An evolution in glasses.

Before the cocktail was a drink, it was a bowl. Punch ruled the social scene — communal containers of spirits, citrus, sugar, water, and spice, ladled into cups for everyone at the table. The British navy ran on it. Colonial Americans planned their evenings around it. The recipes were often more like ratios than precise measurements: one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak.

The cocktail as we know it was born here. Jerry Thomas published the first bartender's manual in 1862. Saloons were respected establishments. Most of the drinks we still consider essential — the Old Fashioned, the Manhattan, the Sazerac, the Martini, the Daiquiri — were invented or perfected during these decades. Bartending was a craft, ingredients were fresh, and a good drink told you what time of evening it was.

American bartending went underground at home and abroad simultaneously. Speakeasies served what they could find. Meanwhile, every great American bartender fled — to Cuba, to Paris, to London. The Hemingway Daiquiri came from Havana. The White Lady came from Harry's New York Bar in Paris. The Savoy Cocktail Book, the most important cocktail manual of the 20th century, was published in London in 1930. American cocktails matured while America wasn't drinking them.

Don the Beachcomber opened in Hollywood in 1934, three days after Prohibition ended. He invented Polynesian fantasy out of whole cloth — rum, fresh juices, exotic syrups, faux-Pacific glassware. Trader Vic followed. For thirty years, tiki dominated American cocktail culture. The Mai Tai, the Zombie, the Painkiller, the Hurricane — all from this golden age of tropical drinks. Most are still misunderstood today; the originals were balanced and powerful, not the slushy disasters they became later.

The craft died. Sour mix replaced fresh juice. Blenders replaced shakers. Frozen drinks dominated. Most bars couldn't make a Manhattan if you asked. The famous cocktail inventions of this era are few and dubious. A handful of drinks from this period are genuinely good (the Bramble, 1984; vodka cocktails like the Espresso Martini, 1983; the Vodka Martini's complete takeover) — but mostly this is the period that craft bartenders spent the next thirty years recovering from.

Dale DeGroff at the Rainbow Room in New York started reading old cocktail books in the early 90s and making the drinks the way they were originally written. Milk & Honey opened in 1999. Audrey Saunders opened Pegu Club in 2005. Phil Ward, Sam Ross, and a generation of bartenders rebuilt the craft from the ground up. Fresh ingredients came back. Bitters became important again. New classics were invented in deliberate conversation with the old ones — the Gold Rush, the Penicillin, the Paper Plane, the Black Manhattan, the Oaxaca Old-Fashioned.

Cocktail culture went global. Mezcal stopped being a curiosity and became essential. The low-ABV movement (championed by Audrey Saunders' Old Cuban and a wave of vermouth-forward drinks) made it possible to have a great cocktail without getting drunk. Asian, Latin American, and African ingredients entered the canon. Drinks like the Naked and Famous, Division Bell, Kingston Negroni, and Smoked Margarita represent a cocktail world more cross-cultural and more confident than any previous era.

The idea of a great drink without alcohol is older than most of the canon — temperance bars in the 1800s were serving phosphates, shrubs, and switchels with the same craft as their alcoholic counterparts. Seedlip's 2015 launch kicked off the modern revival, and bartenders rediscovered the old books alongside the new. Today the Free Pour has its own classics — designed, not substituted. It's a parallel craft with its own techniques, its own canon, and its own seat at the bar.