The Home Bar: a missed opportunity

How I wrote a potential pandemic bestseller and then forgot to tell people about it.

It was only after the pandemic was over that I realised I had missed a huge opportunity.  Everyone, or almost everyone, was missing the conviviality of pubs and bars. If only there was a book which showed people how they could recreate the bar experience at home with tips on decor, a guide to stocking your bar and recipes for making the perfect Daiquiri or Espresso Martini. Well, I had actually written that book back in 2018 called… drum roll please… The Home Bar! It actually got a load of publicity on publication but didn’t really sell. Then when all those interminable and in retrospect scarcely believable lockdowns were imposed in March 2020, I didn’t for a moment think, here’s a great moment to sell my book. I just sat at home and worried, when I should have started a cocktail channel on Instagram and Substack. Crazy! Anyway, the book is still available on Amazon and I’ve still got a few copies lying around in my office.

Here’s the introduction which looks at the evolution of the bar, both home and otherwise:

What could be more hospitable than a properly made drink? Not just a gin and tonic or whisky and soda but what about knocking your guests up a Daiquiri, a Martini or Brooklyn? Furthermore rather than scrabbling around in the cupboard, wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the ingredients were laid out for easy use, and there was a plentiful supply of ice and the right glasses? If you’re thinking along these lines then this book is for you. You can start small, perhaps just a tray, a shaker and an ice bucket, or a small trolley but be warned you might soon be hankering after something with a zinc top, bar stools, and a built in sound system.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; before the home bar, there was the public bar. It might surprise you to learn that the bar, a counter from which drinks are served, is a relatively recent invention. Prior to the early nineteenth century, an alehouse or tavern would not be far removed from a private house, you were a guest of the landlord and one of his many daughters would bring you your drink. You might have to wait for some time but you probably weren’t in a hurry. In contrast the bar was a production line for drinking. One could serve an enormous number of customers quickly. What the steam locomotive was to travel and the power loom was to weaving, the bar was to drinking. 

The drink itself was becoming industrialised too. At these new-fangled bars, the beer would have come from vast commercial brewers such as Whitbread in London, Guinness in Dublin or Bass in Burton-on-Trent rather than on the premises by the landlord’s wife. Gin too was going high too, in 1830 a Dubliner Aeneas Coffey patented a new kind of still which meant that a spirit of great purity could be produced safely and efficiently. It meant an end to the sort of dodgy gin that might poison you. From the 1830s private companies built elaborate ‘gin palaces.’ They employed well-known designers such as John Buonarotti Papworth who did the interior of gentlemen’s club Boodle’s. These places with their polished wood, etched glass and gas lamps provided a cheap glamour and a warm refuge from the freezing London winter. They were the art deco cinemas of their time.

Inside the Viaduct Tavern - a proper London gin palace (image from Fullers)

Whereas poorer sorts went to gaudy gin palaces. The middle classes were turning inwards. Houses were becoming snugger with carpets, better windows and more efficiently designed heating systems. From the 1850s entertaining at home was the in thing and people picked up the new-fangled French habit of offering a drink before the meal, rather than just binging on port at the end. As well as port, a fairly affluent family might offer their guests sherry or if they were really fancy, champagne, and spirits such as whisky, cognac and gin.  Valuable drinks needed to be kept safe from untrustworthy servants or prying children so people bought drinks cabinets or lockable decanters. These elaborate contraptions built of hardwood and brass with secret compartments were early prototypes of the home bar.

At home you might have a glass of sherry or port, or perhaps cognac or whisky, but pubs would knock you up a Gloom-Lifter, an Eye-Opener, a Morning Jolt, and, for when all else fails, a Corpse-Reviver.  These were a genre of drinks known as antifogmatic, designed to keep out London’s infamous cold. American cocktails, the first description of a ‘cocktail’ came in 1806 from New York paper The Balance and Columbian Repository, were more jolly. Charles Dickens on his American book tour of American was amazed by the ubiquity of iced drinks like mint juleps, sherry cobblers and chilled punches. Ice was a rare luxury in Europe but commonplace in America. They would harvest ice in the winter and store it in specially designed ice boxes, forerunner of modern fridges and chiller compartments. 

