The Philosophy of CocktailsAn early description of a cocktail as 'a mix of alcoholic drinks with flavouring ingredients' does nothing to convey the alchemy and speak easy glamour of these elaborate drinks. The cocktail's humble beginnings as a medicinal tonic, through the inclusion of botanicals into distilled spirits such as gin and whiskey, accelerate with the ingenuity of bartenders who created the 'classics' the Martini, Manhattan, and Old Fashioned in the nineteenth