If you care about craft and cocktails, then you owe it to yourself to read the article that Kevin Alexander penned for Thrillist titled The Craft Cocktails Revolution Is Over. It’s an extremely well written and insightful piece that provides not only the argument for but the context behind the claim that the craft cocktail Renaissance has officially ended.
And it’s a difficult assertion to refute, especially when considered in such historically relevant terms. The Renaissance was a flowering of thought and art, a rebuttal of the Dark Ages, which is an apt metaphor for the blossoming cocktail culture that rose up in response to an epoch epitomized by Tom Cruise’s barback antics. Alexander’s reference to the Baroque period does well to sum up the current commodification of craft, where one finds “craft” cocktails in the sky box of a Giants game or being served by the thousands at Coachella.
But the fact is, that’s not craft. Those are just cocktails.
The revolution may be over, but that doesn’t mean that the craft is dead. Craft is Zen; it’s of the moment. You can no more box up and commodify craft than you can stop time. It’s in the process, not the outcome. Anyone can make a Manhattan. How good it is depends on the craft.
So perhaps the revolution isn’t over. Perhaps it’s just begun.
Craft is only dead if you yield it. If you surrender it as a delineator to the mainstream. If we allow it to degenerate into a mere sound bite, if it loses its ability to create any real differentiation, then it may as well be dead. And that will be on us.
To be clear, craft is a constant. Every bartender, every distiller, every person who engages in any occupation practices a craft. How well they perform that craft depends on how well they studied it and how much they practiced. A select few, those who give themselves over completely to the craft, become masters.
We were, not long ago, in the Dark Ages. Some intrepid and imaginative people brought us out of them. Now you can get a decent cocktail just about anywhere. But decent doesn’t mean exceptional. And it isn’t what we mean by craft.
A craft cocktail was made just for you. In front of you. By someone you can reach out and touch. Someone who will take the time to explain the nuance of why they’re using this particular method versus that. It costs more because that’s what it requires, to provide the time to do it properly, to source the best ingredients, to incentivize those involved to consider it as an end and not simply a means to one. It sure as hell doesn’t come ready-made in a can.
Calling something craft doesn’t make it so, unless we let it. And that “we” doesn’t refer to the people who made it, or some marketing company who found the label tested well with Millennials. We refers to those of us trading our hard earned money, hopefully money we earned while striving to master our own craft, for something we value - the time and attention of someone worthy of our respect.
