Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans
Scenes from Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans
The Cocktail Derby Is Sticky and Hard Work: Surviving Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans
By Paul Oswell
This is an unpublished version of a feature written in 2015 for The Guardian (UK)
New Orleans in July is not a fun holiday destination so much as it’s a meteorological trial that you can only hope to survive. It’s a humidifier turned to 98%, dressed up as a city where I suspect the air itself might actually be fermenting. I’m flying in with nothing but a rental car reservation, a notebook, and a professional obligation to document a week talking to dozens of the world's most functional alcoholics.
They call it Tales of the Cocktail, and it’s been happening here for thirteen years. Founders Ann and Paul Tuennerman decided the best way to celebrate a city built on rum, sugar and bad decisions was to slowly walk people between its bars, grab some mixed drinks, and charge admission. She and her husband Paul run the whole ungodly circus, and people call them ‘Mr and Mrs Cocktail’ without a hint of irony.
Why does the entire drinks industry regularly choose this particular circle of hell to hold their annual convention? Why submit to the torture of weather that’s as oppressive as the many, inevitable hangovers? Can it really just be for the cheap hotel rooms? A week later, as I checked out of the historic Hotel Monteleone (cocktail Ground Zero for the week) I understood all of this and more.
The first morning in the hotel lobby. I’m new here, so I look for and find a passing expert. "It's...a week-long party, a marathon, a convention and an endurance test," cocktail historian (yes that’s a real job) David Wondrich tells me in the hotel lobby on the second morning. I write that down because it sounds so succinct even if, on reflection, three of the adjectives mean the same thing. Wondrich is one of the most respected voices in cocktail culture, an opening quote from him will at least give me some gravitas, I think; something I’m in dire need of.
The 17,000 human ingredients for this annual concoction are as esoteric as the foams and tinctures being swirled around various rocks glasses. There are eccentric academics, the most famous and objectionable egos in mixology, wide-eyed cocktail enthusiasts from around the world and legions of people “in the biz”, for which read employees of multinational hooch vendors.
Diageo is the global booze conglomerate that owns half your liquor cabinet, from Johnnie Walker, to Captain Morgan, to a Tennessee whiskey that nobody outside Tennessee has heard of. They’ve got nothing to prove, and are one of the less interesting stories in town, but they do throw huge parties.
I had five or six invitations for subsidized partying that night alone, but to kick things off, I swing by a conference room to see how the big dogs do it. Diageo had, unsurprisingly given it’s one of corporate America’s favorite things to do, flown in an 80s cover band. One local bartender I found, watching this unfold with weary disgust as they knock back a pre-batched pomegranate mojito, says to me: “You could throw a stick in this town and hit a world-class brass band, and they just paid for airfare for a synth player from Ohio.”
A suboptimal version of Love Shack strikes up. I leave and spend the night bouncing between Decatur Street dive bars, which is apparently where all the elite mixologists go to drink picklebacks and domestic beer. This is like chefs at a Michelin-starred restaurant heading to Taco Bell for a post-shift, crispy norovirus wrap. I guess if you just spent 14 hours mixing drinks, you really don’t want to be confronted with a swizzle stick or negotiate garnish.
Back in the fray at the Monteleone next morning, the seminar schedule is up and running. I’m just there for ambiance, sitting at the back of the class wondering if it’s OK to keep my sunglasses on. There’s lots of choice. Cocktail histories (see, I told you). Tasting rooms. The physiology of shaking. The science of frozen drinks. Are savory flavors making a comeback? Credentialed professionals spend their daytime hours sitting in conference rooms, nursing headaches and Diet Cokes and taking notes on ice crystal formation like it was going to be on a final exam.
Cocktail origin stories are the industry’s opium. I watch two men argue with barely-concealed rancour over whether the ‘Harvey Wallbanger’ was invented at the Blackwatch Bar in Los Angeles in 1952, and whether some possibly apocryphal surfer named Tom Harvey really did bang his head on a wall after one too many Galliano-spiked screwdrivers. Nobody agrees on anything, at least at the more entertaining seminars. On casual inspection, most cocktail histories seem to be swamps of contradictory claims, hearsay, and outright fabrication. I figure that this is mostly as it was a long time ago, and everyone was half cut during their invention.
