The classic Seelbach cocktail (a blend of bourbon, Cointreau, bitters and champagne) always came with a cute backstory, the kind that bartenders were extremely excited to tell their customers.
The story goes as so- In 1917, a bartender at the Seelbach hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, was mixing up a champagne cocktail and a Manhattan for a newlywed couple. The bottle of champagne sprayed into the Manhattan and so, unable to serve it, the bartender kept the champagne mixed Manhattan for himself.
He took a liking to this brand new combination of champagne and bourbon from the Manhattan immediately and, after a few alterations, the Seelbach cocktail was born.
Sadly this exciting mix was lost during the dry years of prohibition and was only discovered when the Seelbach Hotel’s head bartender (Adam Seger) unearthed it from an archived menu. This cheeky cocktail has since had a reputation as a pre-prohibition classic that was nearly consigned to oblivion.
It is a lovely story but, earlier this month drinks writer Robert Simonson revealed in the New York Times that this story is nothing but fiction. In fact, Seger himself created the drink in 1995 and imagined the backstory as a means of giving his newly created cocktail some gravitas.
Subsequently, the cocktail was written up in Gary and Mardee Haidin Regan’s 1997 book, New Classic Cocktails, from where the drink – and its fake backstory – became part of the modern cocktail swing.
Robert Simonson learned this discovery from Seger himself, who admitted the shocking revelation in passing at an event for his new bar venture.
“He willingly told everything,”said Simonson. “He seemed to have been carrying it around for some time and feeling the guilt of it – particularly that he had lied to Gary Regan all of these years.”
This false historic story is partly responsible for the Seelbach’s success believes Simonson; “People loved the story – it had this romance of a different time of bartending. Adam created this story because he thought it would be catnip for the press; he didn’t know that bartenders would love it, too.”
Seger’s fabricated story is in keeping with a long tradition of dodgy anecdotes, tall tales, and outlandish claims. For instance, the Gimlet supposedly came about because of a provision in the 1867 Merchant Shipping Act, which made the British Navy start stocking Rose’s lime juice cordial (definitely not true); and a pirate, Roberto Cofresí y Ramírez de Arellano, supposedly whipped up the first-ever batch of Piña Coladas for his thirsty crew in the early 19th century (he didn’t).
For cocktail historian David Wondrich, the Seelbach discovery offers an opportunity to discover how far drinks writing, has come since Seger’s invention of the drink in 1995.
“It wouldn’t have seemed at the time that very much was at stake,” Wondrich says. “When I started writing about cocktails [at the start of the year 2000], I had a column at esquire.com where I had to write a drink of the week. And I put in a few forgeries myself because it was mostly a branch of humour writing – nobody was taking it very seriously. I stopped doing that a long time since because, as the cocktail movement grew, the interest in its history grew and people began doing actual research, which had never really occurred before.”
“As far as we knew then, all the stories were fake. There were myths and legends about various drinks and people would pass them along but there was never really any way to check them, so they were all more or less on the same footing. Some of them – like the idea that the Manhattan was invented by Winston Churchill’s mother, patently false and easily disproved in two minutes of Googling – flourished because there was no real way to check them and there was no interest.”
For Wayne Curtis, (drinks writer and historian) , the turning point came in about 2006. “One of the things you started to hear in bars around that time was ‘What’s your source on that?’ I don’t think that phrase had ever been uttered in bars or among cocktail writers prior to that – if you had a good story, you told it.
We’ve had this explosion in searchable databases online – you can go into Google Books and find Ernest Hemingway’s references to the vieux carré cocktail. The rise of the internet has lead to an echo chamber of bloggers, they’ll just – if not cut and paste – at least write about what they find on other blogs.
“It always amazes me, when I’m researching a cocktail – I’ll put the name in Google, and I see the first lines of the first 10 hits that Google brings up, and they’re all the same. They’re all echoing each other but they’re all different blogs. So if something like the Seelbach gets out there, it gets repeated endlessly like a hall of mirrors and there’s nobody really questioning it.”
In many ways, the Seelbach’s story – from its fabricated history to its reveal as a more recent invention – is an insight into a much larger problem of the information age. The digitisation of archives, and the access granted by the internet, has made it easier than ever for the average person to do their own research. But at the same time the unfiltered nature of internet publishing means that misinformation can breed with ease.
In the case of the Seelbach cocktail, the stakes are low – after all, it’s just a drink, and it’s just as tasty without the backstory. But in these post-truth, post-Trump times, it’s worth taking any chance we can to explore how we know what we know online. Even if it’s just about a cocktail and it’s false romantic backstory.