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That's the marketed, romanticized side of the booze industry. The reality is more like this:
A sizable fraction of the liquor on the US West Coast comes from Frank-Lin Distillers Products.[1] They used to be near the San Jose railyards, but now they're in Fairfield, with better rail access. They need rail access because the ethanol comes in by the trainload, in tank cars.[2] One of their major suppliers is MGP Ingredients in Illinois. They used to be called Midwest Grain Products, and before that, Midwest Solvents. MGP provides pure ethanol to both the beverage and gasoline industries.
Frank-Lin has their own water deionization and filtering plant on-site, to take all the minerals out of tap water and have just pure water. They do some additional processing on the ethanol to remove trace impurities. Then they mix ethanol, water, and flavoring to produce beverages. They have about a thousand different products - vodkas, gins, brandies, bourbons, rums, and wines, but only about a hundred different recipes.
Each brand has its own bottle design and label. The Ball bottle-making factory is conveniently next door. Frank-Lin has an advanced bottling line that can automatically change from one bottle to another without a shutdown.
Frank-Lin also does "contract bottling" - they will make your brand for you. They used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy was a virtual company - everything was outsourced, like a app startup. Skyy was bought by a major distiller a few years ago, which pulled production in-house.
Once you get past the marketing, that's the reality.
[1] http://www.frank-lin.com/ [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.278159,-121.973672,3a,75y,11...
MGP makes lots of stuff, not just ethanol: http://www.mgpingredients.com/product-list/
Here's how it works with whiskey: http://blogs.ocweekly.com/stickaforkinit/2014/07/mgp_whiskey...
Indeed, I've tried several MGP-sourced ryes (knowing that they came from MGP), and found them to be good products. What bugs me, though, is the marketing BS that's thick enough to lay on with a trowel.
The central problem, though, is that whiskey is an unpredictable business, compounded by the necessity of aging the product. Rye lurked in the shadows for a long time, then suddenly became trendy. The result: crazy price jumps, proof reductions (I'm looking at you, Wild Turkey), and everybody and his brother jumping on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, that results in a proliferation of me-too products, and separating what's real from what's BS can be a chore.
I'm still wishing I had gone with my gut feeling and bought a case or two of Rittenhouse Bonded rye back when it was cheap.
Are you saying all Frank Lin products are made with the same grain ethanol and just different flavourings? I'd be astounded if that's the case. I thought things labelled as for example 'wine' or 'rum' had legal definitions. Can you really sell flavoured grain ethanol as unqualified 'wine'?
If you look at their site, it's all college rot gut, and well liquor level stuff. It's the brands that you go and get a giant 1 Gallon handle for 10$. Which makes sense given their business model.
This is the stuff you'll get at a corner bar when you say "I don't care." When they ask what kind of vodka you want.
Wine is fundamentally different from liquor, but he's probably referring to fortified wine, which is cheap wine with neutral grain spirits added to it.
Do they do work for Diageo? It looks like the list of products, at least on their site, isn't something I really encounter in advertisements, promotions or really at any bars I've gone to.
On the topic of branded alcohol and mixed drinks, I got interested in the rise of both a ways back and did some digging, much of it by way of the Google Books ngrams viewer.
The part that wasn't particularly surprising was that mixed drinks and cocktails, along with associated terms ("cocktail hour", "cocktail party") largely date to U.S. Prohibition, when bootleg (and low-quality) hard liquor had to be mixed with other ingredients to become drinkable: http://goo.gl/EBXM87
What was more surprising was that the vast majority of branded alcohols dated to no earlier than the 1950s. Baccardi Rum is a notable exception showing up in the 1920s (http://goo.gl/it9vOc)
Schmirnoff: 1950, on the nose: http://goo.gl/j0yle3 http://goo.gl/YxXJ9i
Remy Martin, Beefeater, Gordon's, and Bombay Gin: 1950s: http://goo.gl/qX6JEY
That "traditional old Number 7" Jack Daniels? 1970s: http://goo.gl/JWVLG6
And an "Irish pub" is really a 1990s phenomenon: http://goo.gl/vLwvTn
And if you look at many of today's "trendy" brands, most are creations of the 1980s, 1990s, or later: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120306152857A...
