Golden Age (1900-1920)

The turn of the century ushered in a brief, brilliant era of cocktail refinement before Prohibition shut the party down. Grand hotel bars became temples of mixology — the Waldorf-Astoria, the Savoy, the Ritz — where white-jacketed bartenders served an increasingly cosmopolitan clientele that demanded elegance in a glass. This was the age that gave us the Aviation, the Last Word, and the Clover Club, drinks that balanced complexity with grace. Vermouth, liqueurs, and freshly pressed juices expanded the bartender's palette far beyond the simple spirit-and-bitters formulas of the previous century. It was a golden window of creativity and sophistication, and the cocktails born in those two decades were so perfectly conceived that a hundred years later, they haven't needed a single revision.