Book Review: Wisconsin Cocktails
Editor’s note: We asked Jennifer Billock to review Jeanette Hurt’s book, Wisconsin Cocktails because she knows Wisconsin. She’s the author of Classic Restaurants of Milwaukee. She recently shared her favorite picks for where to drink in Milwaukee and also shared her picks for favorite Milwaukee restaurants for cheese lovers over at the Cheese Professor.
It’s no accident Wisconsin is known for its drinking culture. The state ranks within the top five in the line-up of most bars per capita, and Wisconsinites claim ownership of some of the biggest names in brewing: Miller, Schlitz, Pabst, and more. But as we quickly see with one flip through Jeanette Hurt’s new book, Wisconsin Cocktails , there’s more to Wisconsin’s drinking fame than just beer and sausage pairings.
Hurt’s book takes us on an encyclopedic journey around the state, bringing along anyone who’s ever wanted to know the history of our most iconic cocktails. Here, you’ll find the history of the statewide favorite, the brandy old-fashioned. Regional drinks come to the forefront, like Door County’s cherry bounce, and Milwaukee’s bloody mary with a beer chaser. Also included are summer favorites like the ice cream cocktails, very specific drinks like the cocktails made at the AAA Five Diamond-rated American Club resort in Kohler, and “medicinal” tonics like Irish coffee and mulled wine. There’s also a chapter on alcohol-free drinks, one for new cocktails taking the state by storm, and an entire section pairing Wisconsin’s two favorite things: booze and cheese. “This is something we’ve actually been doing for a really long time with the bloody mary, but all of our cocktails pair pretty well with cheese,” said Hurt. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any missing cocktails standard to Wisconsin lore—though I will point out that the chapter with “Hot Toddies” in the title doesn’t have a very specific recipe for the drink. For someone like me, who can’t easily improvise in the kitchen or at the bar, that’s a little bit of a let-down. Otherwise, Wisconsin Cocktails is bursting with every type of Wisconsin-centric drink you could imagine, along with history and important information about each. My very favorite thing about the book is the recipes themselves—they’re all sourced from Wisconsinites who are credited below the drink name, so you know they’re authentic.
The book even does some myth-busting, particularly about the brandy old-fashioned. The cocktail’s origin story typically goes like this: The Korbel brothers brought their new concoction—brandy—to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Because so many Wisconsinites attended the fair, they indulged in brandy. Germans traditionally prefer brandy, and since Wisconsin has such a large German population, they brought the drink home with them to begin adding to cocktails. Alas, though, that’s not the truth of the matter. In reality, World War II caused a shortage of good whiskey and an abundance of good brandy in Wisconsin—so brandy got added to drinks instead, people enjoyed it, and it stuck around.
“If you were at a bar and you ordered your drink, and you could get it with either really good brandy or crap whiskey, what are you going to order?” Hurt said. “You’re going to order with brandy, and you’re going to keep ordering it with brandy.”
I had one issue with the book, and it was minor: At times, recipes are set off from the rest of the chapter’s group by large blocks of text. Those ones can easily be lost as you flip through the book. As an example, when I first browsed through the Cherry Bounce chapter, I missed the standard cherry bounce recipe and had to go back and look for it. On the bright side, those recipes are set off with good reason—they’re surrounded by historical information that rounds out the education of anyone interested in Wisconsin drinks.
Predictably, other books about drinking in Wisconsin tend to focus mainly on beer. Hurt’s compendium does justice to the state’s vast and varied drinking culture—taking us all on a true alcoholic quest across America’s Dairyland.