Imbibe!

David Wondrich’s Imbibe! had been on my wishlist for several years, as it was recommended by several folks I follow on Twitter (including, I think, the great follow @creativedrunk), and he later appeared on the podcast Hugh Acheson Stirs the Pot. I finally picked it up a month or two ago when it was on sale for the Kindle, and while it’s a different book than I expected, it’s a great read if you’re a fan of cocktails, especially vintage ones, and how they took over the American drinking scene at least twice in history.

The inspiration for Imbibe! is “Professor” Jerry Thomas, a very successful if peripatetic bartender in the mid-1800s who mixed drinks at swanky bars and dives on both coasts and wrote what is believed to be the first book on drinks ever published in the United States, Bar-Tender’s Guide. He claimed that he invented the Tom and Jerry, an eggnog-like cocktail, and certainly did a lot to popularize the Tom Collins in the United States. He’s a towering figure in cocktail history … but he’s not really enough to support a whole book.

The real meat of the book is the drinks, and the way Wondrich presents the stories around each drink. Many of the classic cocktails we associate with the Roaring Twenties and the period before Prohibition have their origins in the late 19^th century, as far back as the 1850s in some cases, a time of great experimentation with alcoholic spirits, which may simply have been a reaction to the inconsistent or low quality of the spirits available at the time. Thomas spent time tending bar in northern California during the Gold Rush, when he was mixing what I presume was god-knows-what sold as whiskey or brandy or whatever, and thus encouraged the introduction of various mixers and flavorings, notably sugar and other sweetening syrups, as well as peculiar combinations of liquors that would have produced cocktails so strong that you didn’t notice the taste.

I’m using the term cocktails loosely here to describe any sort of mixed drink, but Wondrich adheres to the strict historical definitions of cocktail, punch, sling, and more. A punch has four or five main ingredients – sour, sweet, strong (the booze), weak, and perhaps spice. A cocktail is a punch with the addition of some sort of bitters, potable or nonpotable. A sling is a punch without the sour element, and usually has nutmeg as its sprice. There are also sours (with lemon juice and sugar), collinses (a long sour, meaning it adds soda), juleps (with mint), smashes (with chunks of fruit), flips (with egg), and more. Wondrich walks through these categories and more with historical notes, pinpointing drink origins where possible and debunking the occasional myth.

Many of these drinks are best lost to history, with bizarre combinations of ingredients that result in drinks that sound like they’d have served no other purpose beyond getting the drinker as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. There are champagne cocktails that you’d never make with actual champagne, given the wine’s cost and how most people at least appreciate its flavor. Many drinks in the 1800s were topped with port, a fortified, often sweet wine that would have added color and alcohol but would have run through the flavor of the cocktail beneath like a rhinoceros on amphetamines. And all the eggs … there are some exceptions, to be sure, like a proper egg nog at the holidays, but I cannot see the appeal of mixed drinks with whole eggs in them, warm or cold.

Imbibe! is definitely not a book for every tippler, as it is, pun intended, rather dry in parts. Many of these drinks are antiquated, often lost to history, or only recently seeing a resurgence in interest because of the spread of artisan cocktail bars (which are, unfortunately, likely among the businesses most hurt by our government’s failed response to the pandemic). Some of the ingredients Wondrich identifies in original recipes are no longer available, or extremely difficult to find, and he has to recommend modern substitutes, which is fine but also would raise the question of whether we’re simply better off consuming cocktails and punches designed with those modern ingredients in mind. I’ve read enough about distilled spirits, especially rum, that I approached this book with more history of reading about this sort of thing – and perhaps a bit more specific interest in the makeup of some of the drinks. If you enjoy a good collins or sling, or are interested in the way flavors may or may not combine to create something novel in a glass, Imbibe! is as impeccably researched as you’ll find.

Next up: I’m playing catchup here on reviews but right now I’m reading the short story collection Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Booker Prize nominee Maaza Mengiste.