More elaborate parties are hosted. I play tipsy croquet on an artificial lawn set up by Hendricks Gin. It’s likely the most drunk I’ve been while handling a mallet. Somehow by the end I’m wearing a monocle that I didn’t bring with me. There are more cover bands, people walking round on stilts, burlesque dancers I recognize handing out shots, and networking circles that I’m not in any of the right industries to join.
It’s apparently not cheap to host the official seminars and tasting rooms at the hotel, and so these are mainly the domain of famous liquor names, ones that you’d instantly recognize. There’s a more interesting shadow convention at work in the various hotel bars, though. Sit down at any of them and you’ll likely witness the inventor of a small brand of, I don’t know, celery bitters doing an impromptu ‘off the books’ presentation and sales pitch. If you don’t have an eye-watering entertainment budget, then you have to improvise and hustle.
I see local journalists I know, apparently on the same PR lists as me. We pass each other in corridors and ballrooms, all of us carrying branded swag, a bottle if we’re lucky, as we’re carried along on a wave of free drinks and promises of exclusives. I sit with a couple of them and various sauce industry higher-ups, all of us buzzed at 4pm, chasing the conversation around the table.
Evenings can really get away from you. There might be spontaneous cabs uptown to catch a specific bartender’s shift at Cure, before messily tramping over to Snake & Jakes, or back to the Alibi in the Quarter. At some point I see a friend at Molly’s on the Market, just living his regular life and having a drink after work. I don’t know it at the time but he’s having an affair with my girlfriend. That’s a problem for future Paul, though; right now we’re laughing over Guinness and Jameson. I forgo the uptown debauchery for a night. Any bedtime before midnight is considered early and admirably responsible. My liver, meanwhile, is scrutinising its terms of employment.
I fall into a daily routine of sorts. Wake up around 10am for damage assessment and breakfast. Ease into a few low-key seminars, and try to avoid the first tasting room until at least 4pm. After that, it’s open season. Anything could happen, and the alcohol industry is largely picking up the tab. I have never had so many free drinks, and I’ve been a journalist in the leisure industry for well over a decade at this point. Free food and drink is how I’ve stayed vaguely afloat, because it sure as hiccups ain’t the pay.
Physical deterioration is evident in real time as the days pass. By the final weekend, even the most tenacious boozehounds are inseparable from their water bottles, slumped on various soft furnishings in the hotel lobby, gripping them like life preservers. Even the dive bar lifers, the brand ambassadors and the hardcore bartenders who'd flown in from tiny bars in Asia were starting to look like people who needed a safe space with sparkling water and anything containing a vitamin.
We hadn’t even got to the Saturday night awards ceremony yet. What with all the carousing and reveling and general jollification, I’d kind of forgotten about them to be honest. I’m not important enough to get a seat at any of the tables, but I can sort of mooch around at the back for a while. The Dead Rabbit, out of New York, takes Best Bar. Best Bartender goes to a woman with the improbable name of Ivy Mix, also of New York. There are speeches, photos, and then it’s back into the night for one last time. My liver is taking interviews.
Sunday morning, and with the business end of things completed, it’s thinning out. Airport cabs are quietly slunk into. Anyone still left at the Monteleone has the thousand-yard stare of the existentially hungover. In search of lunch, and possibly a pick-me-up, I drag myself to the Bourbon O Bar in the Quarter. In a moment of genuinely deranged genius, someone had modified a bubble tea machine to shake four Ramos Gin Fizzes at once.
A hundred years ago, this drink required an actual assembly line of human beings, with several "shaker boys" involved in the creation of a single cocktail. They did this for twelve full minutes. It was all under the supervision of a New Orleans barman named Henry Ramos, who apparently believed in a secret ingredient called suffering. Now, a machine built for boba does it in ninety seconds. Progress, I suppose, but at the cost of twelve jobs. Thanks, capitalism.
I fall into conversation with a bartender named Daniel, down from Toronto and doing a stint behind the bar here before he heads home. I ask him the obvious question: What does a working bartender actually get out of a week like this? Education? History? A line on the resume?
"It's more than that," Daniel says as he pushes a dome-perfect Ramos Gin Fizz towards me. "Even the best people get disillusioned working a bar night in, night out. Tales reminds me there's a community. Without this exchange of ideas and talking to other humans, well, we bartenders may as well all be that modified bubble tea machine."
I wrote that down too. Sometimes a good ending sentence simply presents itself. I reassure my liver that we’ll be taking a break this week. It has reconsidered its position. Soft drinks only for a while. Just one more robo-shaken gin fizz and I’m out. The booze industry seems to be in great shape. I wish I could say the same.