It was the start of something like a modern cocktail culture. Recipes were being codified by men such as Jerry Thomas head barman at the Eldorado Hotel in San Francisco in his bestselling book The Classic Guide to Cocktails (1887). One such recipe was for a sweet gin-based cocktail called the Martinez which is thought to be the forerunner for the dry Martini. Nobody knows quite where the origin of the name but that mixture of London dry gin, French vermouth (wine fortified and flavoured) and of course ice, would prove iconic.  

Thomas toured Europe spreading the cocktail gospel. Bars selling American style ie. iced cocktails opened in big cities around the world, in London, Paris, Shanghai and Buenos Aires. Advances in mechanical refrigeration meant that ice could be made in situ rather than having to be shipped in from America - really they used to ship huge blocks of ice across the Atlantic. Not everyone was impressed, according to the literary critic and wine writer, Robert Saintsbury it was a “barbarous time” when vulgar people even started drinking their claret chilled. 

Cocktails were just part of the the post-first world war craze for all things American like jazz music, enormous cars and motion pictures. American films promised glamour, sexual liberation and consumerism. Life began to imitate art: the art deco Strand Palace Hotel in London (the foyer is now in the V&A museum in London) looked like a film set, not surprising as it was designed by Oliver Bernard who had been a set designer in Hollywood. 

The great thing about having people over for cocktails is it didn’t require the work or expense of a dinner party. All you needed was booze, ice, glasses and some basic equipment. They proved particularly popular in England as there was a shortage of servants following the war, one simply could not get the staff. The novelist Alec Waugh claimed to have introduced them to London in 1924, a boast his brother, Evelyn Waugh was quick to scoff at. No matter who invented it, the cocktail hour between 5 and 7pm quickly took off amongst the bright young things. 

In the 20s, Harry MacElhone, a Scot who had tended bar in New York, opened Harry’s Bar in Paris and Harry Craddock, an Englishman from New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel, opened the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel. Both Harrys had been chased out of the US by Prohibition which became law in January 1920. It was the death of the saloon bar but boom time for the home bar because though it was illegal to make and sell alcohol, you were allowed to drink in a private house or club. At home elaborate art deco cabinets were available to serve your drinks from. Philco, an American radio company, offered a radio that opened up into a cocktail cabinet. It featured in the gangster flick Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. You could order your Philco in a traditional wood veneer or in modern materials such as chromium, aluminium and bakelite. The top of the range models cost as much as a new luxury car.

That’s not a home bar. THIS is a home bar (image from 1st Dibs)

But unless you were a member of the Yale Club, which on the eve of Prohibition laid on enough booze for its members to last 14 years, then obtaining alcohol wasn’t straightforward. You could either pay through the nose for drink smuggled in from Canada or Bermuda, or you would do as most people did and drink so-called bathtub alcohol: industrial alcohol flavoured or coloured to taste and look, not very much, like gin, whisky, bourbon etc. Your gin might be adulterated with sulphuric acid. Mmmm tangy! You wouldn’t want to drink that in a dry martini so during Prohibition cocktails became sweeter and fruitier to disguise the taste of the bad liquor. Al Capone’s favourite cocktail was a Southside, a mixture of gin, lemon, sugar and mint. Another popular 1920s cocktail was the Bronx made with orange juice, sweet vermouth and gin.

For those who didn’t want to drink at home, there were speakeasies, illegal bars that could range from someone’s living room to elaborate nightclubs in Harlem. White people would go uptown to drink. According to a columnist in a New York paper: “the night clubs have done more to improve race relations in ten years than the churches, white and black, have in ten decades.” And in contrast to the all male saloon bar of old, speakeasies welcomed women. The spirit of the free drinking modern female was captured in the 1929 silent film Our Modern Maidens starring Joan Crawford which featured the immortal line: “lunch is poured.” When Prohibition was finally repealed in 1933, the drinking culture had been utterly transformed, alcohol for women had been normalised and spirits were king. This set the pattern for home drinking right through until the 1960s. 

After the second world war America, in particular, boomed, and people moved away from the inner cities with there bars and nightclubs into the suburbs. People were spending more time in their homes but they still wanted to lead the cocktail lifestyle: you could listen to Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin Lovers on your state of the art hifi, and no self-respecting American home would be without at least a drinks tray but more probably a cocktail cart or even a built in home bar. 

