How Technology Rescued Cocktail Tradition

Before the internet, there was the Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide. First published in 1935, it was a slim red volume, updated annually with recipes for popular cocktails. In the early days it was thin and could fit under the cash drawer in the register.

Over time, customers became less discerning as to how their cocktails were crafted. It was an era of wine spritzers and light beer. Mr. Boston was set aside—only one update was published between 1974 and 2005. Cocktail mutations arose, then became part of the canon. Bitters failed to go into Manhattans. Entire cartloads of fruit were unloaded into the Old Fashioned.

“The cocktails were terrible in the ’90s,” says Robert Hess, creator of the DrinkBoy website and forum in the late 1990s. “A lot of the people out there now drinking at craft cocktail bars don’t realize just how bad cocktails were.”

After questionable cocktails became ingrained, it was hard to shake them loose. ”One bartender talks to another. And if the first bartender didn’t know how to do it right, those he taught didn’t know how to do it right either. It became a generational thing,” Hess says. “And if it hadn’t been for the internet, that probably wouldn’t have changed.”

Give [the internet] credit for this: It may have saved the cocktail.

The internet gets the blame for a great many social ills—our inability to focus, navigate, remember things, or hold a conversation for more than two minutes among them. But give it credit for this: It may have saved the cocktail.

Hess was a tech evangelist at Microsoft in Seattle in the ’90s. He decided to teach himself about cocktails, but found the products in the liquor store a bit confusing. “If you went to a bookstore, they might have had hundreds of books in their cookbook section and maybe two or three books in their cocktail section,” he says. As was fitting for a tech evangelist, he sought answers on the relatively new World Wide Web.

Here, he came upon a weekly column called “Cocktail Time,” which launched in 1995 on Hot Wired, an online offshoot of the upstart magazine Wired. Bartender Paul Harrington with Laura Moorehead wrote the column. And every Thursday they investigated the history and making of a single cocktail.

Inspired, in early 1998 Hess launched DrinkBoy, one of the early cocktail blogs. A year later, interested in taking Microsoft’s new discussion group platform out for a test drive, he started the DrinkBoy forum. Early cocktail luminaries like Gary Regan, Dale DeGroff, Ted Haigh, Martin Doudoroff, Audrey Saunders (now married to Hess), and David Wondrich signed on. And the forum emerged as a place of genteel debate over the making of proper cocktails. It was essentially a 19th century gentleman’s club, although with less cigar smoke and more typos.

“Suddenly you’re not alone anymore,” Hess says. “We’d talk about the old cocktail books. And we talked about bitters an awful lot.”

This included Abbott’s Bitters, a long-extinct brand that was commonly called for in the classic cocktail texts then being unearthed. Hess tracked down an antique bottle on eBay and sent it out for gas chromatography analysis. The results were published and debated online. Some board participants—including The Bitter Truth in Germany and Darcy O’Neil’s The Extinct Chemical Company in Canada—began their own research and production of vintage bitters. And so drink ingredients moved from crypt to online community to bar cabinet.

Other influential cocktail forums and blogs followed throughout the early 2000s, including Darcy O’Neil’s own Art of Drink (2005), Camper English’s Alcademics (2007), and Matt Rowley’s Whiskey Forge (2008). In 2006, cocktail blogger Paul Clarke (now an editor of this magazine) launched Mixology Monday as part of his Cocktail Chronicles blog. There, drinks bloggers would host online get-togethers to test out variations of drink recipes in dozens of home bars worldwide. In 2008, bartender and blogger Jeffrey Morgenthaler gave a talk at Bar Convent Berlin, an international cocktail conference, titled, “How to Use the Web to Connect to the Global Bar Community.”

Interested in exploring cocktails? You have the libation equivalent of the Library of Alexandria at your fingertips.

Cocktail fans the world over suddenly had free and easy access to information about all manner of cocktail making—technique, ingredients, history. And then came social media. Today, every mixologist, either professional or amateur, is also a documentarian. They’re able to roam the bar world with broadcast studios in their pockets, chronicling every clear ice cube and garnish. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok encourage the dissection and analysis of every drink in a way that Mr. Boston could hardly imagine. Interested in exploring cocktails? You have the libation equivalent of the Library of Alexandria at your fingertips.

In 2012, Mr. Boston published its 68th and final print edition, and then made a decision that would have seemed unthinkable in 1935. After Sazerac Co. purchased the brand, Mr. Boston went fully digital. The little red book that once sat alongside cash registers transformed into a vast online archive. The Mr. Boston website now offered searchable recipes from dozens of earlier editions.

Cocktail culture may ebb and flow in future years, as these things always do. But it’s inconceivable that the DNA of classic cocktails will ever again be lost.