6. The cocktail was a result of bad-tasting liquor during Prohibition
It is easy to find references which attribute the development of alcoholic drinks mixed with each other and with non-alcoholic ingredients to create the cocktail to bartenders in speakeasies forced to mask the taste of the poor quality of their wares. Both the practice and the word cocktail are frequently linked to America’s so-called Noble Experiment in the 1920s. But the word cocktail in reference to mixed alcoholic beverages can be traced back to the first decade of the 19th century in the United States. Before the American Civil War, it was generally used to refer to drinks which contained bitters.
In 1891 a bartender at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel published the first manual on how to make mixed drinks, under the title Cocktail Boothby’s American Bar-Tender. It listed twenty drinks identified as cocktails. So the suggestion that cocktails, both name and the drinks to which it refers, are an ironic result of Prohibition is utterly false. Speakeasy bartenders likely did create many drinks with sweeteners and juices to hide the inferior quality of the liquors they had available. But Prohibition did not lead to the use of the word to describe mixed drinks nor the drinks themselves.