"Mixology" itself -- also largely a creation of the past 20 years: http://goo.gl/1hVsEU
And whiskey, the American version at least, was largely created to allow movement of an otherwise unusable product -- frontier grain -- to the population centres of the East Coast.
Your "sophisticated drinks" are an ad-man's creation.
> And an "Irish pub" is really a 1990s phenomenon
That is an extraordinary conclusion which requires a bit more evidence than you're putting forward.
Another interpretation of the data is that the entire idea of a bar, pub, or corner bar was Irish by default until the 90's, when it became necessary to distinguish between different types of bars.
As an older fellow, my memory from well before the 90's is that what we think of now as an "Irish Pub" would have just been called "a bar" back in the day.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/03/irelan...
Ireland, as much of the world knows it, was invented
in 1991. That year, the Irish Pub Company formed with
a mission to populate the world with authentic Irish barI believe it. In the little midwest town I was living at the time in the mid 90's "Irish Pubs" started appearing seemingly out of nowhere. Somehow St. Patrick celebrations and "Irish Pride Heritage" was also started to get popular.
Even some highschool people who had no Irish heritage decided they wanted to be "Irish". One hung the Irish flag in his room, smoked pipe tobacco, and wore a green kilt to parties.
It was Irish-mania.
> The part that wasn't particularly surprising was that mixed drinks and cocktails, along with associated terms ("cocktail hour", "cocktail party") date to U.S. Prohibition, when bootleg (and low-quality) hard liquor had to be mixed with other ingredients to become drinkable.
That's not totally true - Jerry Thomas published How to Mix Drinks or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion in 1862. Punch (sort of the precursor to cocktails) has been around even longer.
Not to mention cocktail the term dates to the early 1800s.
"Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, in as much as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else"
Also, the Old Fashioned cocktail was created in the later 1800s to bring back the cocktails from the earlier 1800s instead of the garish concoctions that the contemporary bars were mixing. Ironic that until the craft cocktail revolution that modern Old Fashioneds included the "garbage" that the original was eschewing
Indeed.
Folks who are really interested ought to read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399532870/
I'm very glad that Old Tom Gin is finally starting to become available again.
I've updated my post with the ngram for "cocktail, cocktail hour, cocktail party, cocktail lounge", from 1850-2008: http://goo.gl/EBXM87
You'll find that as with the others I've cited, it shows a rapid and dramatic growth during Prohibition, to levels not achieved previously, and which have been maintained since.
Subsequent peaks in 1953, 1985, and 2002.
I'm aware that "appearance in print" is only a proxy for cultural prevalence. But it's a good one.
> What was more surprising was that the vast majority of branded alcohols dated to no earlier than the 1950s.
I can't cite, but I've read that before Prohibition, you pretty much went to a bar and ordered "whiskey", "rum" or whatever booze by style, but not by brand name. There wasn't much in the way of differentiation in the market. But during Prohibition, drinking random booze had a real risk of getting you sick, blinded or dead.
This was because 1) A lot of alcohol was still being produced for industrial uses. 2) To enforce Prohibition, that industrial alcohol was treated with additives to make it disgusting and poisonous to drink. 3) To fill the still-existing market for booze, some people sold alcohol that was made to be industrial but later had the additives (mostly) extracted.
During that time, having a trusted source of quality booze (booze that won't kill you) was suddenly very valuable. Good sources started the branding process to capitalize on that new market demand. Those who branded well grew. And, the rest is history.
Using the Google Books ngram viewer doesn't seem to be the best source for determining the age of alcohol brands. The dates you present are no where near the actual ages of the brands. Smirnoff and Bacardi were both founded in the 1860s, Beefeater and Jack Daniels the 1870s, Gordon's is from 1769, and Remy Martin is from 1724 (source: Wikipedia).
The ngram viewer, you're correct, doesn't clearly indicate the origin date of several of these names.
But you can bet your patootie it shows you when they emerged into common and popular usage. And that's the point I'm making here.
