Barman Henry LaFargue is wrapped in a snowy white chef’s coat, pulverizing blocks of fresh ginger and pineapple with a heavy muddler. He adds a careful measure of Trinidadian rum and maraschino liqueur, shakes the mixture vehemently and pours out the result: a Ginger Smash. It is a fragrant, sweetly stinging masterpiece, and it’s why I’ve come to Manhattan: to seek out the best in modern mixology. Here at Employees Only in the West Village, I’ve found a little piece of it.

LaFargue’s coat is apt; this is culinary bartending, practised by students of history who care about quality and get the details right. They ap­proach their job as a craft, inspired by the classic bartenders of the pre-Prohibition era whose cocktail knowledge was encyclopedic and whose skills were alchemical. In small pockets across North America and the U.K., the old ways are being re­discovered by a few devout mixers.

Gary Regan, author of The Joy of Mixology, calls this new generation of bartenders “cocktailians,” a label he devised to distinguish them from the perfunctory shot-and-pint pourers who tend most bars. A cocktailian is set apart by a deep knowledge of ingredients and a special ability to fuse complex assortments of liquor into harmonious mixtures. “Like a chef at a five-star restaurant versus a guy who slings hash at a diner,” Regan explains.

If there’s one person who can lay claim to starting the modern cocktailian move­ment, it’s New York bartender Dale DeGroff. “King Cocktail” is credited with springboarding the cocktail out of the Dark Ages. In the mid-1980s, during stints at Manhattan’s Rainbow Room and Blackbird, DeGroff went about resuscitating sidecars, pisco sours, aviations and Sazeracs, drinks that had been disinherited in favour of the hapless Harvey Wallbanger.

“Nobody else was doing this stuff,” says DeGroff, flashing his blue-stone Bartender Hall of Fame ring. “Cocktail menus were stuck in a drawer in the 1960s and never taken back out.” Now working as a consultant to cocktail bars around the globe, DeGroff continues to spread the cocktailian ethos to a worldwide audience.

One of DeGroff’s star apprentices, the blond, bespectacled “Libation Goddess” (her online moniker) Audrey Saunders, is the reigning deity at the Pegu Club in SoHo. She advocates expanding the cocktail maker’s repertoire by incorporating ingredients such as salt, spices, hydrosols (the by-product of steam-distilled essential oils), teas and textures (like emulsified egg white and flavoured foams) into classic drink formulas.

Saunders’ cocktails are ingredient-driven in the same way that nouvelle cuisine is. They are drinks that express the true character of each component while combining them in novel ways. Although she insists that she is truly “an old-school girl at heart,” her efforts are sketching the shape of the 21st-century cock­tail. Bourbon muddled with fresh peaches, anise and hyssop? Earl Grey tea with Bombay Sapphire gin stirred into a martini? A mojito with lemon verbena or geranium in place of the mint?

Consider the fact that diners are less willing to put up with the shoddily constructed cocktails they’ve endured in the past, add newly in­spired bartenders, and you’ve got an atmosphere ripe for experimentation. The trouble is, there just aren’t that many cocktailians around. Train­ing is virtually non-existent and, when it does exist, bartenders are not taught the way chefs are, with a rigorous focus on the fundamentals.

To that end, Gary Regan established a cocktailian retreat called Cocktails in the Country, a kind of boozy boot camp. Ensconced in pictur­esque Cornwall-on-Hudson in upstate New York, Regan instructs novice bartenders in the Zen of ex­pert mixing, drawing from his 40 years of experience in the field. This past summer, I attended.

My cohorts were a motley assortment of curious aficionados, seasoned pros and rank amateurs, drawn from all across North America. We had little in common besides a fondness for great drinks. Beginning with the fundamentals (using only fresh ingredients and quality spirits), Regan then preached flexibility, encouraging his students to develop their own technique. “Rec­ipes are merely guidelines,” he said. “You have to feel your way through each drink.” To him, each cocktail is sui generis, individually tailored to each imbiber.

After three days of peeling, paring, measuring, muddling, shaking and stirring and “scientifically sampling” several dozen drinks, we became cocktailians. Regan has been teaching the course since 2001 and in that time has tutored nearly 500 bartenders. Not an army, for sure, but perhaps the first stirrings of a cocktail revolution. 

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Chris Stearns is one of Canada’s foremost mixologists. You can reach him at cstearns@enroutemag.net.