When Esquire made its debut in late 1933, repeal was imminent and Americans didn't know a damn thing about polite drinking. Fourteen years of adulterate alcohol and literally criminal bartenders had turned us into a nation of indiscriminate liquor swillers, people who thought the right wine for filet of sole was gin and orange juice. It was an integral part of the magazine's mission to fix this. To this end, it deployed a crack corps of mixographers, including the bohemian bookseller-anthologist Frank Shay; Jimmie Charters, who had been Hemingway's bartender in Paris; Murdock Pemberton, one of the founders of the famed Algonquin Round Table; and the copper-throated, granite-livered Lawton Mackall. Throughout the 1930s, they wrangled with underaged whiskey, unfamiliar imports, crappy, Prohibition-expedient cocktails that had outlived their time, and a vast pool of ignorance.
They also paid attention to what people were actually drinking and advocated for the best of it—whether that meant the pre-Prohibition classics, tropical drinks drawing American tourists in droves to the Floridita in Havana, or something as simple as the then-exotic gin and tonic. Novelties such as vodka (then newly imported and popular in certain Manhattan nightspots), pisco, and tequila found their place in the long and detailed monthly "Potables" column, but so did good old rye and Scotch and Holland gin.
Then came the war, which "Potables" spent trying to keep the drinking man's morale up in the face of rationing and severe shortages of just about everything but cheap Caribbean rum and iffy domestic vermouth (see sidebar below).
When the war was over, it seemed like the drinking man didn't much care what he drank as long as it was straightforward and anesthetically strong, and soon Esquire didn't, either. Only in the late 1990s did things begin to turn back to the way they were in the magazine's early years.
The cover of the April 1997 issue of Esquire featured a brunette in a black cocktail dress perched, rather awkwardly, on the rim of a giant martini glass. "Welcome to Cocktail Culture" read the headline. Americans were starting to drink real cocktails again. At the end of 1998, Esquire had a regular drinks column for the first time in decades.
By 2004, when I took over, it was back to the old "Potables" days. People gave a damn about the spirits they were drinking and thought it a useful thing to know how to turn them into elegant, balanced cocktails, punches, sours, fizzes, and what have you. We've been trying to give the people what they want ever since, ignoring the faddish edges and geeky swamplands that always surround such things and sticking to drinks that you can actually make, and might actually want to. Some of our obsessions have become some of yours: rye whiskey, which we've been talking up for fifteen years, finally caught on (between 2009 and now, rye grew from selling 88,000 cases a year to well over half a million); mezcal, which we first wrote about in 2005, is white-hot; and suddenly everybody's drinking our favorite cocktail, the old-fashioned. Even the big bowl of punch, an Esquire entertaining favorite since the days of Pemberton and Mackall, is back. What's next? We figure you'll tell us, like you always have.
The Esquire Cocktail
During World War II, there were short ages of everything but rum and tequila, and Esquire columnist Lawton Mackall wrote lots of columns on how to deal with them responsibly. The Esquire Cocktail is him doing his part. Contemplate its symbolism. Do not drink it.
(May 1942)
- 3 parts dry vermouth
- 1 part gin
Stir with cracked ice in mixing glass. Strain into cocktail glass. As final zest note, wring a piece of lemon peel over drink.
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For Esquire's 1,000th issue, October 2015 (on sale now), we look back on the history of the magazine and launch a digital archive of everything we've ever published, Esquire Classic.