Yes, some of those brands "existed" going back through history to dates earlier than U.S. Prohibition. I explored that aspect in an earlier question to reddit's /r/AskHistorians, and from what I could glean from that, while the names existed they were largely as small and local establishments. Not the national conglomerates we've got today.
Most large alcohol brands underwent a revolution in the post-WWII era. Many far more recently than that.
One of the key differences before and after prohibition was who controlled the sale of what booze.
Before prohibition, a majority of saloons were 'tied-houses', meaning they bought from a single brewery. (Part of this was due to the massive industrialization of brewing by a few highly successful companies) Fierce competition between local saloons ensued, and larger brewers would fight marketing and price wars against local competitors, driving them out of the market.
Their marketing and sales tactics also contributed to the abundance of 'social ills' that were part of the argument for prohibition in the first place. The Anti-Saloon League was actually the most powerful lobby for prohibition, beating out both the Women's Christian Temperance Union and Prohibition Party combined.
To combat the problems brought by saloon monopoloy, new legislation after prohibition required brewers to be separated from the retail operation by the requirement of wholesalers for distribution. Once brewers no longer had a monopoly on a given retailer, all earlier concepts of branding and marketing changed. No longer would you go to a 'Pabst saloon' (which was the only viable saloon in town), but instead just any local saloon, tavern or bar, and select one of the local brews.
There are older cocktails - e.g. the Sazerac, the Gin fizz, and related drinks which were refined in the late 1800s. The Mint Julep (which you may not accept as a cocktail) goes way back further.
It is probably true that fussier drinks are more recent, but there are probably plenty of specialty drinks that have simply been forgotten.
If you are researching names you know, you will probably come up with a newer pedigree.
Also it is unfair to be lumping cocktails together with "branded alcohol", though it is true the brands have had a hand in pushing cocktails, they didn't invent the idea.
[edit: 1862 bartender's guide to mixed drinks] https://books.google.com/books?id=QDUEAAAAYAAJ&dq=Bar-Tender...
Also the gin and tonic, a result of British Imperialism encountering Tropical Disease.
Again: the historical record, indicated by prevalence in the Ngram viewer, suggests a fairly recent emergence in the general public discussion of both cocktails and branded liquor.
Bombay Sapphire is a product of the 1987. I had always assumed it was some sort of old liquor back from when India was controlled by the Brits. I'm sure that was their goal.
Quite.
I was first introduced to the concept of alcohol branding by way of the wine industry (at one point Pepsi, by way of Diageo, owned a number of Napa Valley properties). The "fake rustic / family / small one-off" vibe of a great many wineries, breweries, distilleries, bars, etc., is little but a show.
Though yes, there are also genuine family-owned outfits. They just don't have hundred-million-dollar advertising budgets. Well, except for the Gallos.
On Diageo's holdings: "Diageo's brands include Smirnoff (the world's best-selling vodka),[7] Johnnie Walker (the world's best-selling blended Scotch whisky),[8] Baileys (the world's best-selling liqueur),[9] and Guinness (the world's best-selling stout).[10][11] It also owns 34% of Moët Hennessy, which owns brands including Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot and Hennessy.[12][13] It sells its products in over 180 countries and has offices in around 80 countries."
Guinness has quite a long ngram history, and I suspect that most of it is due to the stout. It goes down during Prohibition, though if you switch to British English it continues upwards during that era.
FWIW, http://www.pre-pro.com/midacore/snyder.php says there wasn't a national trademark protection before 1905. That would have given only 15 years for a national brand to assert itself before prohibition.
http://nypost.com/2014/10/18/what-every-president-drank/ says that Wilson's campaign song "Wilson's. That's all" came from a then popular whiskey brand. That would have been before prohibition. The brand was: Wilson "That's All" Old Label Blended Whiskey. There's a picture of a bottle at https://www.pinterest.com/engraver26/beer-booze-bottles-labe... , but that's a post-prohibition bottle.
There are some pre-prohibition brands at https://www.sweeney-emporium.com/cgi-bin/go.pl?session=a2bjr... .
