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1 week ago | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
Way back in 1900, there was a hot new musical playing on Broadway: Florodora. The production had been such a hit in London the year before that it made its way to Broadway. The show became known for its attractive cast, particularly the “Florodora Sextette,” a rotating group of six actresses that figured heavily in the show.
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4 weeks ago | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
Every day at Whoopsie’s in Atlanta, the bartender on duty makes a selection from the annals of cocktail history to serve as the drink of the day. Each featured recipe is then recorded in a big Moleskine book, into which co-owner Tim Faulkner has been entering drinks for 15 years. The book serves as both an archive of the recipes and an easy way for any Whoopsie’s bartender to recreate a previously featured drink for customers who come in asking for one.
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1 month ago | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
When it comes to the tropical canon, rum is by far the preeminent spirit. Though it’s not the only spirit used in such drinks, the bar team at Tern Club in Knoxville, Tennessee, which leans on tropical classics, is always on the hunt for recipes that show “a different spirit profile,” according to Jocelyn Morin, the bar’s co-owner. The fruit of one such hunt was the Tropical Itch.
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1 month ago | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
It seems that all the major literary circles of the early 20th century were awash with cocktails. There were little cliques of writers, journalists and entertainers that would haunt the same clubs, hotels and restaurants, putting back a never-ending string of drinks between deadlines. And like Hollywood and Broadway before it, many figures from this milieu lent their name to a cocktail or two. But in some cases, multiple names were attached to the same mixture.
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2 months ago | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
Alejandro Medina first encountered the Parkeroo 15 years ago while working at Anvil in Houston, where the bar program famously emphasizes the classics, both well-known and obscure. Medina, like Anvil owner Bobby Heugel, was a great advocate for agave spirits. There, early examples of tequila-based cocktails were of particular interest, especially if the drink was less expected, and had no relation to the Margarita.
The Parkeroo, with its mixture of dry sherry and tequila, fit the bill.
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2 months ago | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
When Shannon Mustipher was opening Glady’s Caribbean in Brooklyn back in 2015, she devoted a lot of energy to dialing in her versions of classic tropical drinks at a time when the available rum selections were far more limited than they are today. One such cocktail was the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. “I was interested in it because it posed a challenge for me,” she recalls.
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Feb 10, 2025 | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
The Ward Eight is, famously, the only classic cocktail to come out of Boston and somehow make it into the 21st century. Many say that the drink (typically made with whiskey, lemon and orange juices, grenadine and, originally, soda water) was born at the city’s old Locke-Ober restaurant, but its origins are disputed; after all, fine dining was not, at the time, a culture from which new cocktails often sprung.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
When the auto manufacturer Rolls-Royce opened its doors in 1904, cocktails were already over a century into their existence. But there was something about automobiles—and airplanes—that seemed to go together with early 20th-century cocktail culture; it was all so fast and modern and debonair. The decades preceding World War II saw several cocktails honoring this instant connection—from the Bentley to the Aviation, the Pan-American Clipper and, of course, the Rolls Royce.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
The Bee’s Knees is an undisputed classic. A Prohibition-era gin sour made with honey, it’s beloved, not just because of its old-timey name, but also because it harks back to the “golden age” of cocktails. But for Bee’s Knees fans who want to branch out, there’s a deep cut that’s mostly been left to history—until now. Enter the Bebbo.
The first extant recipe we have for the Bebbo comes from a little-known 1937 book out of New Orleans: Gerald Marco and Hyman Gale’s The How and When.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
punchdrink.com | Al Culliton
Jeremy Oertel has kept the Fancy Free in his back pocket for years. He first encountered the maraschino-laced Old-Fashioned when he was working at Brooklyn’s now-closed Dram, where guests often asked for the bartender’s choice, back in 2010. “The Old-Fashioned was super popular,” he says. “But they’d have an Old-Fashioned and say, What’s next?”
Maraschino liqueur can be a very polarizing ingredient, but Oertel’s always been a fan and has thus always championed the classics that call for it.
