Canon and craft
Cocktails by style
Two different questions, answered on one page: where does this drink sit in the canon, and how much does it ask of me?
The era lists are built from curated period data rather than guesswork, and they are deliberately incomplete: 107 of the 152 alcoholic recipes on the site are confidently placed in a period, and the rest are left out. Any drink whose dating is genuinely disputed — and a surprising number are — has no era at all rather than a plausible-looking guess.
That means an era page is a list of drinks we can confidently place in that period, not a complete history of it. The history section explains why that distinction is worth insisting on.
The other three lists — beginner, bartender-style and showpiece — are computed from difficulty, ingredient count, preparation method and garnish, all of which the catalogue records per recipe.
The pre-Prohibition and Prohibition-era canon — the drinks everything since has been measured against.
Post-repeal drinking: tiki, the vodka boom, and the drinks that defined the decades the craft revival reacted against.
Recent enough that we usually know who invented them, established enough that a good bar is expected to know them.
Easy builds with few ingredients and almost no equipment — the drinks to learn on, chosen for forgiveness rather than simplicity alone.
Drinks that ask something of you — advanced technique, unusual builds, or enough moving parts that order matters.
Drinks with real presence — elaborate garnish, distinctive glassware, or a build people watch you make.
Other ways in