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The Mix Masters1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Itinerary | Home To engineer the perfect cocktail, bartenders are distilling booze to its very essence. At the slowly revolving Carousel Bar in New Orleans’ Hotel Monteleone, I’m sipping a Sazerac and watching a crowd of bartenders assemble for Tales of the Cocktail, a week-long celebration of mixology. Think of it as a Star Trek convention for the bibulous. They’ve come here, like me, to gleefully dissect the minutiae of their profession in exhibits and seminars like Aqua Vitae: The Spirited History of Alcohol as Medicine and On the Rocks: The Importance of Ice. In its five-year history, the event has charted the remarkable resurgence of the skilled mixologists who have brought the profession back to its roots and recaptured cocktail culture’s lost brilliance. Bartending today is remarkably like it was 100 years ago, before Prohibition stuck a cork in all the fun and put the craftsmen out of work. This year, one development stands out, and it will do for bartending what the chef’s garden did for cooking. Some expert mixers, no longer content to experiment with the spirits, bitters and liqueurs made by the big distillers, have taken the logical next step: crafting their own raw ingredients. These distologists – a conflation of “distiller” and “mixologist” – have traded silver shakers for copper stills and are rebuilding cocktails from the bottom up.
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