Episode One: Detroit Drinks Cocktail History

 Welcome to Detroit Drinks History, a podcast where we examine Detroit’s complex and compelling history through the lens of a slightly foggy drinking glass. I’m your host, Mickey Lyons. Since this is our inaugural episode, let’s take just a couple of minutes to talk about this podcast, what to expect, and how we’ll approach this history.

 Every episode we take one topic and look at that by checking out how it played out in Detroit, specifically in relation to our drinking habits, laws, places and people. Here’s an example: coming up pretty soon, we’ll have a full episode featuring Detroit Drinks Baseball history. But rather than just give you the history of Detroit baseball — because it’s far too long and because there are far too many people who could do this better than I can — we take that history and weave in Detroit’s bar history (Lindell AC, anyone?) and how drinking in Detroit shaped that history. For example did you know that Detroit had another Tigers baseball team, owned one of the Midwest’s biggest brothel owners? What about the fact that we weren’t allowed Sunday games until Prohibition had started in Michigan, because of the complicated blue laws?

 So these are the kinds of things we’ll talk about on the podcast. Think of it like this: Topic X + Detroit history + drinking history. And there you have it, Detroit Drinks History.

For our first episode we’re going to keep it kind of simple and introduce some key concepts. We’re looking at the general, early, history of drinking in Detroit, from around 1700 to the mid-19th century. I’ll also explain WHY I think studying the history of drinking is important. Later on I’ll talk with Nick Britsky, host of Nick Drinks, about some uniquely Detroit cocktails from history, and how they came about.

 So: why drinks history? Because it’s important, dangit. Many of us learned history as a series of Important Dates and Famous People Doing Things (usually fighting). But in the last few dozen years, historians are starting to realize that the way life played out for most people was really only vaguely influenced, day by day, by these grand happenings. Most of the time, you got up, you worked to produce the food, clothing and shelter you needed, and you hung out you’re your family and friends. That’s the history I’m telling. And one place where a surprising amount of history got made is the corner pub. The saloon. The tavern.

There’s a sociological concept, also common in urban planning, called the Third place. The third place, according to Roy Oldenburg who first coined the phrase, is

determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people's more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends...They are the heart of a community's social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.

Roy Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 1989

 What’s this mean? Well, your first place is the home. Your second place is your work. Between those places, and public spaces is the Third Place. It’s where the free exchange of ideas happens, where you definitely argue politics and religion, where you meet your peers and relax, yes, but also where you talk about the upcoming election, or the big game.

Also important to our understanding of the Third Place is the fact that they foster a strong sense of community. The shared space of the bar, to its regulars, is a reassuring step out into the world without the chaos of the larger public squares. As anthropologist Setha Low said in a 2020 article for The Conversation, lamenting the loss of Third Places during worldwide pandemic shutdowns:

 If public spaces expand our social relationships and liberalize our world view, third places anchor us to a community where we are recognized and our needs accommodated. Third places are predictable and comfortable – a setting where we feel “at home.”

Bars, taverns, coffee shops, gyms, churches, barbershops: these are all Third Places. And while it may seem highfalutin’ to propose that these should be afforded the same level of study as, say, the histories of the grand concert halls, I think we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t take the opportunity to research what happened on the everyday, grungy, but fun street level.

Picture this: you’re a young traveler who’s journeyed across the Atlantic from, say, Ireland or Hungary or Germany in the nineteenth century. You might not know anyone here, but a friend of a cousin’s has said there are plenty of jobs on the docks and in the factories, so you leave the too-crowded family homestead and venture into the wilds of the Midwest. When you arrive in Detroit, everything is a confusion of loud noises and new people. You may not even speak the language. But one of the first things you see is a sign, maybe with the familiar Polish Eagle, or with a last name that you recognize from home. It’s the local saloon, run by the son of an immigrant from three towns over in the Old Country.

You enter the tavern, or pub, or saloon, and most of the faces look like the ones back home. They’re speaking in an accent you recognize. You head up to the bar and hand over a dime gladly for a cool glass of beer to wash off the dust from the road. Making small talk with the folks around you, you quickly have a line on a job, a place to stay and likely a hot meal on the house. You have somewhere to cash your check when you do get a job. You know where the local house of worship is. Before too long, someone you met in the saloon on your first day in town introduces you to their family and friends, and theirs, and so on, and Bob’s your uncle because you married his niece!

 Taverns, then, weren’t just a place that people went, drank beer or booze in silence, and left. They were the second-most important place in the social fabric of towns and cities for hundreds, even thousands of years, after places of worship.

And that, she says, stepping off of her soapbox, is why I’m dedicating an entire podcast and website to Detroit Drinks History.

 So, what was drinking in Detroit like throughout the years? Well, before the Europeans brought their booze, mostly in the form of wine and brandy via the French at first, the Fox, Sauk, Ottawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi who lived here first didn’t have any formalized habits of producing and drinking alcohol.

