Bars – especially those billing themselves as cocktail bars, but also restaurants with what we now call ‘cocktail programs’ – are taking time with their drinks, carefully measuring ingredients, making syrups and infusions in-house. They painstakingly press and strain fresh juice (or construct acid-adjusted simulacra of the same), reconstruct long-forgotten classics and obscurities, and build novel drinks out of an ever-expanding array of unusual, unexpected, and – even to sophisticated drinkers – largely unknown ingredients. If you want a Manhattan variation made with Fey Anmè – a forest liqueur inspired by Haitian botanicals and made from hibiscus buds, dandelion, and bitter melon . . . well, some enterprising bartender probably has you covered. And if not, with a little bit of effort, you can probably stir one up at home.
This is a far cry from the simplistic, slapdash, thoughtlessly boozy drinking culture that ruled from the 1970s through the 1990s. It’s fussy, precise, thoughtful – at times almost overeducated – and it has resulted in a rapid improvement in the quality and creativity of craft cocktails since the turn of the century. This period of improvement has been called the cocktail renaissance.
But as much as anything, the revitalization of the cocktail has been built on an obsession with ingredient quality and variety, and a pursuant explosion in product availability. Put simply, cocktails are better and more interesting because what we put in them is better and more interesting, thanks to a combination of demand from knowledgeable practitioners and supply from importers and entrepreneurs delivering products to meet that demand.
As modern cocktails continue to evolve, so will the revolution in ingredients, as ever more sophisticated customized creations become part of the tool kit for both top-flight bars and home bartenders. Indeed, you can already see the seeds of the next stage of the renaissance beginning to flower, as modern cocktail wizards apply increasingly abstruse culinary techniques to both classic drinks and novel creations.
------
To understand the role that ingredient availability has played in the cocktail renaissance, consider the Aviation.The Aviation is a shaken gin-based cocktail with a distinctive lavender hue; conceptually, it’s best understood as a tailored variation of the sour – a broad cocktail category that, in its most basic form, involves a spirit, citrus juice, and some sort of sugar or other sweetener.
The first known appearance of the classic recipe came in Hugo R. Ensslin’s pre-Prohibition cocktail guide, Recipes for Mixed Drinks. In Ensslin’s formulation, the drink calls for four ingredients, as follows:
Modern readers might notice a few historical quirks about the recipe. For one thing, there are no units of measurement specified – no ounces, no teaspoons, just ratios and ‘dashes’. The book was published in 1916, before today’s standardized measurements were in use.
For another, the listing of ‘maraschino’ would have referred to some form of maraschino-flavored liqueur. Today, there are multiple brands available in many parts of the country, and even if a recipe writer did not specify a brand, he or she would probably have noted the fact that it’s a liqueur in order to differentiate it from the thick, sugary, nonalcoholic syrup one finds in a bottle of preserved maraschino cherries.
And then there is that final ingredient: crème de violette. Crème de violette is exactly what it sounds like – a ‘crème’ or sweet liqueur flavored with, among other things, flowers. It’s purplish in tint, and it can give the cocktail a distinctive lavender hue. Arguably, it’s the cocktail’s signature ingredient, the element that piques a drinker’s interest both in terms of how it looks and how it tastes.
Flash forward to the turn of century, however, and the ingredient had disappeared. New York Times cocktail scribe William Grimes once reportedly told cocktail enthusiast and author Ted Haigh that the Aviation was his favorite forgotten cocktail. But in Straight Up or On the Rocks, Grimes’s groundbreaking 2001 book of cocktail history and recipes, a recipe for the Aviation appears without any mention of crème de violette. Other highly regarded, thoroughly researched cocktail books from around the same time followed suit: Haigh’s book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails prints an Aviation recipe without the flower liqueur, as does legendary bartender Dale DeGroff’s book The Essential Cocktail.
Both Haigh and DeGroff are modern legends in the cocktail world, known for their thorough research and exacting cocktail preparation methods. Both would have been aware of Ensslin’s original, historic formulation. So why the omission?