Apparently there were plenty of brands pre-prohibition. So I think what you're seeing is that the most popular drinks now don't have a long history, not that brands are a result of prohibition.
what you're seeing is that the most popular drinks now don't have a long history, not that brands are a result of prohibition.
That's a possibility. And prohibition certainly put a lot of established liquor companies out of business. Though that doesn't address the question of why the sudden rise to prominence of brands from 1950 onwards -- 17 years after repeal.
Trendy brands are fashion items with limited product histories? Who would have guessed?
In any case, it's instructive to look at old menus and wine lists to get a feel for what was actually on offer way back when. For the most part, cocktails as we know them don't show up until the 1940s or so. Though it's worth noting there aren't a lot of speakeasy menus around.
On the other hand, generic types of liquor like "old tom gin" or "rye" date back well into the 19th century.
Wine brands certainly date back even further, and interestingly it's the champagnes that have changed very little in the top brands for centuries. Some beer brands, particularly Guinness and Bass have been popular on American menus for a long, long time.
Browse the New York Public Library's historic menu collection here- http://menus.nypl.org/
If it's not something you think much about, the history can be pretty surprising. I happen to have spent much of the past few years rummaging about in the archive closets of the Industrial Revolution -- its emergence and development. Part of that story is of development of technologies and products, some is how those came to be branded and merchandised.
It's fascinating history.
James Burke in his 1979 series Connections dates modern consumer goods to Wedgwood China in the 18th century.
The first real "personal appliances" -- consumer mechanical products -- were the bicycle and sewing machine, both emerging in the 1880s.
Edward Bernays and principles of modern PR and advertising would make another excellent topic of exploration.
All of which goes over and elucidates a tad more than snark.
But the NYPL link is appreciated.
Interesting that branded bourbon is an outlier, having some well established brands by the end of the 1800s (Forester, Weller, Grandad, Crow, etc)
I don't think your comment on whiskey fits in with your thesis. Whiskey is the answer to "what should we do with all of this left over grain?" throughout the Western world.
Whiskey production in the US exploded following expansion over the Cumberland Gap past Appalachia. See, e.g., http://www.whisky.de/archiv/beginner/bourbon_hist.htm
The routes were overland (rivers have a hard time crossing mountains), this was pre-railroad (let alone highway). There was significant grain production, that couldn't be moved feasibly by other means.
I was specifically addressing the case within the U.S., not the rest of the world, though yes, you're generally correct. Fermenting (and sometimes distilling) grains, fruit, potatoes, etc., is a way of storing surplus production in a form that's resistant to rot or other decay.
It's easy to write an article poking fun at fern bars and pseudo-naughty drink names like Slippery Nipple. People in the past and their absurd habits - so unbelievably shallow. So unlike you and I, who have discovered genuine connoisseurship concerning drinking habits.
But history is unforgiving, and the laugh will be on us. In a few years the term "mixologist" and the whole discourse concerning bitters, muddling, and artisanal gin is going to be ripe for the comedic shredder. I look forward to it.
Dare I say it is already here. The mixologist is a pretentious name for a bartender. Though I'd argue there is nothing wrong with bitters, muddling or artisan liquers.
I can go to any number of bars in Sydney where a 'mixologist' can't make a simple Belvedere Vodka, a bit dirty (not slutty). Go to a place that has a bartender, and at least you've got a shot at something half decent.
When I worked as a bartender, if we didn't know what a particular drink was, and the customer didn't know what was in it, we just asked "What color is it?". We usually came up with something satisfactory!
Not just mixed drinks: Prohibition killed decent American beer & wine as well, and led to decades of industrialized, homogenized mediocrity that we are still recovering from.
I'd argue the recovery is about complete.
Go into any neighborhood liquor store, and in addtion to the Big Three and the other inexpensive pale lagers and pilsners, you'll also see something from one of the major craft breweries (Samuel Adams, New Belgum, et. al), -- a couple amber ales, and at least one pale ale or wheat ale. Go into a larger liquor store, and in addition to the above, you're likely to find beers from other craft breweries local to your region, all of them offering various ales and lagers ranging from very pale and light to very dark and heavy, and plenty of points in between.
