Cocktail Questions: What's Next for Cocktails?

What to do when we reach Peak Cocktail.

In this edition of Cocktail Questions, a reader question that is actually a lot of questions, all of which amount to:

• What’s next for cocktails, and the art and practice of cocktail making?

Do you have a question about cocktails, bars, booze, home bartending, or something else related to the topics discussed in this newsletter? Send your pithy, clear question to me at cocktailswithsuderman@gmail.com

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Hello! As a long-time reader of your newsletter, and someone who became a career bartender and bar manager after studying and learning from that newsletter, I’d like to ask for your perspective about the future of the craft cocktail movement.

At heart the question is simply “Where next?” but to pose it from a few different angles:

• Given everything that has been accomplished by bartenders and mixologists over the past 25+ years, what are the most promising directions for bartenders and bar owners to explore to create new experiences for cocktail enthusiasts?

• If you had to set the menu and creative direction of a bar today, what would you put on that menu? What would make it exciting to you, and what criteria would you judge your work by?

• If a bartender has invested sufficient time learning the history of the cocktail and the modern cocktail revival, and developed their foundations and techniques and library of basic specs with sufficient thoughtfulness and care, and has delved into the more advanced techniques in books like Liquid Intelligence and the Aviary and their descendants, and has worked to broaden their knowledge of lesser known spirits, where should they focus their efforts next to grow in their craft?

• What should a bartender do today in order to become someone whose story is worth telling (like the bartenders listed in A Proper Drink?)

—John

John,

You became a professional bartender after reading this newsletter?!

That’s amazing—and incredibly gratifying, especially since my main goal, from the beginning, was merely to help home bartenders understand what they were doing, and make better drinks at home.

In some ways, that’s also a preview of my answer(s), which is that I’m not a bar professional.

In my youth, I worked as a server at a couple of restaurants, but I have never mixed a drink professionally, at an actual operational tavern, in my life. My focus has always been on the drinks themselves, rather than on the business of selling them in a retail environment. These are different things.

I like bars, and I try to keep up with the news and the hype, but I’m an interested outside observer, but not a professional insider. So take anything I say accordingly.

The good news for cocktail enthusiasts is that we have crossed the Rubicon: The Cocktail Renaissance is over. And it’s over because the work is (mostly) done.

You can think of the Cocktail Renaissance, which ran from about 2000 until sometime in the early/mid 2010s, as the boozy-drink equivalent of HBO’s golden years, when shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire showed everyone just how good television—a medium long thought to be sort of crass and basic—could be. What followed was a boom in scripted television series, many of which aimed at the same mix of critical acclaim and upper-middlebrow prestige appeal. That boom in scripted series gave us what FX boss Jon Landgraf famously called Peak TV.

Something similar happened with cocktails: A handful of really good bars, bartenders, and drinks enthusiasts showed the world just how good a mixed drink could be. And then came a wave of imitators, updaters, artists, and entrepreneurs who took those ideas and used them to create bars, restaurants, and home cocktail experiences all over.

Today, we are at Peak Cocktail. Interesting cocktails, historic cocktails, high-concept cocktails, thoughtful and thematic cocktails—they are now just about everywhere. Some of these drinks are even pretty good. And every now and then, these drinks are even very good.

Bars like Double Chicken Please, which built its reputation on insanely clever drinks designed to taste like food staples, and Superbueno, which serves a Vodka Soda—a Vodka Soda!—that is so complex to prepare I don’t have space to describe it, have picked up first-class accommodations on the hype train, and deservedly so.

The brooding, ultra-dark New York drinking den Death & Co. has expanded into a luxury brand with hotel offerings and new establishments bearing less-brooding branding, as well as an endless procession of new drinks featuring ever-more-obscure ingredients.

Martiny’s, another buzzy newish bar in NYC, serves a Vesper—a James Bond-derived vodka-+gin Martini variation that is famously impossible to make well—that is somehow one of the best drinks I had last year.

Cocktail maximalism is thriving. But what’s missing from the market right now is simple, reliable excellence—especially from bars outside the major cocktail innovation metros.

There should be well-enough-known cocktail bars in Dayton, Ohio, and Lexington, Kentucky, and Jacksonville, Florida, that don’t try to blow your mind with obscure ingredients or complex preparations, but that instead specialize in serving perfect, precise renditions of well-worn classics: Martinis, Negronis, Old Fashioneds, Sazeracs, Daiquiris, Mai Tais, Whiskey Sours—Whiskeys Sour?—and so forth.

What the cocktail world needs right now isn’t cleverness or innovation or novelty—it’s back-to-basics, geographically accessible excellence.

To some extent, this is a customer education challenge: More people need to understand what those drinks should taste like, so they will seek out and pay for a superior experience. I don’t know whether a bar that just served really, really good Boulevardiers and Daiquiris and so forth would make it in Cincinnati or St. Louis or Boulder or Grand Rapids. Most new businesses fail, and the bar and restaurant business can be tough. But this seems like the gap in the market to me.

That more or less answers your question about what menu I’d design for a bar opening right now: It would focus on a list of a dozen or so classics and standards that never left the menu. And then there would be a rotating list of seasonal drinks, mostly lesser-known drinks from old cocktail books (3 Dots and a Dash in the summer, Bobby Burns in the winter, amaro-spiked sours in the fall, and so forth). There might occasionally be house specials, and some idiosyncratic personal fixations—a weekly Cynar night?—but the primary focus would be on execution rather than innovation. Every single drink would be made just right every single time.

In some respects, it would look a lot like this newsletter, which cycles through seasonally interesting drinks, often nods toward cocktail history, and tries to keep the classics in mind—while occasionally taking a break with a fun gimmick or a personal obsession. This newsletter is the bar I’ll never open, in essay form.

As for advanced techniques: I think more bartenders would benefit from looking at recipe books that have nothing to do with cocktails. Learn food history, and food preparation techniques, and then try to think about ways to cross-pollinate that knowledge and incorporate those ideas into liquid form. I have a project in mind along these lines that may eventually make it into this newsletter.

I also suspect that the non-alcoholic drink boom will continue, and go through its own revolutions. There’s a lot of undiscovered territory in the world of NA drinks, and a growing market. If you want to innovate, figure out how to make world-changingly great cocktails with NA spirits.

If you do, that will be a story worth telling. The modern history of boozy, pre-Prohibition-style cocktails has been told, and the star bartenders have secured their place in cocktail history. But I’m not sure there’s an NA startender yet—though if there is, it’s Derek Brown. As we’ve seen over the last 25 years, there’s room for more than one.

The trick, the almost impossible trick, is to do something truly great, something truly notable, in your own personal way, in a place where you can get attention and stand out from the crowd. Novelty helps, though novelty doesn’t necessarily mean originality as a craft bartender. Marketing, branding, packaging, all matter too. Double Chicken Please’s drinks are excellent and fairly complicated. But at least some of their success is a product of the cocktails-as-food concept, which makes for great marketing. Sometimes novelty comes in the form of a unique synthesis of vibes and sensibilities and sales pitches rather than original drinks.

All of this is obviously quite difficult to pull off. There’s no step-by-step, repeatable guide to achieving that sort of success. Be distinct. Be excellent. Be yourself. That’s really all any of us can ever hope to be.

You Know What Big Boy? You’re Growns Up and Your Growns Up!