Classic Cocktail 7

If you have been following this segment up till now, recently we have been exploring quite a number of cocktails that use vermouth and were probably derived from the Vermouth Cocktail family. Well, another of such cocktail is the Manhattan.

This cocktail is native to New York where possibly it was created at New York’s Manhattan Club by a barman named William Black around the 1870s and 1880s. Further in-depth research finds other debatable stories which claim to say otherwise. Nonetheless, by the mid 1880s, the Manhattan was common property as it made its first appearance in print on September 5, 1882 in the pages of Olean (NY) Democrat . It wrote, “It is but a short mixture of whiskey, vermouth and bitters came into vogue.” ¹

The original recipe (or then commonly agreed recipe) of the Manhattan was found in O.H. Byron’s 1884 Modern Bartender’s Guide. In the recipe, the ration of vermouth was more than the whisky similar to the Martinez. However, this is 2012, so let’s look at the recipe used nowadays.

Ingredients
60ml of blended whiskey
30ml of Italian sweet vermouth
2 dashes of Angostura bitters

Instructions
Stir and serve straight up in a cocktail glass, garnish with a cherry.

For this cocktail, the preferred whiskey would be a rye whiskey. Back in the nineteenth century, New York was a rye-drinking town and it’s safe to say that the early Manhattans were made with rye². When Prohibition hit, Canadian blended rye was used. Then after the 1950s, bourbons started to make a slow revival by its use in Manhattans. Because of this cocktail too, we’re now seeing more single-barrel and small-batch bourbons in the market.  The Manhattan is one of those things that never goes out of style and is ranked as one of the top 10 American cocktails.

1. David Wondrich (2007). Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar.

2. Degroff, Dale (2008). The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks