRONI

We can be proud of it, since it is an Italian cocktail, of Florentine origin. One day, around the 1920s, the traveler and polyglot Count Camillo Negroni got bored of the usual Americano that he ordered daily for the aperitif, so he asked the barman of the Caffè Casoni in Florence to replace the gin with the seltzer, also in honor of the last trips he had made to London.

Thus was born the drink of "real men", destined to end up in the wastewater of youth discos.

3.WHISKEY SOUR

It has a mysterious origin. Some trace it back to the ancient British seafaring practice of making drinks that could last on long ship voyages. Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that the drink is mentioned in the famous "The bartender's guide: how to mix drinks" by Jerry Thomas, published in 1862. Another accredited theory attributes its birth to the English Mister Eliott Stubb, who in 1870 opened a bar in Iquique, a Chilean village. There he began to experiment, obtaining a mixture of whiskey and limon de pica, from which the modern after-dinner was developed.

4. DAIQUIRI COCKTAIL

Cuban, Hemingway's favorite. According to historiographers, in 1898, near Santiago de Cuba, there was a small village called Daiquiri, where one day a very thirsty young sailor disembarked and, in a hurry to get a drink, he entered a shack that offered drinks, but he refused to drink a straight Rum, so he asked to have it diluted with lemon juice and spiked it with sugar.
According to another legend, in the early twentieth century a mining engineer of Italian origins, Giacomo Pagliuchi, visited the iron mine in Daiquiri. At the end of the day he was invited to drink by an American colleague of his, who only had rum, sugar and lime at home: thus he invented a new cocktail!

5.COCKTAIL MANHATTAN

According to a popular theory, the cocktail was invented at the Manhattan Club in New York in the early 1870s by Ian Marshall, who had been in charge of preparing a banquet, organized by Winston Churchill's mother, in honor of Samuel Tilden, candidate for the presidential elections. The success of the banquet made the drink very popular.
In reality, the Manhattan Cocktail can be considered an evolution of the Whiskey and Gin Cocktail, to which some creative barman tried to add vermouth, a step that some consider fundamental for mixed drinks.

The history lesson is over, I wish you a good drink! :)