It is the American male dream: a family, a new car every couple of years, a big house in suburbs and an ice cold martini or two when you came home from work. This heyday of the home bar was reflected in the culture of the times. Richard Yates’ alcohol-soaked novel Revolutionary Road where the hero Frank Wheeler daydreams about “a white wrought-iron table set with ice and cocktail mixings.” With the return of quality booze, the cocktail and the Martini especially was elevated into an arm form. The poet laureate of post-war cocktail culture was Bernard de Voto in his 1949 book, The Hour who came up with the immortal dictum on the importance of making your drink fresh every time: “you can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.”

The look moved on from the art deco of the 20 and 30s, to modernism in the 40s and 50s. In 1951 there was the Festival of Britain which was meant to be a celebration of British design and the optimism of the postwar period but architectural critic Jonathan Meades refers to it as the Festival of Scandinavia such was the influence of Scandinavian design. This impact was felt internationally. The era of chic minimalist design and strong liquor will be familiar to viewers of Mad Men, a series that went to great length to get the details in dress, furniture and, of course, alcohol absolutely right. But it wasn’t all Nordic good taste. As the 50s gave way to the 60s stripped back minimalism was out and interior design became more riotous. We can see the change from a film like High Society (1956) where Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly booze and croon around an understated mid-century bar, to Anne Bancroft trying to seduce Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate (1967) at a kitsch home bar complete with tiki-style glasses and a big glowing sign saying “bar” presumably in case drunk guests forgot where they were. 

From this point on the home bar lost its cool though not for now its popularity. It was mocked in films such as 1978’s Foul Play where Dudley Moore plays a swinger who tries to seduce Goldie Hawn with a piano that turns into a (let’s face it completely fabulous) bar. British readers will remember the Delboy’s home bar from the 1980s sitcom Only Fools and Horses, with its lurid blue cocktails decorated with umbrellas.  The cocktail was becoming a bit of joke. 

By the 1980s stricter drink driving laws led to the end of suburban boozing lifestyle. The home bar seemed an anachronism as did spending time making cocktails. Wine consumption was rocketing in English speaking countries. Now when you went to someone’s house you’d be offered the choice of red or white wine. That great lover of spirits, Kingsley Amis, wrote that the most depressing words when meeting a friend for lunch were: “shall we go straight in?”, closely followed by “red or white?” It was the time when the word ‘gentrification’ was coined. In America and Britain, the middle classes were moving back to the inner cities into old Victorian houses. It was the era of the informal dinner party but generally people were entertaining less at home and going out more. Eating out was the thing as the Bruno Kirby character in When Harry Met Sally put it: "restaurants are to people in the 80s what theater was to people in the 60s.”

Many home bars were scrapped or relegated to the garage rather than being the centrepoint of the room. Home bar became synonymous with the dreaded man cave which for me misses the point of cocktails, they are meant to be unisex. The home bar was down, but it was not out. In the ‘90s there was a reappraisal of 50s suburban culture. A young crowd rediscovered the joys of easy listening, suits and cocktail dresses. People could pick up home bars for song at garage sales or they would buy or rent houses which had them built in. The Seattle based DJ and cocktail aficionado Terence Gunn has written of how there was a brief vogue in the States for home bar crawls. Those fabulous formica topped bars from the 1970s are now collectors items. 

Meanwhile the cocktail itself was being reinvigorated barmen such as Dick Bradsell at the Atlantic Bar in London, inventor of the Espresso Martini and the Bramble, and Dale deGroff at the Rainbow Room in New York. A new generation were discovering the joy of art deco hotels like Claridge’s in London and the classic cocktails from the golden era, the Manhattan, the Negroni and, of course, the Martini. Nowadays there’s a wide palate of flavours to choose from. Small distilleries have opened all over the world, the choice of gins, whiskies, vermouths and brandies is now better than ever. People both professional and amateur are experimenting with making their own infusions, flavoured vodkas, vermouth and syrups and ageing cocktails for a more complex taste.

So if you’re seriously interested in cocktails then you need somewhere to keep all the equipment, bottles and glasses etc. But a home bar isn’t really about practicality, it’s about showing off, it’s about entertaining, it’s about pretending that you are Humphrey Bogart or Joan Crawford for the evening. So whether you’ve got a drinks alcove or custom made bar in your warehouse apartment, invite your friends over, get your shaker out and let your imagination run wild. This book will provide a little inspiration but the rest is up to you.