How a Private-Club Cocktail Escaped Into the Wild

We’re now in what the Wall Street Journal recently dubbed the “golden age of the private club.” This, of course, is nonsense. The true golden age was, appropriately, during the Gilded Age, the era from shortly after the Civil War to nearly World War I. In 1893, some 119 private clubs were found in New York City alone, with membership totaling approximately 24,000. (That’s according to Club Men of New York by J.H. Rossiter.)

This was the time of oil and steel tycoons with impressive sideburns, and railroad barons and department store merchants of notable corpulence. By day and by night, they gathered in social clubs like birds flocking to their trees, each according to their plumage. (By “they,” of course, I mean wealthy, white males.)

What they did in these private clubs was, by definition, private—but accounts suggest that it involved leather chairs, the reading of newspapers, frequent harrumphing, grousing about politics and the stock market, the smoking of cigars, and pretending not to conduct business. Also, they drank.

Some of these clubs also developed signature drinks, and occasionally one escaped its dusky confines and made it out into the light of day.

They drank port and wine, naturally, but also cocktails. It was, after all, the epoch when the Martini and the Manhattan and the Old Fashioned were coming into full bloom. But some of these clubs also developed signature drinks, and occasionally one escaped its dusky confines and made it out into the light of day.

One of these was the Florestan cocktail.

The Florestan Club opened on North Charles Street in Baltimore in 1911. It began as a club of musicians, both professionals as well as serious amateurs. It was named after an 1835 work by the German composer Robert Schumann—which featured a character named Florestan, an impulsive, striving sort, whose name derived from the Latin word for “blossoming.” Club members included brewery owner Frederick H. Gottlieb (“the best-known amateur musician inthe city”) and Wilberforce G. Owst (“the man with the long mustache”). Club members would go on to found the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1915.

The club also had literary members, which was in large part why the Florestan cocktail found some fame. Among these was the noted writer H.L. Mencken, who with writer and critic George Jean Nathan founded three prominent magazines in the early part of the last century. The pair wrote about the Florestan cocktail in The American Mercury, in which they mentioned it as a drink that required its own style of glass.

“Roughly speaking, there are … only three kinds of cocktails that may be served in a single kind of glass without grievously offending the cognoscenti.” (They never actually specified what type of glass it required but noted that to serve in the wrong kind was “akin to serving Pilsner in a punch glass.”) “When you hear a person say that cocktails do not agree with him,” they asserted, “it generally means that it is the glass the cocktails have been served in that does not agree with him.”

The glass may have led to heightened attention because the Florestan [cocktail] was neither complex nor terribly creative.

The glass may have led to heightened attention because the Florestan was neither complex nor terribly creative. It was, essentially, a gin Martini made with sweet instead of dry vermouth, and brightened with a dash of absinthe. The recipe was featured in the 1930 edition of Noble Experiments, a Prohibition-era compilation of favorite drinks of notable people. (“History only will know what this inspired little band of scientists has done to brighten these dark days of Volsteadism, and only the Lord knows the risks I ran in trying out their concoctions,” wrote the editor.)

The Florestan reached its zenith in large part thanks to Nathan’s prose. He wrote about the dancer Adele Astaire—Fred’s older sister, who at the time was considered the better dancer of the two. Nathan, who was also Adele’s suitor for a time, wrote that she danced like “a dozen Florestan cocktails filtered through silk.” This is a curious description, as one assumes that a dozen cocktails would not yield a graceful dance, no matter how many yards of silk were employed. Adele did not achieve the terpsichorean fame of her brother; she retired at age 35 to marry a British royal, and lived in Ireland in what she described as a 200-room castle with one bathroom.

The Florestan Club was similarly short-lived—it shuttered in 1917, just six years after it opened. The reason, according to the son of a founding member: “Lowbrows began to invade it and destroy its character. So the founders closed it up.”

Mencken and Nathan wrote in The American Mercury: “The waster is not he who wastes his time drinking but he, rather, who wastes his drinking. We owe it to the cocktail to keep it safe from democracy.” One can only hope that the modern revival of private clubs will keep the cocktail safe from the perils of democracy, at least for another generation.