“Stan Jones in 1977, From His Book.”

For the discriminating cocktail drinker, most of the late twentieth century represents mixology’s Dark Ages. From the dawn of color television to the rise of the internet, the classic American cocktail was a species in peril (I draw no correlations here, although I suspect they could be drawn). As booze-business commentator Frank Kane put it in 1965, “the art of mixing drinks is a lost cause in most bars.” Kane’s summary of the symptoms: “Not one local tavern in fifty serves a Martini or a Manhattan in a properly chilled glass. Not one…

New Orleans is a paradoxical place: a Catholic city, devoted to pleasure; a tourist city, where it’s hard to get a bad meal; a cradle of American mixology, where the most popular drink is a revolting combination of syrups, artificially-flavored liqueurs and neutral spirits that’s served in a plastic hand-grenade.

Thankfully, that’s not the city’s only popular drink. In the better sort of places, you can also get a Sazerac, a simple mix of rye whiskey, sugar, absinthe (or Herbsaint, a local substitute) and the city’s own Peychaud’s Bitters. Indeed, the Sazerac has even been declared the…

A year and a half ago, I published a book about Jerry Thomas, the man who wrote the world’s first bartender’s guide. In it, I bemoaned the fact that none of Thomas’s contemporaries (he was born in 1830 and died in 1885) had ever thought to write an “American Bariana” — a book chronicling the sayings and doings of the men who pioneered America’s first indigenous culinary art; who invented the Julep and the Cocktail and the Sour and, in short, made “American Bar” a global watchword for refined intoxication. Every time we step up to a bar we toast their achievement, and yet in the absence…