"museum of the american cocktail" news and stories

Rarely in the drinks business do you find a couple actually working together as partners, equals behind the bar. Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown may not be working full time behind the bar as a cocktail couple, but they sure do contribute a lot to the cocktail community as writers and historians.

I first met them as founders of the Museum of the American Cocktail, in New Orleans, where drinking history is told via displays of old books, bar tools, advertisements, and educational seminars. I later spent some time with them as they painstakingly preserved thousands of bottles housed on the Ĭle de Bendor in the south of France, where in 1958 Paul Ricard of pastis fame began a grand collection (including items from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe) of drink history called the Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spiritueux (EUVS). If you can make it to Bandol, the lovely boat ride to see the amazing displays of bottles, old menus, and glassware is well worth the effort, but if that's not in the cards you should peruse the collection on the EUVS website.

To further cocktail conversation, they launched Mixologist: The Journal of the American Cocktail and then later The Journal of the European Cocktail that serve as periodicals for scholarly research and debate on the origins, history, and sociology of spirits, cocktails, and the places that serve them. The journals have included in-depth articles on everything from the chemistry behind simple syrup to the lore of the mint julep (penned by yours truly).