From the Alabama Slammer to the White Russian: Were Any Good Cocktails Created in the ’70s?

In October I visited Montreal with a few friends. On a whim we popped into a vibey neighborhood cocktail bar in the Latin Quarter a few blocks from our hotel. Amid the menu’s usual suspects — Martini, Manhattan, Americano, and Negroni — lurked a mind-boggling showing of drinks that originated or were popularized during the 1970s: Amaretto Sour, White Russian, Tequila Sunrise, and — it can’t be! — an Alabama Slammer. We ordered our usuals plus a Slammer for the table. It was an admirable rendition, brighter and more tart than the last one I drank in college (in shot form, no doubt), thanks to fresh-squeezed orange juice. Sadly, it couldn’t diminish the cloying one-two punch of Southern Comfort and amaretto, which tastes like a drunk My Little Pony stuffed with marzipan.

Still, it left me wondering whether this bar’s menu was a harbinger of glam days to come filled with technicolored layers of juice and blue curaçao, a healthy splash of amaretto in everything, and luridly named variations on the Sloe Screw (Slow Comfortable Screw Against the Wall, anyone?). After all, the 1970s are already back aesthetically — or so nearly every major food and drink publication has told me. Plus, disco cocktails aren’t a far cry from our current era of extra Martinis. But are any of them any good?

Simply posing the question, “Were any good cocktails created in the 1970s?” to industry pros will yield a startling number of “emphatic no’s” — a.k.a. what 25-year bartending vet Toby Maloney calls the easy answer. And while we can split hairs over a handful of one-off gifts like the Jungle Bird (supposedly invented in the mid- or late-’70s at the Aviary bar inside the Hilton in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) and the Sbagliato (a glorious mistake by a bartender in 1972 Veneto, I’m told), the question begs an examination of what was available to the average bartender in those days, what customers were asking for, and what that might’ve said about their mood.

Born of Necessity?

It’s not hard to draw parallels between certain defining phenomena of the 1970s and now. Record inflation, political disillusionment, social unrest, and a woman’s right to choose fueled a national malaise and need for escapism, garishness, and glitter. What says vacation better than a drink that looks like an actual sunset? It was the height of the jet age as well, and tiki culture was soaring. Therein one might again hold a mirror up to the 2020s, when we edged back into society and international travel following 18 months of pandemic lockdown.

“People were facing a lot of challenges in the ’70s,” says Collin Nicholas, founder and operator of Uncommon Concepts in Portland, Ore., and a longtime bartender. “Going out and socializing, and the drinks themselves were a vehicle to create a sense of escape from what’s going on in the world.”

“You have these major brands that know bars are going to use well spirits, because it’s cheaper for them, and there’s the utility of getting people drunk quicker. All you need to do is cover it up.”

In other words, it was less about what was inside the glass than how it made people feel. “Getting their buzz felt great, but so did a nice tall glass full of Blue Hawaiian with a pineapple wedge and umbrella sticking out of the top,” Nicholas adds.

The view from behind the stick looked a little less glam. Cheap, industrial-grade spirits and bottled mixes had cemented themselves as standard inventory, which Maloney says explains the maligned lower quality of ingredients and sweet-leaning ratios that tend to define the majority of drinks from the era. Some found a way, as evidenced in the aforementioned handful of classics invented around then. For the rest, nothing covers up a multitude of commercial-grade sins quite like heaps of sugar and cream.

“The ’70s were when we fully transitioned into the industrialization of alcohol production,” agrees Chad Hauge, co-owner of Common Good Cocktail House and private whiskey bar Subourbon in Chicago’s west suburbs. “You have these major brands that know bars are going to use well spirits, because it’s cheaper for them, and there’s the utility of getting people drunk quicker. All you need to do is cover it up.”

