If you were to draw a line tracing the development of cocktails in America, it would look something like this.

You had boosy mixed drinks like the mint julip and the sazirac that had medicinal origins.

They keep getting better and the Golden Age of cocktails brought us classics like the Martini, Manhattan, and the Dackeery.

Then the line of evolution during prohibition took a turn.

Bootleg liquor became the norm, but bartenders kept innovating abroad, making cocktails like the

Bees knees and the Bloody Mary.

And then...

Then there are the Dark Ages.

The Cocktails' Dark Ages are often described as an era of cocktail delinquency.

From World War II, almost until the end of the 20th century, cocktails seem to lose the thread.

If you're a Genexer or a millennial, these are the cocktails you might have grown up hearing about.

The Long Island Ice Tea, a sex on the beach,

the Madori Sour.

But the Dark Ages were important to the modern cocktail movement too, even if it's not always appreciated as such.

Today on 100 Proof, we shed light on the dark ages of the American cocktail.

I'm Tony Tipt. I'm a senior editor on the books team at America's Test Kitchen.

I'm also the host of Joe versus the Test Kitchen on YouTube. I developed recipes

for cookbooks and one of my favorite cookbooks that I really didn't expect to love was

How to Cocktail. This is so much more than just a collection of recipes and I want to share

with you one little bit of advice to elevate your cocktail game. So a really

important part of almost any cocktail is simple syrup.

And you look at almost any recipe for simple syrup.

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