By Paul Oswell
This is an unpublished version of a feature written in 2015 for The Guardian (UK)
New Orleans in July is not a fun holiday destination so much as it’s a meteorological trial that you can only hope to survive. It’s a humidifier turned to 98%, dressed up as a city where I suspect the air itself might actually be fermenting. I’m flying in with nothing but a rental car reservation, a notebook, and a professional obligation to document a week talking to dozens of the world's most functional alcoholics.
They call it Tales of the Cocktail, and it’s been happening here for thirteen years. Founders Ann and Paul Tuennerman decided the best way to celebrate a city built on rum, sugar and bad decisions was to slowly walk people between its bars, grab some mixed drinks, and charge admission. She and her husband Paul run the whole ungodly circus, and people call them ‘Mr and Mrs Cocktail’ without a hint of irony.
Why does the entire drinks industry regularly choose this particular circle of hell to hold their annual convention? Why submit to the torture of weather that’s as oppressive as the many, inevitable hangovers? Can it really just be for the cheap hotel rooms? A week later, as I checked out of the historic Hotel Monteleone (cocktail Ground Zero for the week) I understood all of this and more.
The first morning in the hotel lobby. I’m new here, so I look for and find a passing expert. "It's...a week-long party, a marathon, a convention and an endurance test," cocktail historian (yes that’s a real job) David Wondrich tells me in the hotel lobby on the second morning. I write that down because it sounds so succinct even if, on reflection, three of the adjectives mean the same thing. Wondrich is one of the most respected voices in cocktail culture, an opening quote from him will at least give me some gravitas, I think; something I’m in dire need of.
The 17,000 human ingredients for this annual concoction are as esoteric as the foams and tinctures being swirled around various rocks glasses. There are eccentric academics, the most famous and objectionable egos in mixology, wide-eyed cocktail enthusiasts from around the world and legions of people “in the biz”, for which read employees of multinational hooch vendors.
Diageo is the global booze conglomerate that owns half your liquor cabinet, from Johnnie Walker, to Captain Morgan, to a Tennessee whiskey that nobody outside Tennessee has heard of. They’ve got nothing to prove, and are one of the less interesting stories in town, but they do throw huge parties.
I had five or six invitations for subsidized partying that night alone, but to kick things off, I swing by a conference room to see how the big dogs do it. Diageo had, unsurprisingly given it’s one of corporate America’s favorite things to do, flown in an 80s cover band. One local bartender I found, watching this unfold with weary disgust as they knock back a pre-batched pomegranate mojito, says to me: “You could throw a stick in this town and hit a world-class brass band, and they just paid for airfare for a synth player from Ohio.”
A suboptimal version of Love Shack strikes up. I leave and spend the night bouncing between Decatur Street dive bars, which is apparently where all the elite mixologists go to drink picklebacks and domestic beer. This is like chefs at a Michelin-starred restaurant heading to Taco Bell for a post-shift, crispy norovirus wrap. I guess if you just spent 14 hours mixing drinks, you really don’t want to be confronted with a swizzle stick or negotiate garnish.
Back in the fray at the Monteleone next morning, the seminar schedule is up and running. I’m just there for ambiance, sitting at the back of the class wondering if it’s OK to keep my sunglasses on. There’s lots of choice. Cocktail histories (see, I told you). Tasting rooms. The physiology of shaking. The science of frozen drinks. Are savory flavors making a comeback? Credentialed professionals spend their daytime hours sitting in conference rooms, nursing headaches and Diet Cokes and taking notes on ice crystal formation like it was going to be on a final exam.
Cocktail origin stories are the industry’s opium. I watch two men argue with barely-concealed rancour over whether the ‘Harvey Wallbanger’ was invented at the Blackwatch Bar in Los Angeles in 1952, and whether some possibly apocryphal surfer named Tom Harvey really did bang his head on a wall after one too many Galliano-spiked screwdrivers. Nobody agrees on anything, at least at the more entertaining seminars. On casual inspection, most cocktail histories seem to be swamps of contradictory claims, hearsay, and outright fabrication. I figure that this is mostly as it was a long time ago, and everyone was half cut during their invention.
More elaborate parties are hosted. I play tipsy croquet on an artificial lawn set up by Hendricks Gin. It’s likely the most drunk I’ve been while handling a mallet. Somehow by the end I’m wearing a monocle that I didn’t bring with me. There are more cover bands, people walking round on stilts, burlesque dancers I recognize handing out shots, and networking circles that I’m not in any of the right industries to join.
