1946 The Stock Club Bar Book by Lucius Beebe

national spirits 0£ the United States in the eighteenth century were almost universally popular because of their immediate availability, their integration to the islands trade in cane and molasses and their suitability to cold climate, outdoor life and generally unheated houses. Champagne became the favorite drink of the nineteenth cen– tury Russian nobility because of its costliness and exotic nature, and to lend it an authority lacking through natural fermentation it was heavily fortified for ·the Russian market with cognacs and other brandies. Madeira was atene time the universal wine among people of manners and position in America because of its trade accessibility to clipper shipping. Similarly it is quite possible to trace a close parallel between the trend of American life away from the countryside toward cities and the rise in mixed drinks, imported beverages and a general alcoholic sophistication. There are still American frontiers where a drink means only one thing: Bourbon whisky, and the only chaser think– able is beer or soda water, but these are fast vanishing. The once wicked mixed drink is now almost universal, and in polite circum– stance, where the object is to extend the pleasure and usefulness of a drink over the longest possible social and conversational period, the tall mixed drink flourishes luxuriantly. The lore 0£ keeping bar has become ertormously complicated for, while the vast preponder– ance of orders are for drinks which can be numbered on the ten ' fingers, a knowing barman must be able, instanter and without refer– ence to other authority, to compound any of several hundred stimu– lating arrangements, and even the conventional stand-bys, Martini cocktails and Scotch highballs, are subject to little variations and the perfections of individual taste and practice. It is with the end in view of recording the preferences, practices and prejudices of drinkers at the wonderful and legendary mahog– any of the Stork Club that this book has been evolved. It is not the

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