The Cocktail Colloquy: The Martini Now

We don’t do guest posts on The Mix and never have, since the newsletter bowed back in January 2022. If you read something in these pages, it’s either me, Robert, or my co-founder Mary Kate.

But some offers are too attractive to pass up.

Last May, we asked Lowell Edmunds—emeritus professor of classics at Rutgers and the author of the famous 1981 book-length study of the Martini, The Silver Bullet, and its updated 1998 version Martini, Straight Up (and regular reader of The Mix)—if he would be willing to pen a guest post for The Mix about Martini culture. I knew from our correspondence over the years that he had never stopped thinking about the Martini.

The answer was: Yes, he would. He said the theme of the essay would be “the changes that the Martini has undergone and what it is now.”

And so, dear readers, we find ourselves in the possession of a fresh piece of Martini scholarship by Lowell Edmunds! (If you have never read his book, you should do so, or cease to call yourself a student of the cocktail.) It is published below. He attacks the subject in short sections, each with a different focus, in a style that reminded me of the early essays of Susan Sontag.

Edmunds’ generous contribution to The Mix got us thinking. New writing on the subject of the Martini is always welcome. And, what with The Martini Expo Chicago coming up this September, what better time to publish such compositions? So we asked a collection of writers and thinkers who we respected—people with a track record of writing about the Martini (and one who doesn’t, but whose thoughts are welcome on any topic) if they would contribute an essay to The Mix. In all but two instances, they agreed!

We are calling this essay series The Cocktail Colloquy: The Martini Now. We will publish one essay every Monday for the next several weeks leading up to the beginning of The Martini Expo on Sept. 13. We named it the Cocktail Colloquy, rather than the Martini Colloquy, because: a) it sounds better; b) we are leaving open the possibility of running future essay series about other classic cocktails.