Recipes: Bee's Knees

On the Myth of Prohibition-Style Cocktails.

Bartender Frank Meier, inventor of the Bee’s Knees cocktail.

One of the more amusing—or irritating, depending on your mood at the time—tropes a cocktail writer encounters is “Prohibition-era cocktails.” I’ve been hearing and reading that phrase since the first Neo-Speakeasy style bars popped up some 20-odd years ago.

What people mean when they use that term is pre-Prohibition cocktails, the mixed drinks that were popular in bars before the Volstead Act came crashing down. There are no Prohibition-era cocktails, not from the U.S. anyway, because alcohol was, you know, illegal during Prohibition. Oh sure, there was still alcohol to be had. Oceans of it. But most of it wasn’t very good and the clandestine drinking holes of the time weren’t terribly interesting in shaking up fancy drinks. As Nick the bartender put it in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” speakeasies served hard drinks to folks who wanted to get drunk fast.