One reason is that more than a decade after Ensslin’s book appeared, British bartender Harry Craddock published The Savoy Cocktail Book, which compiled drinks served at the Savoy Hotel in London. It has since become a sacred text for bartenders, and Craddock’s version of the Aviation did not include any crème de violette. (Haigh also writes that the original had both maraschino and either crème de violette or Crème Yvette, a proprietary violet petal liqueur, and notes that substituting either Yvette or crème de violette for maraschino results in a different cocktail: the Blue Moon.)
Another reason, however, is availability. Even as recently as the 2000s, crème de violette was all but impossible to obtain in the United States.
Crème de violette was produced in Europe, and Prohibition’s near-total restriction on alcohol sales and purchases shut down legal trade in spirits through the 1920s and early 1930s. Meanwhile, according to Dinah Sanders’s entry in The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, European interest in crème de violette faded around the same time, in part because some felt the flowery spirit tasted a bit too much like soap.
So even though Prohibition ended in 1933, crème de violette did not return to American bars and liquor stores. The unique floral booze was gone from domestic distribution, and while one could still obtain a bottle in France, even there it was relatively obscure. Thus, Ensslin’s Aviation became a thing of legend.
At least, that is, until the late 2000s. Credit for the return of crème de violette goes to spirits and wine importer Eric Seed. In 2005, Seed founded Haus Alpenz, initially to distribute a relatively obscure Australian pine liqueur, Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur of the Alps, which he marketed to upscale bars at ski resorts, according to a 2009 Atlantic article on Seed’s importing business.
But Seed was also aware of growing interest in other arcane ingredients, including some liqueurs mentioned in historical cocktail recipe books that could no longer be found in American liquor stores. So in 2007, Sanders writes, Haus Alpenz responded to ‘a small but persistent demand from modern mixologists’ by bringing crème de violette back to the US via the Rothman & Winter brand. Its primary intended use was as a cocktail ingredient for the nascent cocktail revival.
At first, it was difficult to find, as many liquor stores didn’t see the need to stock something so strange and obscure. But a small number of dedicated craft cocktail bartenders began to put the Aviation on their menus or make them off-menu for friends, and within several years, crème de violette became one of Seed’s top sellers. By the early 2010s, the drink became a sort of secret handshake between discerning drinkers and barkeeps – a wink and a nod between those who knew.
Today, you can order or make at home any number of purple-hued drinks that use the stuff. Some, like the Purple Reign 75, a riff on the French 75, are modern riffs on historical cocktails. Others are wholly modern creations like the Stormy Morning, which combines one flower ingredient with another – elderflower liqueur. If you’ve ever seen a lilac-colored cocktail served at a bar, there’s a good chance that it was made with crème de violette.
The first known appearance of the classic recipe came in Hugo R. Ensslin’s pre-Prohibition cocktail guide, Recipes for Mixed Drinks. In Ensslin’s formulation, the drink calls for four ingredients, as follows:
- ⅓ lemon juice
- ⅔ El-Bart gin
- 2 dashes maraschino
- 2 dashes crème de violette
Modern readers might notice a few historical quirks about the recipe. For one thing, there are no units of measurement specified – no ounces, no teaspoons, just ratios and ‘dashes’. The book was published in 1916, before today’s standardized measurements were in use.
For another, the listing of ‘maraschino’ would have referred to some form of maraschino-flavored liqueur. Today, there are multiple brands available in many parts of the country, and even if a recipe writer did not specify a brand, he or she would probably have noted the fact that it’s a liqueur in order to differentiate it from the thick, sugary, nonalcoholic syrup one finds in a bottle of preserved maraschino cherries.
And then there is that final ingredient: crème de violette. Crème de violette is exactly what it sounds like – a ‘crème’ or sweet liqueur flavored with, among other things, flowers. It’s purplish in tint, and it can give the cocktail a distinctive lavender hue. Arguably, it’s the cocktail’s signature ingredient, the element that piques a drinker’s interest both in terms of how it looks and how it tastes.
