This book is a history of how cocktails became a global sensation from the US to Europe and Asia

Americans, already familiar with cocktails, introduced their travelling companions from around the world to their first taste of an authentic American libation. After returning from the US these travellers helped spread the merits of the new mixed drinks. Europe’s hotels and cafes added cocktails to their offerings in order to cater to the expectations and drinking preferences of American tourists, and soon the rest of the world would follow. Some European bars were simply called the “American Bar”.

In Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock (1938), a meeting takes place between Colleoni and ‘the Boy’, two opposing gang leaders, in the lounge at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Brighton. As they talked, “chimes of laughter came from the American Bar and the chink, chink, chink of ice”. When they talk again by phone, “the Boy” hears “a glass chink and ice move in a shaker”. Greene uses the sound of cocktails being made to demonstrate the wide cultural gulf between the young street thug and the older and supposedly more sophisticated mob leader who does his business at the fashionable American bar.

By the 1960s airline passengers could have cocktails served by shapely stewardesses in mini skirts. Some airline executives and customers viewed stewardesses as flying…

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