Bottoms up!

No one knows exactly where, why, when, or whom the first cocktails were mixed and shaken, though a likely candidate fot the honour is Betsy Flanagan, an enterprising Irish-American innkeeper, who, it is said, decorated the bottles from which she decanted her concoctions with gaily coloured tail feathers from fighting cocks. The story goes that a French customer of hers was so taken with unusual presentation that he raised his glass to Betsy with the toast “Vive le cocktail”!

Whether this tale is true or not remains a matter of conjecture. Some cocktail buffs hold that name really comes from cock-ale, a mixture of spirits administered to fighting cocks in 18th-century England to get their courage up before their bouts, while others argue that the name was derived from a mixed drink called a coquetel, which originated in the Bordeaux region of France. Apparently, this was a favourite tipple among the French officers serving alongside the rebellious colonists during the American War of Independence, in what were to become the southern states of the U.S.A. What cannot be disputed, however, is that cocktails started their real climb to fame in 20s America, when they became the preferred illegal beverage for the hundreds of thausands of dirnkers confronting the vigours and rigours of Prohibition. A total ban on the “manufacture, sale of transport of alcoholic drinks” held the nation in its grip from 1919, when the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was passed into law over the President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, until 1933, when it once again became legal to drink alcohol in the U.S.A.