There's good stuff to be had. You just have to be willing to consider beer to be more than cheap pale lager, and to go looking for it.
I can get all the great beer I want in the US. At this point, if people are still drinking Coors and Budweiser and wondering if there's more to life, that's their own problem.
Not just alcohol. An interesting observation in An Economist Gets Lunch (one of my favorite books on food) is that Prohibition is responsible for putting many great restaurants of the era out of business (restaurants make money on alcohol). The remaining restaurants adjusted to a more "family-friendly" palate, (think grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, and cheeseburgers) and away from more subtle flavors.
The article ended just as I was expecting the meat. The article seemed to want us to blame women for this, but never quite dared to say as much outright.
Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one (if you're worried about the nutritional balance of your cocktail, the alcohol will kill you first). A clever name doesn't have to mean a bad drink. The disappearance of federal regulation was interesting, but it doesn't seem like it tells the whole story - it's not like those federal whiskey inspectors have been reintroduced (have they?).
I don't know how you managed to pull misogynist tones out of this--author merely pointed out that, to increase patronage, bar owners moved towards more open and public spaces. It's just what the market wanted.
Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one.
So, again, you're missing the point: strong mixers (sweet or sour!) cover up bad ingredients and also cover up bartenders being incompetent. It's not a choice between sweet, sour, and whatever else in a good mixed drink; it's a bartender knowing how the flavors fit together in the drink, and knowing how the flavors vary across brands and years of theoretically the same ingredient. For example, there are several different manufacturers and brands of gin, and what works well in a gin and tonic may fail to test nearly as good in a proper martini.
It's more economical and requires vastly less skill to dump vodka or well tequila into a sour-mix and thrown in some cubes and give to a patron, than it is to pick the right tequila off a bar, pair with the right liquors, and add just a slight amount of mixer for flavor, and then serve.
FWIW it's often the bitter flavor tones (as well as the actual booze taste) which are viewed as the more True Believer flavors, not sour.
In general when you see that sort of talk decrying the "rookies" and "amateurs" they're talking about drinks designed to cover up the booze and classic booze-y flavors, and those tend to be sweet & sour mixers. And no, there's nothing wrong with those drinks, drink what you want.
In related news, a list of what whiskey brands are owned by which of the big-four companies: Pernod Ricard, Diageo, Suntory, and Brown-Forman:
"Bourbon or scotch? You may be surprised by who owns your favorite whiskey" Raghu Manavalan, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - 15:53
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/numbers/bourbon-o...
Somewhat off-topic, but I've really enjoyed the "Bartender" manga over the years and its historical digressing into various mixed drinks.
I can't vouch for accuracy, but it's an entertaining read.
You can learn all kinds of things from Bartender, like how to turn someone's life around by serving them whiskey with water.
He truly makes the bar tender.
It seems like cost should at least be mentioned.
It may not be the sort of thing your average SF tech worker can relate to, but for many Americans the choice between a $10-$20 mixed drink and a $2 double shot of a well liquor (with more ethanol than the mixed drink) is no choice at all.
Not sure I agree. At least around where I live (Boston) the older style ("Dark Ages" in the parlance of TFA) bars are also serving $10-$20 mixed drinks, they're just not as good.
For instance, a Dark Ages bar you'll be paying $15+ for a bird bathed style "martini" which is simply chilled vodka (martinis are not vodka, and they should have a measurable amount of vermouth) or you're paying the same for a proper 3-4 oz sized craft cocktail.
This article wasn't talking about cocktails vs slugging shots of straight liquor, rather it was talking about how wretched the state of mixed drinks themselves became.
A Manhattan made with high-grade ingredients is sublime, but DIY is far more cost-effective than having someone else do it for you. Plus, there's lots of room for experimentation (maybe try different types/amounts of bitters, using rye rather than bourbon, or adding a dash of absinthe, or different mix ratios for the main ingredients).
<boggle>
Is this the kind of thing I'm missing out on by living outside a dinky little town out in the country? $20 for a mixed drink is insane. Who buys this crap?