Flash forward to the turn of century, however, and the ingredient had disappeared. New York Times cocktail scribe William Grimes once reportedly told cocktail enthusiast and author Ted Haigh that the Aviation was his favorite forgotten cocktail. But in Straight Up or On the Rocks, Grimes’s groundbreaking 2001 book of cocktail history and recipes, a recipe for the Aviation appears without any mention of crème de violette. Other highly regarded, thoroughly researched cocktail books from around the same time followed suit: Haigh’s book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails prints an Aviation recipe without the flower liqueur, as does legendary bartender Dale DeGroff’s book The Essential Cocktail.
Both Haigh and DeGroff are modern legends in the cocktail world, known for their thorough research and exacting cocktail preparation methods. Both would have been aware of Ensslin’s original, historic formulation. So why the omission?
One reason is that more than a decade after Ensslin’s book appeared, British bartender Harry Craddock published The Savoy Cocktail Book, which compiled drinks served at the Savoy Hotel in London. It has since become a sacred text for bartenders, and Craddock’s version of the Aviation did not include any crème de violette. (Haigh also writes that the original had both maraschino and either crème de violette or Crème Yvette, a proprietary violet petal liqueur, and notes that substituting either Yvette or crème de violette for maraschino results in a different cocktail: the Blue Moon.)
Crème de violette was produced in Europe, and Prohibition’s near-total restriction on alcohol sales and purchases shut down legal trade in spirits through the 1920s and early 1930s. Meanwhile, according to Dinah Sanders’s entry in The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, European interest in crème de violette faded around the same time, in part because some felt the flowery spirit tasted a bit too much like soap.
So even though Prohibition ended in 1933, crème de violette did not return to American bars and liquor stores. The unique floral booze was gone from domestic distribution, and while one could still obtain a bottle in France, even there it was relatively obscure. Thus, Ensslin’s Aviation became a thing of legend.
At least, that is, until the late 2000s. Credit for the return of crème de violette goes to spirits and wine importer Eric Seed. In 2005, Seed founded Haus Alpenz, initially to distribute a relatively obscure Australian pine liqueur, Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur of the Alps, which he marketed to upscale bars at ski resorts, according to a 2009 Atlantic article on Seed’s importing business.
But Seed was also aware of growing interest in other arcane ingredients, including some liqueurs mentioned in historical cocktail recipe books that could no longer be found in American liquor stores. So in 2007, Sanders writes, Haus Alpenz responded to ‘a small but persistent demand from modern mixologists’ by bringing crème de violette back to the US via the Rothman & Winter brand. Its primary intended use was as a cocktail ingredient for the nascent cocktail revival.
At first, it was difficult to find, as many liquor stores didn’t see the need to stock something so strange and obscure. But a small number of dedicated craft cocktail bartenders began to put the Aviation on their menus or make them off-menu for friends, and within several years, crème de violette became one of Seed’s top sellers. By the early 2010s, the drink became a sort of secret handshake between discerning drinkers and barkeeps – a wink and a nod between those who knew.
Today, you can order or make at home any number of purple-hued drinks that use the stuff. Some, like the Purple Reign 75, a riff on the French 75, are modern riffs on historical cocktails. Others are wholly modern creations like the Stormy Morning, which combines one flower ingredient with another – elderflower liqueur. If you’ve ever seen a lilac-colored cocktail served at a bar, there’s a good chance that it was made with crème de violette.
And Rothman & Winter is no longer the only brand that produces it; there are now at least a half dozen brands available. I currently possess three different bottles, each with its own subtly different character – one is a little sweeter, one is a little more floral, one is a little more earthy. They all work in an Aviation cocktail, but the drink’s flavor profile differs subtly depending on which bottle you employ.
The story of the Aviation, then, is the story of the entire cocktail renaissance – a story of rediscovery and revitalization, with novel ingredients coming back to the bar.
The story of the Aviation, then, is the story of the entire cocktail renaissance – a story of rediscovery and revitalization, with novel ingredients coming back to the bar.
by Peter Suderman, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: The Spruce Eats/Cara Cormack via
