About the time America came into being 250 years ago, alcoholic beverages were often viewed as part of an apothecary’s kit—called “medicinal tonics” or “fortifying drinks”—and one consumed them as one would NyQuil today: not as something to be enjoyed but endured. You were literally drinking to your health.
Our understanding of health changed, but our habits were slow to evolve. During nineteenth-century saloon days, you would belly up to the bar, order a shot, knock it back, then leave—many early bars didn’t even provide stools. A bar was more like a filling station than a place to linger. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 1800s that cocktail culture began to blossom: Creativity edged out efficacy, and drinks such as the Manhattan, daiquiri, and martini appeared in bars as cocktails to be sipped rather than gulped.
Then, in the mid-twentieth century, something unexpected happened: The shots of yore and modern mixed drinks formed an uneasy merger. This was during the dark days for classic cocktails, and these colorful short-form concoctions, now often called “shooters,” frequently arose in bars within the orbit of college drinkers. They appealed to the callow and the daring and carried names that suggested carnival rides, like the Woo Woo, the Kamikaze, and the B-52. Today the shooter menu at the Vortex Bar & Grill in Midtown Atlanta (actual slogan: “Make Your Liver Earn Its Keep”) includes the Sour Skittle and the Sucker Punch. Austin, Texas, is home to the Cheers Shot Bar, with offerings that include Bye Felicia and Orange Crush and many other names not suitable for publication.
Yet there’s little reason to concede the shooter to the Rabelaisian horde. A sophisticated version can make for a welcome preamble to an evening, or a transition from the workaday world to something more elysian. And when served icy cold—or even better, in a shot glass made of ice (silicone molds for these are widely available online)—a shooter can instantly bring down the temperature of a sultry evening.
Any cocktail can be served as a shooter (though only a barbarian would shoot a Negroni rather than sip it). But these three variations are easy to batch, offer guests a choice of spirits (vodka, tequila, whiskey), and come with a modicum of flair to make them stand out. You can fill the ice shots and store in the freezer, then pull them out when guests arrive. It’s like a more informal “Hey!” compared with the formal greeting of a fancy cocktail. While these compact drinks may lend themselves to swift consumption, they’ll nicely set the stage for a long and languorous evening.
Wayne Curtis is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails and has written frequently about cocktails, spirits, travel, and history for many publications, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, Imbibe, Punch, the Daily Beast, Sunset, the Wall Street Journal, and Garden & Gun. He lives on the Gulf Coast.