For the French Jesuits and voyageurs, brandy was an important trade item as well as a way to purify drinking water. Mostly they brought their own, but before too long informal taverns cropped up. Our first official brewer, Joseph Parent, arrived just a few years after Cadillac and his crew. If you haven’t had a chance yet, take a listen to the Detroit Historical Society’s new limited-run podcast series, Detroit Untold: Beer. It goes into far more depth than we’ve got time for here and it’s a great listen. Because of our climate, Detroit was a pretty good spot for orchards, too, so pear and apple brandies and ciders were on the scene pretty quickly.

 From the beginning, alcohol and its trade were tricky here in Detroit, and politically fraught as well. In 1696, five years before Detroit’s official founding, Cadillac was stationed at Fort Michilimackinac. His wife was caught controlling a scheme to smuggle illicit brandy between Detroit and Michilimackinac and as far as Montreal. Two officers under Cadillac’s command, Louis Durand and Joseph Moreau, were supplied with a considerable amount of unreported brandy in Montreal to supplement their official trade goods. They were to sell the brandy, unrecorded, and turn all the profits over to Marie-Therese Cadillac.

I should note, here, that the trade they were conducting was mostly with the Anishnaabe, Iroquois and other Native American groups that settled the area then known as New France. Off and on for decades in the early years of Great Lakes trade by the French, trade in alcohol with the First Nations was outlawed officially but conducted illicitly nonetheless. Needless to say, as with most of the other trade conducted by white settlers, the deals of the trades in alcohol and other items were heavily stacked in favor of the Europeans.

 Durand and Moreau got caught during a routine inspection and sent to jail. Durand and Moreau protested that they were under orders to sell the contraband, but Cadillac denied the claims and, to add insult to injury, had their home and warehouse ransacked and confiscated all the cash and property for himself.

 The pair took the case all the way to the court in Quebec, but Cadillac had all their money so he dragged the case out for months until Durand and Moreau were forced to accept a paltry settlement. Thus, even before the official founding of the French settlement at Detroit, we had our first (but definitely not our last) legal case involving booze, drunkenness and smuggling.

English-style ales and bitters came along in greater numbers with the British and American military forces that took over, although Detroit kept a strong French habitant influence for a very long time. And brandy was pretty popular across the board, as were potables that might not be as familiar to us now, like Madeira, as well as rum and whiskey. The large-scale rum and whiskey production was centered in other parts of the continent until the middle of the 19th century, sure, but you can bet that there was plenty of home-use moonshine, of varying qualities, being produced and traded. For the most part, Detroiters drank what folks on the east coast drank, albeit a bit later and staler than they did.

 Round about the middle of the 19th century is when things started to heat up here in town. Once the Erie Canal opened up westward states like ours to the east coast trade and travel, we started to see more — and more grand — proper hotels, taverns and the like. One of the pioneering Detroit hoteliers was Ben Woodworth. Woodworth started construction on his hotel, stagecoach stop, tavern, saloon, all in one, not long after the Great Fire of 1805 that destroyed the town. The hotel stood at the corner of Woodbridge and Randolph streets, now right about where the Detroit-Windsor tunnel begins.

Woodworth’s hotel, later known as the Steamboat Hotel, was massive, opulent and busy! It hosted grand balls, quartered American soldiers in the War of 1812, and entertained President James Monroe in 1817. Generations of Midwesterners traveling on steamboats through the Great Lakes were relieved by the sight of the Steamboat Hotel rising about the Detroit wharfs. Woodworth and his hotel, we’ll see in a later episode, also played role in Michigan being the first state to abolish the death penalty.

Through the 19th century, these grand hotels and slightly more lowly taverns catered to travelers from around the globe. And served up plenty of boozy concoctions along the way.

We’re going to have loads and loads of episodes that tease out individual people and events in Detroit’s booze history, so don’t worry if you feel like I’ve glossed over something. Detroit’s beer will have its own episode, in fact, with Steve Johnson of Motor City Brew Tours, and we’ll definitely be talking Stroh’s and Canadian Club. And Prohibition. All the Prohibition.

For now, let’s pause in the mid-nineteenth century in bustling Detroit, in a grand hotel like the Russell or the Steamboat. And now is as good a time as any to dig into one particular detail in a long and storied tale of Detroit, history and drinks.

Let’s talk cocktails, specifically. They’ve been around as long as people have been fermenting and brewing and distilling, and they’re as diverse (and delicious) as you could want. A cocktail is, by its simplest definition, any drink made of booze, bitters, sugar and water. The variations are endless and some iterations have more staying power than others. For example, not a whole lot of Detroiters are drinking hot milk punch these days. But you might be surprised to learn that one of the three cocktails Detroit has contributed to the international drinking scene is not much more than a simple frozen milk punch.

Cocktails really started to be recorded, recipe-wise, around the middle of the 19th century. The Old Fashioned dates at least that far back. The Sazerac goes back to at least the 1830s. These were the kinds of drinks that hotel bartenders all over the country would have been serving, with local variations and local flair. I’m sure there were plenty more delicious inventions that we don’t have recorded. Again, there’s another great reason to treat our drinks culture history with the respect accorded by historians to other areas of life. Just think about how many stories we’ve missed out on!