It’s apparently not cheap to host the official seminars and tasting rooms at the hotel, and so these are mainly the domain of famous liquor names, ones that you’d instantly recognize. There’s a more interesting shadow convention at work in the various hotel bars, though. Sit down at any of them and you’ll likely witness the inventor of a small brand of, I don’t know, celery bitters doing an impromptu ‘off the books’ presentation and sales pitch. If you don’t have an eye-watering entertainment budget, then you have to improvise and hustle.
I see local journalists I know, apparently on the same PR lists as me. We pass each other in corridors and ballrooms, all of us carrying branded swag, a bottle if we’re lucky, as we’re carried along on a wave of free drinks and promises of exclusives. I sit with a couple of them and various sauce industry higher-ups, all of us buzzed at 4pm, chasing the conversation around the table.
Evenings can really get away from you. There might be spontaneous cabs uptown to catch a specific bartender’s shift at Cure, before messily tramping over to Snake & Jakes, or back to the Alibi in the Quarter. At some point I see a friend at Molly’s on the Market, just living his regular life and having a drink after work. I don’t know it at the time but he’s having an affair with my girlfriend. That’s a problem for future Paul, though; right now we’re laughing over Guinness and Jameson. I forgo the uptown debauchery for a night. Any bedtime before midnight is considered early and admirably responsible. My liver, meanwhile, is scrutinising its terms of employment.
I fall into a daily routine of sorts. Wake up around 10am for damage assessment and breakfast. Ease into a few low-key seminars, and try to avoid the first tasting room until at least 4pm. After that, it’s open season. Anything could happen, and the alcohol industry is largely picking up the tab. I have never had so many free drinks, and I’ve been a journalist in the leisure industry for well over a decade at this point. Free food and drink is how I’ve stayed vaguely afloat, because it sure as hiccups ain’t the pay.
Physical deterioration is evident in real time as the days pass. By the final weekend, even the most tenacious boozehounds are inseparable from their water bottles, slumped on various soft furnishings in the hotel lobby, gripping them like life preservers. Even the dive bar lifers, the brand ambassadors and the hardcore bartenders who'd flown in from tiny bars in Asia were starting to look like people who needed a safe space with sparkling water and anything containing a vitamin.
We hadn’t even got to the Saturday night awards ceremony yet. What with all the carousing and reveling and general jollification, I’d kind of forgotten about them to be honest. I’m not important enough to get a seat at any of the tables, but I can sort of mooch around at the back for a while. The Dead Rabbit, out of New York, takes Best Bar. Best Bartender goes to a woman with the improbable name of Ivy Mix, also of New York. There are speeches, photos, and then it’s back into the night for one last time. My liver is taking interviews.
Sunday morning, and with the business end of things completed, it’s thinning out. Airport cabs are quietly slunk into. Anyone still left at the Monteleone has the thousand-yard stare of the existentially hungover. In search of lunch, and possibly a pick-me-up, I drag myself to the Bourbon O Bar in the Quarter. In a moment of genuinely deranged genius, someone had modified a bubble tea machine to shake four Ramos Gin Fizzes at once.
A hundred years ago, this drink required an actual assembly line of human beings, with several "shaker boys" involved in the creation of a single cocktail. They did this for twelve full minutes. It was all under the supervision of a New Orleans barman named Henry Ramos, who apparently believed in a secret ingredient called suffering. Now, a machine built for boba does it in ninety seconds. Progress, I suppose, but at the cost of twelve jobs. Thanks, capitalism.
I fall into conversation with a bartender named Daniel, down from Toronto and doing a stint behind the bar here before he heads home. I ask him the obvious question: What does a working bartender actually get out of a week like this? Education? History? A line on the resume?
"It's more than that," Daniel says as he pushes a dome-perfect Ramos Gin Fizz towards me. "Even the best people get disillusioned working a bar night in, night out. Tales reminds me there's a community. Without this exchange of ideas and talking to other humans, well, we bartenders may as well all be that modified bubble tea machine."
I wrote that down too. Sometimes a good ending sentence simply presents itself. I reassure my liver that we’ll be taking a break this week. It has reconsidered its position. Soft drinks only for a while. Just one more robo-shaken gin fizz and I’m out. The booze industry seems to be in great shape. I wish I could say the same.