We've covered a few different fizzes (which emerge in the 1870s), but this one is the golden type (c. 1882), which means that there's no egg white in it, just egg yolk! We'll get into this more, but the "coffee" part comes from the Coffee Cocktail, a drink from our period of interest that contains no coffee but does contain brandy and port. Cacao and vanilla accent this drink perfectly.

This is a riff on the Harvard cocktail, which is basically a Manhattan with brandy in place of rye. But I didn't like the ratios with the port, so I turned it into a kind of Improved Cocktail (my favorite variation on the Old-Fashioned), with a base of Cognac plus small measures of cacao, ruby port, and Alpine amaro. A splash of Champagne makes it feel quite fancy and dries out the cocktail a bit.

The Ladies’ Delight is a brandy, rum, and coffee drink featured in William Schmidt’s The Flowing Bowl, published in 1892. The original spec is topped with ice cream and berries. I've wanted to recreate this drink for years now and this month's theme gave me the opportunity. In addition to Cognac and coffee (in the form of cold brew), it has crème de cacao, amaro, vanilla syrup, and a touch of salt. After a little experimentation, I love the way the styling on this drink turned out.

Spirit-forward drinks were stars of the Cocktail Renaissance–and they haven’t strayed much from the formula that was set over 200 years ago. This recipe reflects the resurgence of “old-world” spirits like Cognac and genever as well as the return of rye as a base for cocktails. The bitters in this Old-Fashioned come in the form of amaro, a darling of contemporary American cocktail culture. This drink harkens back to my Al-Pino Old-Fashioned recipe, which I developed in 2018 (original) and 2021 (2.0) respectively.

The very first cocktail recipe in William Schmidt’s sprawling entertaining and drinks manual is the Jack Frost Whiskey Sour. It calls for “apple whiskey,” cream, a whole egg, sugar, lemon, and soda. In actuality, it’s a Fizz and our version plays that up and splits the spirit and sweetener elements across a few different spirits and liqueurs. Juniper, apple, fig, and honey come through in this creamy, Flip-adjacent Fizz.

The Widow’s Kiss was first published in 1895’s Modern American Drinks by George Kappeler. The original recipe calls for apple brandy with equal measures of Bénédictine and yellow Chartreuse, plus Angostura bitters. Our take is dry and spirit-forward and switches out the Chartreuse in favor of Alpine amaro, which nods to the Alpine origins of Chartreuse and also does the work of the bitters. It’s got a Rusty Nail vibe that I really love.

A stirred drink from The Hoffman House Bartender’s Guide (1905), the Automobile Cocktail consists of equal parts Scotch, Old Tom gin, and Italian vermouth, plus a little gum syrup and orange bitters. I took this template and subbed in apple brandy for the Scotch, using alpine amaro in place of bitters, and sweetening with fig syrup. It’s Martinez-esque, but feels perfect for November with apple and pronounced piney notes. “Motor wagon” was a term used by some early car makers.