The Golden Age: Jerry Thomas and the First Bartender's Guide
In 1862 an American bartender wrote down 236 cocktail recipes. That book is why the modern bar exists.
In 1862, a bartender named Jerry Thomas published a book called How to Mix Drinks, or, The Bon-Vivant's Companion. It was the first English-language cocktail manual — and, in most respects, still the last one anyone writing about classical cocktails has to seriously reckon with.
The book codified over two hundred drinks that had, until then, existed only as house specialties or oral tradition. It made the profession of bartending replicable, teachable, and — for the next fifty years — professional.
Who Jerry Thomas was
Thomas was born in Sackets Harbor, New York, in 1830. He learned to tend bar in New Haven, went to California for the Gold Rush, ran a bar in the basement of P.T. Barnum's American Museum in New York, tended bar in London and Paris, and returned to San Francisco to run his own establishment.
By the time he published the Bon-Vivant's Companion he had worked in every major cocktail-drinking city in the English-speaking world. The book reflects that geography: alongside American drinks it collects punches from the West Indies, cobblers, juleps, sangarees, and the Blue Blazer — a burning stream of Scotch whisky that Thomas famously threw back and forth between two mugs.
What the book did
Before 1862, cocktail recipes were closely-held house knowledge. Thomas printed them: quantities, methods, and garnishes for 236 drinks including the Tom Collins, Whiskey Sour, Mint Julep, Fancy Whiskey Cocktail (the Old Fashioned with an orange peel), and the Martinez (arguably the ancestor of the Martini).
The book also codified categories — Punches, Juleps, Cobblers, Cocktails, Crustas, Fixes, Fizzes, Slings — that structure how bartenders still think about drink families.
What came after
The decades between Thomas's book and Prohibition (1920) are sometimes called the Golden Age of American bartending. During those years the profession developed elaborate bar culture: dedicated cocktail lounges, specialized glassware, ice programs, and named house drinks associated with particular bars and bartenders.
It is in this period that the Manhattan (1870s), the Martinez (1880s), the Martini (1890s), the Sazerac (as it evolved from a brandy cocktail into a rye cocktail), and hundreds of variations were developed. The cocktail canon most bars still work from is, essentially, the drinks that survived from this window.
The book's afterlife
The Bon-Vivant's Companion went through several editions in the 19th century and vanished for most of the 20th. It was reprinted in the 2000s during the modern craft cocktail revival and became a working reference for a new generation of bartenders trying to recover pre-Prohibition drink knowledge.
Anyone building a serious home bar library owns a copy. The recipes are still workable, though 19th-century pours were sweeter and shorter than today's; modern reprints often include notes on how to modernize the ratios.
Frequently asked
- Was Jerry Thomas the first celebrity bartender?
- Effectively yes. He earned $100 a week in gold in 1860s San Francisco — more than the Vice President of the United States — and toured his Blue Blazer act across the country.
- Are his recipes still drinkable?
- Most of them, with modernized proportions. His base templates for the Sour, Punch, and Cocktail families are still what the trade uses.
- Where can I read the book?
- Public-domain scans are available online. Modernized print editions with critical apparatus by Wondrich and others are worth owning.