A whole barrel of monkeys

Incidentally, as part of the above inquiry, experiments were carried out on monkeys. Two were used. The first was made drunk with new whisky and was seen to become quarrelsome, no doubt due to the fusel oil (which was well-known for making men fighting drunk), and the second was intoxicated with 'fine old whisky' with the result that it became 'markedly hilarious', the maturity and the lack of toxic ingredients obviously agreeing with the chimp. Once sobered-up, the experiment was reversed, causing the quarrelsome beast to cheer up somewhat and the contented one to become aggressive. The conclusion drawn was that new or freshly distilled whisky did have an adverse effect, at least on monkeys, and that its storage to allow maturation appeared to be beneficial.

From Bad Whisky: The Scandal That Created The World's Most Successful Spirit, by Edward Burns

In Review: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva

Gin is not dead. Hope I didn't spoil the plot or anything, but I had some last night and it was quite tasty. Very herby. And junipery. In fact, you could argue that, with the recent births of a number of high quality US gins and the global relaunch of Bols Genever, that gin has never been in better health. But I'm not one for arguing, and anyway, of course it has. Patrick Dillon's book is concerned with the period of time known as the Gin Craze, the mania that accompanied London's fixation with cheap spirits in the 18th Century. In 1743, the stills of the capital produced 2.2 gallons of the stuff for every man, woman and child in the city, which still wasn't enough for Judith Defour, who left her child naked in a field while selling her clothes in order to buy more gin. Such excess couldn't be tolerated and Dillon tells of the attempts to bring Madam Geneva to heel.

Of course, not all of those attempts were intended as a moral cleanser. The First Gin Act of 1729 is weighed against Robert Walpole's search for "enough cash to buy off a king" while the Act that actually worked was not one of prohibition, but one that would allow the Government to incrementally raise the revenue it gained from spirit production. Dillon provides a useful chronicle of how societies deal with new drugs: first there is wild consumption set against staunch moral outrage, followed by prohibition and widespread lawlessness, and finally, the intervention of central government once a potential revenue stream is identified. This is how drugs move from illicit through illegal into acceptability.

Dillon gives his tales of debauchery and heavy-handed sermonising a wonderful sense of place in the growing metropolis. Even with its splintered boroughs and conflicting laws, London itself almost seems a character in a cast that includes Daniel Defoe, Dick Turpin and the lawman Thomas De Veil amongst a milieu of prime ministers, kings and ambitious clergymen.

The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva is a fantastic book, accessible yet packed with detail. For anyone interested in the history of spirits, it shows how the industry has moved from Hogarth's Gin Lane to something looking a lot nearer Beer Street.

Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva (Amazon.co.uk) The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva (Andrew Lownie Literary Agency)

Sunday Night Open Mic: it ain't where you're from

I'd been planning on writing a post to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Repeal Day. It's a day worthy of celebration for anyone who works with alcohol and reminds me that bartenders have an obligation to dispense spirits, liqueurs and wines responsibly. The problem is that I don't have a lot to add - US Prohibition carries more weight over here in symbolic terms rather than practical ones. My first thought had been to write about the legacy of Prohibition in terms of its effect on the culture of bartending and alcohol consumption, but Camper English wrote a great post at Alcademics.com that hit the topic right out of the ballpark. My second thought was, "it's 3am on Saturday morning, I've got a 12 hour shift starting in 8 eight hours and I haven't slept or eaten since Thursday." Sleeping is over, work is over and Repeal Day is over. We didn't have a shindig to celebrate US citizens' ability to drink booze for three quarters of a century. After all, we've been doing it for much longer in the Old World. Eastern European peasants discovered that skimming the slush off the top of a frozen barrel of mead made for a way more interesting evening. Canny Scots - I don't think they come in other varieties - hid whisky distilleries so far into the glens that the excise men couldn't find their stills to assess their tax liability. Londoners even got up to producing north of 2 gallons of gin for every man, woman and child in the capital, in a calendar year. Round here, drinking has a long and storied history. That's not to say that alcohol can't lead to societal problems, because it can and it does - there's no better illustration to that than working in a bar over the Christmas period - but it's part of the culture, as much as football (the one where you actually use your feet), talking about the weather and disliking the English. Having never had it taken away, we don't feel a powerful need to mark the occasion.

But, still, I'd missed a party. It happens, so I sat down with the Sunday papers and came across Miranda Sawyer's column in the Observer Music Monthly:

Still, who cares about gossip? There are still bands having their moment, whose small press acknowledgement coincides with a ground-swell of love from us punters, a realisation that, yes, this is music to cherish.

