INDEX: Cocktail Merchandising Displays

INDEX:
Cocktail Merchandising Displays

Cocktail Merchandising Displays

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SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS AND LINKS…
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This Cocktail Merchandising Displays in Retail index page aggregates links
to all post and photos of retail merchandising, display, and outfitting
as well as deep Background courtesy of Wikipedia.

BACKSTORY: A cocktail is a mixed drink, usually alcoholic. Most commonly, a cocktail is a combination of one or more spirits mixed with other ingredients, such as juices, flavored syrups, tonic water, shrubs, and bitters. Cocktails vary widely across regions of the world, and many websites publish both original recipes and their own interpretations of older and more famous cocktails.^[1]^[2]^[3]

A well-known ‘cocktail’ in ancient Greece was named kykeon. It is mentioned in the Homeric texts and was used in the Eleusinian Mysteries. ‘Cocktail’ accessories are exposed in the Museum of the Royal Tombs of Aigai(Greece). They were used in the court of Philip II of Macedon to prepare and serve mixtures of wine, water, honey as well as extracts of aromatic herbs and flowers, during the banquets.

In the United States, a written mention of ‘cocktail’ as a beverage appeared in The Farmers Cabinet, 1803, . The first definition of a cocktail as an alcoholic beverage appeared three years later in The Balance and Columbian Repository (Hudson, New York) May 13, 1806.^[4]Traditionally, cocktail ingredients included spirits, sugar, water and bitters;^[5] however, this definition evolved throughout the 1800s to include the addition of a liqueur.^[6]^[5]

In 1862, Jerry Thomas published a bartender’s guide called How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon Vivant’s Companion which included 10 cocktail recipes using bitters, to differentiate from other drinks such as punches and cobblers.

Cocktails continued to evolve and gain popularity throughout the 1900s, with the term eventually expanding to cover all mixed drinks. In 1917, the term cocktail party was coined by Julius S. Walsh Jr. of St. Louis, Missouri. With wine and beer being less available during the Prohibition in the United States (1920–1933), liquor-based cocktails became more popular due to accessibility, followed by a decline in popularity during the late 1960s. The early to mid-2000s saw the rise of cocktail culture through the style of mixology which mixes traditional cocktails and other novel ingredients.^[7] By 2023, the so-called “cocktail in a can” had proliferated (at least in the United States) to become a common item in liquor stores.^[8]

In the modern world and the Information Age, cocktail recipes are widely shared online on websites. Cocktails and restaurants that serve them are frequently covered and reviewed in tourism magazines and guides.^[9]^[10] Some cocktails, such as the Mojito, Manhattan, and Martini, have become staples in restaurants^[11] and pop culture.

The term cocktail can refer to a wide variety of drinks; it is typically a mixed drink containing alcohol.^[12]

When a combined drink contains only a distilled spirit and a mixer, such as soda or fruit juice, it is a highball. Many of the International Bartenders Association Official Cocktailsare highballs. When a mixed drink contains only a distilled spirit and a liqueur, it is a duo, and when it adds cream or a cream-based liqueur, it is a trio. Additional ingredients may be sugar, honey, milk, cream, and various herbs.^[13]

Mixed drinks without alcohol that resemble cocktails can be known as “zero-proof” or “virgin” cocktails or “mocktails”.

The origin of the word “cocktail” is disputed. It is presumably from “cock-tail”, meaning “with tail standing up, like a cock’s”, in particular of a horse, but how this came to be applied to alcoholic mixed drinks is unclear. The most prominent theories are that it refers to a stimulant, hence a stimulating drink, or to a non-purebred horse, hence a mixed drink.

Cocktail historian David Wondrich speculates that “cocktail” is a reference to gingering, a practice for perking up an old horse by means of a ginger suppository so that the animal would “cock its tail up and be frisky”,^[14] hence by extension a stimulating drink, like pick-me-up. This agrees with usage in early citations (1798: “‘cock-tail’ (vulgarly called ginger)”, 1803: drink at 11 a.m. to clear the head, 1806: “stimulating liquor”), and suggests that a cocktail was initially considered a medicinal drink, which accords with the use of bitters.

Etymologist Anatoly Liberman endorses as “highly probable” the theory advanced by Låftman (1946), which Liberman summarizes as follows:^[15]

It was customary to dock the tails of horses that were not thoroughbred […] They were called cocktailed horses, later simply cocktails. By extension, the word cocktail was applied to a vulgar, ill-bred person raised above his station, assuming the position of a gentleman but deficient in gentlemanly breeding. […] Of importance [in the 1806 citation above] is […] the mention of water as an ingredient. […] Låftman concluded that cocktail was an acceptable alcoholic drink, but diluted, not a “purebred”, a thing “raised above its station”. Hence the highly appropriate slang word used earlier about inferior horses and sham gentlemen. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

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