A few weeks ago, in this space, I made my peace with the long-brewing trend of packaging craft beers in cans. But there is a parallel trend that I cannot abide: putting what are presented as craft cocktails in cans.
I tried a number of the new pop-top drinks to spare you, dear reader, the ordeal. I drank a “Ready to Party” canned margarita from Mexico’s Reyes Y Cobardes, a corpse reviver No. 10 from Maryland’s Tenth Ward Distilling Company, and a “Tiki rum mai tai” from San Diego’s Cutwater Spirits. They were all so awful that I quit right there. The corpse reviver, for instance, was corn-syrup sweet with a viscous mouthfeel to match. The mai tai was simply an abomination (Will someone please tell the Cutwater crowd that there is neither pineapple nor coconut in a mai tai?).
I never got to the offerings from other new cocktail canneries, such as Social Hour, Tip Top Proper Cocktails, and Siponey, and I’m not going to.
Every so many years, someone comes out with a line of ready-made, premixed cocktails and proclaims them to be a grand innovation. It’s happened again, but this time, the purveyors are yawping about the tremendous novelty of cocktails in a can. Imbibe magazine noted that the current fad isn’t exactly new: In the ’70s, one could buy Party Tyme canned cocktails. I might add that the Heublein brand was selling canned cocktails in the late 1960s and had been bottling cocktails since the 19th century.
“A Cocktail Anywhere,” proclaimed Heublein’s advertisements in the 1890s. The Manhattans, martinis, and York cocktails were “always ready for use” and needed no mixing. “They are of more uniform quality and more thoroughly mixed than those prepared in a moment as wanted,” Heublein’s copywriters enthused.
Which brings us to one of the problems with relying on factory-produced drinks: There will come a day when the factory stops making one’s preferred concoction, and then, where are you? The York cocktail is a case in point. Now that Heublein is long gone, what is a York cocktail aficionado to do? If she knew how to make the drink, of course, she could just mix one up herself. The drink may be forgotten, but there is a recipe for the York in one of the classic turn-of-the-20th-century bartender’s manuals, George Kappeler’s 1895 Modern American Drinks. Combine equal parts Scotch and dry vermouth, add three dashes of orange bitters, stir with ice until very cold, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and garnish with a twist of lemon peel. Now, was that so hard that anyone ever needed it pre-prepared for them and bottled?
I should point out that the York, even freshly made, is a horrible cocktail that lapsed into obscurity for good reason, which only leaves the question why anyone would ever have bothered to bottle it in the first place.
Or, to put it slightly differently, who drinks ready-mixed drinks anyway? Holland House used to sell drink mixes to which one only added the liquor. In 1960, the company was doing a roaring trade, selling some 3 million bottles of the nasty stuff. The New York Times blamed the suburbs. People moved out to Jersey or Connecticut and found themselves separated from their favorite watering holes. The city had given them a taste of “sophisticated” drinking, but out in the ‘burbs, they found themselves bereft of the lemons and bitters needed for cocktail-making.
To which one can only shake one’s head: What kind of sophisticate is it who doesn’t know how to secure a bottle of Angostura? What Holland House’s customers lacked, the New York Times sneered, was, “perhaps, just the real sophistication and assurance that was necessary to mix a cocktail of their own.”
By the mid-‘60s, Calvert had joined the pre-fab chorus with its “goof-proof cocktails.” Calvert, too, pushed the proposition that combining gin with dry vermouth or rye whiskey with sweet vermouth are challenging tasks. But don’t worry! Calvert claimed that with its product, “No one — not even your goofy Aunt Marjorie — can go wrong.”
Now that the trend has come back around, I will happily leave the canned cocktails in the custody of Aunt Marjorie. I’ll make my own drinks, thank you very much. And if I goof them up every now and then, well, that’s just a chance I’ll have to take. In the immortal words of Jim Backus, “What could go wrong with an Old Fashioned?”
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