The first of our city’s celebrated cocktails, chronologically, is the Last Word. The drink is made of equal parts gin, lime juice, green Chartreuse and Maraschino liqueur. And it is delicious and refined. It’s been on the menu at the Detroit Athletic Club since at least 1916 and might have stayed a local creation if not for some timely intervention. In 1917, traveling vaudeville comedian Frank Fogarty performed his show at the Club and it was noted in the DAC newsletter that he had “enlivened proceedings at the bar.” Obviously the drink made enough of an impression on Fogarty that as he traveled around the country, he told other bartenders about the delicious drink.

Thirty-plus years ago, Ted Saucier, a publicist for the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, wrote a cocktail recipe book called “Bottoms Up.” In it, he recorded the recipe for the Last Word. He attributed the recipe “Courtesy Detroit Athletic Club,” but he also included a note: “This cocktail was introduced around here about thirty years ago" — around 1920 — "by Frank Fogarty, who was very well known in vaudeville," Saucier wrote. "He was called the 'Dublin Minstrel' and was a very fine monologue artist."

Right. But that only brings us to 1951. The drink might still have languished in obscurity if not for bartender Murray Stenson, of Seattle’s Zig Zag Café. In 2009, he was digging through some old cocktail recipe books and came across Saucier’s. Once he tried the Last Word, he was hooked. After all, not a whole lot of drinks are able to pull of the kind of complex, refined combination of flavors present in the Last Word. Plus, it’s always fun to use Green Chartreuse. Bartenders are nothing if not collaborators, so it wasn’t long before the drink made its way to New York’s Pegu Club, and from there the rest of the country. So the drink had to go from Detroit, to New York, to Seattle, before it made its way back home.

Cocktail number two is the Bull Shot. The origin of the Bull Shot is quintessentially Detroit. It’s 1952 and the Caucus Club downtown is in full swing. The club was legendary for its swanky cocktails and upscale clientele. An ad executive from BBDO, which is still in business by the way, is in desperate need of a way to push a boatload of Campbell’s beef bouillon: beef broth, in other words. He sits down with Caucus Club owner Lester Gruber and a few others and they do some experimenting. Eventually they come up with an absurd, bizarre and uniquely 1950s concoction. They take newly-popular vodka, Worcestershire sauce, a dash of Tabasco and some hot beef broth.

The cocktail’s lucky guinea pigs that night included the then-chairman of General Motors. They all loved it. And thus is born the Bull Shot: made up of vodka and beef broth, yes, but also equal parts ingenuity, creativity and sheer stubborn salesmanship. That’s a Detroit drink. 

Cocktail number three is a damn fine drink, no matter what Nick tries to tell you later. Like the Bull Shot, we know exactly when, where and why the Hummer was created. In 1968, Jerome Adams was the new head bartender at the Bayview Yacht Club in Jefferson Chalmers on Detroit’s east side. He was a little anxious, because the previous head bartender had been there for nearly 30 years. Adams had quite a legacy to live up to. Even though it was January, he brought out the blender and started experimenting, determined to find a crowd-pleaser. He landed on it, finally, with the combination of light rum, Kahlua and vanilla ice cream. He was bringing the samples back to the kitchen for the wait staff to try out.

That might have been the end of it, with the drink maybe being a staff favorite for a bit, then forgotten. But just as Adams was heading to the kitchen with the drinks in his hand three men walked in, fresh from watching a Red Wings game downtown. They asked him for a sample, and soon the whole bar was drinking the new drink. In a 2011 Metro Times interview, Adams tells it like this:

"They say, 'Well, Jesus Christ, these are pretty good! ... What you call it?' I say, 'Well, it doesn't have a name.' So one of the guys says, 'You know what? After two of these damn things, kinda makes you wanna hum.' So that's how we got the name 'the Hummer.' I never thought it was going to be that big. I just started pushing it across the bar."

One of those three men, by the way, just so happened to be Ed Jacoby, owner of Jacoby’s bar downtown. Jacoby and his friends, and the sailing jet-setters at the Bayview, started asking for the drink wherever they went, and Adams was fielding long-distance phone calls from annoyed bartenders all over the world asking him how the heck to make this thing. They were likely even more peeved when they found out they had to bust out the blender to make it.

Jerome Adams certainly did cement his legacy, with the invention of the Hummer and with his decades-long career. He was the head bartender at the Bayview Yacht Club for 50 years and passed away in 2018. I had the chance to meet him once, a long time ago, and he was a true gentleman.

The drink is still fairly popular among the sailing set. In England, it’s a Detroit Hummer. In Germany, they honor the drink’s creator and call it the Sir Jerome.

The three cocktails invented and perfected in Detroit each contribute to telling a story about the innovative spirit of Detroiters, for as long as there’s been a city and booze.

For the second half of this episode, I sat down with Detroit’s own connoisseur of all things cocktail and Detroit, Nick Britsky. He’s the founder and host of Nick Drinks. Nick has been a familiar feature on morning TV for a few years now, demonstrating such concoctions as the Dumpster Fire cocktail and the McRib Daisy. He’s pretty familiar with Detroit’s bar scene. We talked about what makes these three cocktails so quintessentially Detroit, and wrap up the show by pondering what’s unique about our city’s bar culture — and what’s next for the drinks scene here.