There’s a new* trend for premixed cocktails in cans or bottles. The word “new” gets an asterisk because there have been trends for premixed cocktails every so often going back over a hundred years.
But there’s no doubt we are experiencing a surge. Just consider the hype — curiously similar hype at that — being offered up of late. “The Best Canned Cocktails, Ranked By Bartenders,” proclaimed a headline at HuffPost Life this June. Delish.com had “15+ Canned Cocktails—Best Canned Drinks.” Marie Claire claimed to be more discriminating, narrowing their list down to “The Very Best Canned Cocktails in the U.S. in 2019.” The Thrillist made it rather more specific with “Best Canned Cocktails to Drink This Summer,” following a week after the Wall St. Journal promised “The Canned Cocktails You Should Be Sipping This Summer.”
Alas, I will not be doing any testing to see what the best canned cocktail is because I object to the concept. Canned cocktails are like canned music — the alcohol equivalent of lip-synching.
But they have long had an audience, or rather audiences, as the consumers have fallen into varied categories.
The earliest efforts at premixed cocktails — Heublein’s bottled “Club Cocktails” around the turn of the 20th century — sold the notion that its drinks improved with age. Typical is a Heublein advertisement that declaims with the huckster-confidence perfected in the Gilded Age: “It must be accepted as a fact, ratified by the general experience of the trade that an aged mixed drink of any kind is superior to one made as wanted.” What delicious buncombe! “Ratified by the general experience of the trade!” Oh, what elegant eyewash.
In those days, well before Prohibition, most cocktails were made in bars. But during the Dismal Experiment, people had to learn how to mix drinks at home. And by midcentury many were still lacking confidence in their skills, an uncertainty ruthlessly exploited by the hucksters selling prefab quaffs.
Calvert, for example, advertised its ready-made stuff as “Goof-proof.” For those perplexed by the mysteries of the jigger and pony, Calvert promised that with their product “there’s no way to make a mistake.” (Well, other than buying the junk in the first place.)
In the sixties, Heublein was still in the game with ads featuring sternly suave, pre-mustache Robert Goulet pronouncing, no doubt in a dulcet bass-baritone, “Most people can’t make cocktails as good as these — and I wish they wouldn’t try!”
Old Bob Goulet must have had a feeble group of friends, because when it comes to most, if not all of the classics, drinks are remarkably easy to make well. All you need to make a superb Martini, for example, is a good Junipery gin, good dry vermouth, ice, and two minutes with which to stir. Really, how hard can it be? (And that includes the challenge of removing an olive from a jar.) Were I not so forgiving of human folly, I would be tempted to declare that those who can’t be bothered to make a proper drink don’t deserve one.
Then again, the cocktail renaissance of the last 15 years or so has spawned a trend for the fussy and over-engineered. Drinks have gotten so complicated that even some haute cocktailian boîtes are resorting to premixing their elaborations in bulk so that the bartender doesn’t have to endure the effort and indignity of actually making a cocktail. “Pre-Mixed Cocktails Are Gaining Ground in Bars and Restaurants,” Bloomberg reported in March. “It’s easier on the servers and allows us more time to talk to the guests and make sure they’re having the best experience possible,” explained Naren Young, creative director of a Manhattan bar called “Dante.”
My guess is they named the bar Dante because in Hell’s level four-and-three-quarters they charge $20 a drink for premixed cocktails, thus liberating “servers” to chat up the clients instead of practicing that noble art that rivals jazz as America’s gift to world culture.
Remind me not to go there.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
