On July 4, 2023, Alan and I started one of my favorite traditions, Manhattan Monday. Every week, we experiment with different cocktails that riff off of the Manhattan, or occasionally on the Old Fashioned, and then I post about it on social media. 

At the time, I thought it might be a fun thing to do. I didn’t realize how much I would learn or how many stories I would find. Uncovering tidbits of information on the names of cocktails, the bartenders who created them, or the distilleries that make the spirits has become the highlight of my week. 

In the past year, we’ve made cocktails like the Brooklyn, which let me write about the French cavalry sergeant who developed Amer Picon to ward off malaria. When we tried the Berlioni cocktail, I discovered that the owner of Gompers Distillery in Redmond, Oregon named the distillery after her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands. My cocktail research even taught me that a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle coined the term Beatnik in 1958 by combining the word Beat (as in Beat Generation) with Sputnik. It was his way of suggesting that Jack Kerouac and his poet friends were all communists. Beatnik may have started as a pejorative, but it has become synonymous with a social, artistic, and political movement, not to mention being the name of a great cocktail.

Have you ever done research for one thing that let you stumble upon a story you never knew existed?