Remembering Stephen Remsberg
Remembering Stephen Remsberg
The Legacy of the Owner of the World's Largest Private Rum Collection.
The interesting thing about the cocktail revival—the thing that set it apart from similar revivals in the food, wine and beer worlds—was that, in the United States at least, in the early years, it was not led by bartenders or bar owners or distillers or anyone actually involved in the creation of cocktails. It was led by oddballs and enthusiasts; civilians who loved cocktails and cocktail history, but as a sideline; people who did something else entirely for a living.
I learned about these free-lance experts one by one when I began writing about cocktails in 2006. There was someone in Seattle named Robert Hess, who worked at Microsoft, but created an important cocktail chat room named DrinkBoy where people would virtually gather and debate the finer points of mixed drinks. There was a man name Ted Haigh who worked in the film industry in some capacity—he was a graphic designer, I was told. He had a crazy collection of vintage spirits and had written a book about forgotten cocktails. Haigh collaborated with another IT guy named Martin Doudoroff on the Cocktail Database, a collection of obscure cocktail recipes. There was another film-world guy, Jeff Berry, who called himself “Beachbum.” He had made it his business to track down lost tiki drink recipes and publish them in a series of paperback volumes. A former Comp Lit professor named David Wondrich was sifting through cocktail history in the pages of Esquire.
There were many others. Stephen Visakay had a collection of vintage cocktail shakers which he was happy to show off. A Southern woman named LeNell Smothers had a small liquor store in Brooklyn that was changing hearts and minds through its unusual stock. The Anglo-American, husband-and-wife team of Anastatia Miller and Jared Brown were self-taught experts on such things at Martinis. A chemist named Ted Breaux was trying to bring absinthe back. Philip Greene, who was a lawyer at the Pentagon, and related to the 19th-century bitters maker Antoine Peychaud, had co-founded the Museum of the American Cocktail. There was a covey of oddly powerful cocktail bloggers whose websites were must-reads, including Paul Clarke, Craig Mrusek, Matt Robold, Camper English and Rick Stutz.
These were the people who possessed the vital information that led to the rebirth of the cocktail. There were a handful of cocktail bartenders in New York, London and San Francisco, who were coming up in the ranks and would soon displace all others in terms of influence. But, in the early days, this eclectic group drove the movement.
If you went to Tales of the Cocktail, the annual New Orleans cocktail convention, in the early years in the aughts, these were the people who sat on the dais at panels and seminars. I remember attending Tales for the first time in 2006, absorbing the knowledge of one free spirit after another and wondering, “Who are these people?”
And then there was Stephen Ridgway Remsberg, who passed away on December 31. He was 75.