Dmitriy Shteynbuk — 1806: The Newspaper Ad That Named the Cocktail

The word cocktail first appears in print in 1803, in a New Hampshire paper called The Farmer's Cabinet, in a bemused note describing a hangover cure: 'Drank a glass of cocktail — excellent for the head.' The reader is expected to already know what a cocktail is.

Three years later, someone finally admitted they didn't. On May 6, 1806, the Balance and Columbian Repository of Hudson, New York, ran a satirical piece about a losing political candidate whose supporters had been placated with, among other things, '25 dozen cocktails.' A reader wrote in to ask what those actually were.

The editor's reply, published on May 13, 1806, is the definition every bartender in the English-speaking world can now recite: 'Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters — it is vulgarly called a bittered sling.'

'Vulgarly called' is the interesting phrase. The cocktail was not, in 1806, a refined drink. It was a bittered sling — a sling being a plainer mixture of spirit, sugar, and water. The bitters were the innovation, and they were the reason the drink needed a new name.

The editor then added, in a tone somewhere between satire and analysis, that a cocktail is 'said, also, to be of great use to a democratic candidate, because a person having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else.'

Two centuries later the joke still lands. And the definition still holds. When you sit down at a bar in 2026 and order an Old Fashioned, you are ordering the drink the 1806 editor was making fun of. The category has outlived every one of its critics.