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.

This delicious little number takes inspiration from several classics, including a variety of brandy sours and punches and, of course, the New-York Sour. A base of brandy, lemon, cacao, and vanilla gets topped off with a classic "claret snap" for a tannic note that fits really well with the dried fruit and chocolate in the drink.

For this flip, I took post-Civil War technique and style and applied it to pre-Civil War ingredients. As we saw with our At Loggerheads a few years back, flips in the eighteenth century were ale-based and served hot. But the Gilded Age brought ice and shakers into the equation and, though beer-based versions did exist (especially with porter), fortified wine as well as spirits took over as the most common base. I love the flavor of this drink, the walnut adds this really pleasant bitterness to the whole thing; it kind of tastes like melted pumpkin ice cream with walnuts on top.

Spirit-forward drinks were exceedingly popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century–from Bumbo to Slings, Toddies, Cock-tails, and Black Strap, they’re all just variations on sweetened, diluted spirits. The Cock-tail, of course, is the one with bitters in it. I love maple and walnut together and it works beautifully with the sherry base. Though this recipe features a complex “Improved Cocktail” structure (which dates to later in the 1800s), it could very well have existed during our period of interest!

I always like to include a beer cocktail when we travel to this time and place because they were so incredibly common, it’s almost lying not to have one! Beers brewed with a pumpkin base (once known as pompion ales) originated in the years before the Revolutionary War and pumpkin ales line shelves every fall to this day. This autumnal beer cocktail is named for the original town center in Conway, Massachusetts, which is also the name of this month's theme. This drink is, then, sort of like a title track!

This is an imagined punch that might have been from the early republic with favorite products of the period, all of which would have been available for purchase in olde New English taverns. Aged rum and brandy is just about a classic eighteenth-century punch base as you’ll find and the sherry gives it this wonderful nutty, oxidized flavor. There’s a noble history of using oranges in punch and I really like what it’s doing here! And I really love orange with maple, it’s such an autumnal combination for me; this combo is also featured in my most popular BA recipe ever, the Applejack Sour. And in fact, we’re doing this with apple brandy instead of rum at Gigantic this fall, and it’s delicious both ways!

This classic cocktail entered the cocktail renaissance canon via Ted Saucier’s 1951 book Bottoms Up, where the recipe is credited to the Detroit Athletic Club and an Irish-born vaudeville star called Frank Fogarty. It likely came into being around 1915. The drink’s equal-parts construction balances out the strong flavors of  juniper-heavy London dry gin, herbaceous green Chartreuse, and rich maraschino.

This drink is both a relic of its original period (the years just before Prohibition) as well as of the cocktail revival of the aughts. It became an emblem of a certain kind of “golden-age” cocktail and people are still intrigued by its name and esoteric ingredients. It’s a little bit too floral for my palate these days, but it’s a great drink to have up your sleeve for friends who enjoy flowery gin drinks.

With a name like this, it’s no wonder this cocktail has survived into the modern age; originally “corpse reviver” was a catch-all term for a hangover cure, but none has been more famous than this version. The other reason it’s survived is that it appears in the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), one of the most popular cocktail guides of the twentieth century. Its equal-parts structure, bright ingredients, and absinthe rinse make this a perennially delightful sour.

Certainly the least well-known of our drinks this month, but it’s my favorite! This one was first published in the Café Royal Cocktail Book (1937) in London. The name comes from a luxury train line that ran from New York to Chicago. My little tweak to this one is that I suggest nutmeg as a garnish (at least in fall and winter); chocolate and nutmeg are so great together, especially with the juniper and the spiced notes from the aromatized wine.

The Negroni emerged circa 1920, but doesn’t show up in bar manuals under that name until the ‘40s, when its equal parts mixture of London dry gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari. It was adopted as a favorite of cocktail revivalists in the aughts and 2010s, which has spawned countless variations.

This cocktail takes the Daiquiri’s triumvirate of rum, lime and sugar and adds elements from several sours (including the Sophisticate, which was a major influence on this spec) in the Sloppy Joe’s bar manuals from the ‘30s: crème de cacao, vermouth, and egg white. I absolutely love the way this drink turned out, and it’s extra versatile because there are two garnish options: the perennial bitters design or cold weather-friendly dusting of cocoa powder.

Longtime Club members might remember this one from the beta test month I ran back in August of 2020, wherein this drink was called The Tall Man from Havana. It has since become a Gigantic classic, where it began traveling under the name Havana Moon (named for the Chuck Berry song). The inspiration was the “Sloppy Joe’s,” the bar’s eponymous drink that combined brandy, port, pineapple, grenadine, and Curaçao. A very good example of the pre-tiki tropical genre.

The Mary Pickford appears in the Sloppy Joe’s books–a mix of rum, grenadine, pineapple, and maraschino liqueur. I took that inspiration, subbed crème de cacao in for the maraschino, added lime for acid, and a small measure of Cognac for vanilla and dried fruit notes. Pickford was a movie star, director and producer; I named this after her little sister, Charlotte, who was also an actor.

This is a little-known Mojito riff dating from the early 1930s at Sloppy Joe’s. It has everything you’d expect from a Mojito–rum, lime, sugar, mint, and soda–but adds a little bit of “French vermouth,” which I interpret here as blanc (or bianco if it’s an Italian producer). This small change adds a slightly floral note and bolsters the lime’s acidity. I like the channel-knife lime peel garnish here along with a big bouquet of mint, of course.

The Margarita is the most popular cocktail in the U.S. and variations on the template always sell well. This is my take on an aperitivo-friendly Margarita. A split base of smoky mezcal and lightly-aged reposado come together with aperitivo wine, lime, grapefruit, and agave, for an exceedingly refreshing, sort of Italianate Margarita. A salt rim tastes great here.

This is the “root drink” for this month’s recipes. It was one of those cocktails that I thought up, tried, and loved right away! This spirit-forward, bittersweet drink is adjacent to two well-known agave-based Negroni riffs: the Rosita (tequila, sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, aperitivo liqueur) and the Oaxacan Negroni (mezcal, sweet vermouth, Campari). For a little extra bitterness, opt for a grapefruit twist; orange works great here, too.

This is an exceedingly refreshing beer cocktail that’s absolutely perfect for summer. I took inspiration from several templates: the Paloma (tequila, lime, grapefruit, sugar, soda), Radlers (beer, grapefruit), the Spaghett (domestic lager, Aperol, lemon), and the Michelada (Mexican lager, salt, lime, spice sometimes tomato juice, Clamato and other ingredients).

This year, my brilliant friend and colleague Kris Kirkland came up with a drink called the Rhinestone Cowboy for the Gigantic spring menu. It consists of mezcal, reposado tequila, Cocchi Rosa, peach liqueur, grapefruit, lime, frozen peach chunks, agave, and basil. I wanted to do something similar with strawberry, so I cut out the mezcal’s smokiness in favor of more vanilla flavor from the tequila and aperitivo liqueur. The results are delicious!

This obscure gem from the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) illustrates the power of absinthe as the sole base for a sour. Because of the strength of the base spirit, the ratios of this drink are all topsy-turvy in a most intriguing way–two parts lemon to one part each absinthe and simple syrup; a touch of saline is advised. It sits on the edge of being too tart, but this sour’s complex herbaceous undertones keep you coming back for another sip until, suddenly, you’ve finished it.