Jerry Thomas, 1862. The book the rest of bartending grew out of.

Jerry Thomas published How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant's Companion in 1862. It is the first cocktail book published in English. Every category of mixed drink that survives in modern bartending appears in its 250 or so recipes. If a craft bar today serves you a fancy drink with a citrus peel and an explanation, the bartender's intellectual lineage runs through this volume. Free PDF inside: The Lost Cocktail Codex, 50 hand-transcribed recipes, no card.

This piece is a deep read of the 1862 manuscript. Who Thomas was, what is in the book, why it remains the foundation, and which of his recipes are still worth making in 2026. I will spare you the parts most cocktail histories pad with; I want you to leave understanding why this book specifically (not a contemporary, not a later book) is the one you keep hearing about.

The man

Jeremiah "Jerry" Thomas was born in 1830 in Sackets Harbor, New York. He went west during the gold rush, landed in San Francisco, ran the bar at the El Dorado in 1849, and spent the next two decades hopping between landmark hotel bars: the Occidental in San Francisco, the Metropolitan in New York, stops in St. Louis, Chicago, Charleston, New Orleans, and a much-mythologized European tour. He died in 1885 at the age of 55.

What set Thomas apart from his contemporaries was performance. The Blue Blazer, his signature, involved pouring flaming whiskey in a long arc between two metal mugs to create a continuous stream of fire. He served drinks from a silver-plated bar set he commissioned, and he made bartending a public craft in a way that elevated the trade socially. The 1862 book was the published distillation of what he had learned moving from bar to bar across the United States.

The publication context

The book was published by Dick & Fitzgerald of New York in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War. It cost $1 (about $30 in 2026 dollars) and ran 240 pages. The full title was How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant's Companion. Containing Clear and Reliable Directions for Mixing All the Beverages Used in the United States, Together with the Most Popular British, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish Recipes; Embracing Punches, Juleps, Cobblers, etc., etc., etc., in Endless Variety.

That sub-subtitle tells you exactly what the book is. Mostly American drinks, with a global appendix. The structure is ambitious; Thomas wanted to claim the cocktail as both an American and a cosmopolitan form. He partly succeeded.

The 1862 edition was followed by an 1876 edition (revised, expanded, with more European drinks) and an 1887 edition (further revised, posthumously edited from his notes). The 1862 is the foundational text, the 1887 is the most complete picture of his repertoire, and most modern reprints (Mud Puddle Books, etc.) work from the 1862 with notes from later editions.

What is in the book

The recipes are organized by category, not by base spirit, which tells you something about the period. To Thomas, the structural unit of mixology was the form of the drink (the punch, the julep, the cobbler) rather than the bottle that anchored it.

• Punches (a long opening section, the dominant form before the cocktail). Both individual punches and large-batch.
• Juleps (mint juleps, brandy juleps, etc.).
• Smashes (the small-format julep cousin).
• Cobblers (the iced wine drink that gave us the modern cocktail shaker).
• Mulls and toddies (the hot drinks).
• Sangarees (sweetened, fortified wines).
• Slings (the ancestor of many modern long drinks).
• Sours (citrus + sugar + spirit, the structural foundation).
• Fizzes and rickeys (the carbonated branch).
• Eggnogs and milk punches.
• Cocktails (a small section, defined as bitters + spirit + sugar + water; this is where the modern cocktail definition comes from).
• Crustas (the sour with sugared rim, ancestor to the sidecar).

The cocktail section is small in 1862 because the cocktail as a category was small in 1862. It would explode in popularity over the following decades, and by Hugo Ensslin's 1916 book the proportion had inverted: cocktails were the dominant category and punches were a subsection. Ensslin coverage here.

Why this book and not another

There were earlier writings on mixed drinks. There was no earlier book in English with the scope, the organization, and the documentation of Thomas's 1862. He acted as a clearinghouse for everything being served in major American bars at the time. He wrote down recipes that had previously lived in oral tradition between bartenders. He gave names to drinks that had been called whatever the local bartender felt like calling them.

The act of standardization mattered as much as the recipes themselves. After 1862 a Mint Julep had a published reference. Before 1862 it was whatever the bartender in front of you called a Mint Julep.

The Blue Blazer and the showmanship problem

The Blue Blazer is the recipe Thomas is most famous for and probably the worst one to actually order. It is hot Scotch (or whiskey), water, sugar, and lemon, set on fire and poured between two metal mugs in a long arc. The visual is spectacular. The drink itself is mediocre by modern standards: too sweet, too watery, dominated by the showmanship rather than the flavor.

That is the honest take. Thomas's lasting contribution is not the Blue Blazer; it is the systematic documentation of every other category. The Blue Blazer is a footnote about him as a performer.

Five recipes from 1862 that are still worth making

How to read the original today

The 1862 edition is in the public domain. Project Gutenberg has a clean text version. Internet Archive has scans of multiple editions. If you want a physical copy, the Mud Puddle Books reprint includes Dale DeGroff's commentary, which is worth reading because DeGroff is the modern bartender most directly responsible for re-popularizing Thomas in the craft revival of the 1990s.

For working through recipes at home, modern transcriptions are easier than the period text because Thomas's measurements are inconsistent. He uses "wine glasses," "small glasses," "tumblers," and "tablespoons" interchangeably, with no fixed conversion. The conventional translation is 1 wine glass = 2 oz, but it is approximate. The transcribed recipes in The Lost Cocktail Codex use modern fluid ounces throughout.

Every cocktail menu in every craft bar in America in 2026 is a footnote on a $1 book published during the Civil War.

What is missing from 1862 that comes later

The Manhattan is not in the 1862 edition. Neither is the Old Fashioned (as a named drink; it appears later as the holdover of the original 1862 cocktail definition, when newer drinks departed from it). The Martini is not present; it shows up in Harry Johnson's 1888 expanded edition. The Aviation does not appear until Hugo Ensslin in 1916. The Negroni (1919) is post-war. Most of the canonical "classic cocktails" are post-1862 inventions or reformulations.

Thomas's book is the foundation, not the ceiling. Read it as the start of the conversation, then move forward through Johnson, Boothby, and Ensslin to see how the form evolved across the 60 years up to Prohibition. Reference page on all five.