Whip Cocktail

Brandy, dry vermouth, and absinthe — the pre-Prohibition accent tradition, absinthe banned in the US in 1912, Carpano producing vermouth in Turin since 1786.

The Whip belongs to the pre-Prohibition era of American cocktail culture, when a small pour of absinthe used as an accent or rinse was a routine element of refined mixed drinks at the cosmopolitan bars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The formula of brandy, dry vermouth, and absinthe places it firmly in the tradition that also produced the Corpse Reviver No. 2, the Tuxedo, and the myriad spirit-vermouth-accent combinations catalogued by Harry Johnson, Jerry Thomas, and their contemporaries. Dry vermouth itself had been produced in Turin by Antonio Benedetto Carpano from 1786 and codified in drier French versions by Noilly Prat from around 1813, giving bartenders of the era a sophisticated aromatic modifier to work alongside spirits. Absinthe — the anise and grand wormwood distillate that had been associated with Parisian café culture since the 1840s — was available across American bars before the spirit was banned in the United States in 1912 and in most of Europe by 1915. The Whip would have been mixed and served routinely during the period when absinthe was still legal and accessible, and its appearance in early 20th-century American bartending manuals documents exactly the kind of quietly sophisticated pre-Prohibition drink that the Volstead Act interrupted and that the craft cocktail revival eventually rediscovered.