This cultural hangover of masking the alcoholic equivalent of a “sports utility vehicle” endures to this day on suburban chain-restaurant drink menus populated by sugary bombs that get drinkers lit on the cheap. This in turn carries over to bars like Hauge’s, where customers new to craft cocktails assume they run saccharine. “One of the first things someone will always say when they have never been to my bar (and are perusing the menu) is, ‘Is this cocktail too sweet?’”

Of course, what we’ve also learned from the era of the extra Martini, unicorn latte, and increasingly absurdist Bloody Mary is that there are also times in history when we drinkers explicitly reject serious cocktail culture.

“With more modern culture, we’re really honing in on this idea now that you create an experience through a drink, not so much that it reflects what’s going on in the world.”

“There’s a cyclical thing that happens,” Christine Sismondo, author of “America Walks Into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops,” told me in a 2022 interview. “When people say, ‘I don’t care about integrity, I want something fun and entertaining we can talk about at the bar.’ We were due for a little frivolity.”

It’s not unlike the highly visual, mass-market appeal of #cocktail TikTok, which trades in looks and quick-hit entertainment over substance.

“If you look at ’70s cocktails and the layering of drink ingredients as reflective of the fact that we were more into flashy things like disco in that time period, you could compare it to now in a way,” says Hauge. “We’re visually focused, getting attached to things in a TikTok video without necessarily knowing what the flavor is like. It’s about casting a wider cultural net.”

When to Adapt? When to Leave Cloying Enough Alone?

Nicholas designs bars that happen to lean 1970s in their aesthetics, if a little less on the nose. With plenty of velvet, rounded edges, jewel tones and a few well-placed disco balls, the vibe is bright, comfortable, and brimming with ’70s upbeat energy, perhaps to counter a prevailing sense of heaviness. Nicholas counts among those who think the cocktails of the era “sucked for the most part,” except the Piña Colada, which is a fixture on the menu at Pink Rabbit.

Called the Pono, bartender Ben Purvis’s best-selling riff incorporates papaya purée for funk and buttery texture, a touch of banana liqueur for tropical notes, and even less Becherovka herbal liqueur for cinnamon, clove, and bitterness. It’s an almost-too-perfect metaphor for tempering the ’70s penchant for cloying, escapist excess with balance and grounding complexity.

Maybe it’s better that we leave well alone, and simply accept that one person’s Alabama Slammer is another’s balance-corrected Blood and Sand.

“We’ve made so much progress in terms of technology and process and perspective on cocktails, and the intention behind them,” Nicholas says. “With more modern culture, we’re really honing in on this idea now that you create an experience through a drink, not so much that it reflects what’s going on in the world. There is an emphasis on ingredients, freshness and sustainability — and also the story behind the cocktail more than its effect on the drinker. ”

One could say the same for Hauge’s feelings about amaretto, an ingredient that in small, seasoning-sized doses, “can be really welcomed and wonderful and add a lot.” In fact, Common Good almost always features a variation on the Amaretto Sour, adjusted with amaro and the “Jeffrey Morgenthaler approach” of adding a higher-proof bourbon.

So what about the Alabama Slammer? Does this cocktail have a more austere, palatable counterpart? Hauge hesitates; every element, from the berry-like sloe gin to the orange juice, which lacks the pH of lemon to balance it, is inherently sweet. Could he adjust the pH in the orange juice with citric acid or acid phosphate?

“I’ve seen this technique used on otherwise unbalanced cocktails like the Blood and Sand,” he says. He wonders aloud if he might take a similar tact with the SoCo, finding out its Brix level (a measure of the dissolved solids in a liquid used to determine sugar content), then deconstructing its component flavors.

Or maybe it’s better that we leave well alone, and simply accept that one person’s Alabama Slammer is another’s balance-corrected Blood and Sand.

It’s not all about the craft, after all.

“We look back on ’70s cocktails and dispense all the criticisms I did earlier, but that wasn’t the focus,” Hauge says. “With so many of these cocktails, it’s not necessarily that the idea is bad or the recipe initially is bad. It just wasn’t as important to make a cocktail in balance as one that looked good, that matched vibes, that had mass-market appeal.”