Back at university, I was music editor of the student newspaper. One of the key battlegrounds in the struggle against manufactured pop was authorship - popular music couldn't truly be authentic and therefore artistically interesting if its authorship was in doubt. For example, the awkward, vacuous sentimentalism of Starsailor's debut album would be deemed more vital to our cultural life than the entire oeuvre of Girls Aloud. This was not a bold position for student critics to take: "mainstream" was our black spot, the kiss of death, our ultimate seal of disapproval. The question of authorship would, in some cases, override all others - my review of the previously mentioned Love Is Here listed every discernible influence on the album and seemed to view the fact that they were so blatantly obvious as a good thing. I may have used the words "proud songwriting tradition".

No, I am not proud.

The point I'm digging at is this: whether you're listening to a song or a symphony, the most important question is "do I like what I'm hearing?" If the answer's "yes", then nothing else matters. So, cocktails. Bear with me.

I can't source it online, but there's a bartender themed version of the lightbulb joke.

Q: How many bartenders does it take to change a lightbulb? A: What's wrong with the original bulb? It's got 100% authentic ingredients, classic presentation - look, are you saying Edison didn't know what he was doing? It's better this way... 

Heading into work this evening, I pulled off a sales report to adjust my stocking levels ahead of next weekend. The report contains a breakdown of all of the wet (alcohol) sales in my department, including cocktails, which I always check for trivia's sake. The top three tend to swap places throughout the year, but at any given time it will contain:

• Mojito
• Cosmopolitan
• French Martini

...and those three drinks will be head and shoulders above the next tier of drinks, which is made up of a couple of our original cocktails and classics like French 75s, Bellinis and Long Island Iced Teas. You have to get right into the long tail before you start seeing things like Martinis and Manhattans. Even Margaritas are rare, and Sidecars and Old-Fashioneds appear on a chart measured against months, not days.

This seems counter-intuitive, given that classic cocktails represent a huge part of my training. They are the foundation on which my  ability to make new drinks is built. Looking at their recipes and structures let me pull back the curtain and see the old guy behind it, the insides of cocktails. My thinking is so skewed towards the classics that I can tell you how to make a Gin Daisy off the top of my head, but I have to look up the Alabama Slammer.

Working behind a bar tells you that classic cocktails aren't that popular. Britain may have a centuries-old tradition of social drinking, but our cocktail tradition is much younger. But how much?

I'd guess it's about 75 years old.

Prohibition saw an emergence of a cocktail tradition, or at least the recognition of its existence, outside of the USA. It's often said that the essential American cocktails are the Martini and the Manhattan; in the UK it's probably a vodka-Coke, and there's one good reason for that. They've been doing it longer than we have.

Focusing on the history and traditions of mixology has improved product quality in the industry - Edinburgh's bartenders are creating better drinks than they were five years ago, but that focus isn't a major concern for the consumer. A successful bar is one that makes money, regardless of how intimately its staff know Jerry Thomas. Manhattans might have the heritage, but French Martinis move units, and that is the ballgame.

Time to make a tenuous connection.

There's no reason to discount a drink because it doesn't fit your idea of what a cocktail should be. For every bartender who rolls his eyes and closes his mind when he discovers a drink has Malibu in it, for every mixologist who won't look at a bottle of vodka, for every bar chef who thinks a product isn't "premium" enough, try this: have a taste and ask one question: "do I like the way this tastes?"

Nothing else matters.

In review: Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

Here's what I know about Cuban independence. It turns out you can write entire books on what I don't know about the history of Cuba. Helpfully, Tom Gjelten has done just that and he's even made particularly relevant to the likes of me by looking at the subject through the lens of the Bacardi family.

I hadn't really associated Bacardi with Cuba in the past. When they started printing "Casa fundada en Cuba, 1862" on their UK bottles a couple of years ago, I was one of the knowing bartenders who would turn the bottle over and point out the words "Product of the Bahamas" on the back label. Of course, I was aware that Bacardi had been founded in Cuba and had fled when Castro nationalized their facilities on the island in 1960, but I'd never thought of it as being particularly tied to any one country. My experience of Bacardi was as a global product from a multi-national corporation. But from small acorns, y'know.

The impressive thing about Gjelten's book is the way he emphasizes those Cuban roots at every stage of the story. There are points when the company seems to represent everything Cuba could be and yet, by the end, the Bacardi company I'm familiar is as far away from the old idea of a free Cuba as the Castro regime. The Bacardis turn out to be the perfect guides to Cuban history, from Facundo Bacardi's struggle to establish a life for his family during the Spanish colonial period to Emilio Bacardi Moreau guiding both his company and hometown through revolution and regime change. There are cameos from Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemmingway, Che Guevara, and there's always the long shadows cast by Cuba's homegrown dictators, Batista and Castro.

It's not a book about bartending. It often seems like the fact that the Bacardis made rum is incidental to the drama, which is, I guess, true. Ultimately, it's a book about people and the trouble that comes when you get enough of them together to form a family, to form a company, or to form a nation.