Women in Cocktail History

The history of cocktails is usually told as a history of men: Jerry Thomas, Dale DeGroff, Sasha Petraske. This is not entirely wrong — men have dominated the front-bar profession for most of the last two centuries — but it is radically incomplete. Women have been making drinks, innovating recipes, and shaping cocktail culture at every stage of its development, often in the face of institutional barriers that would have stopped less determined people.

Ada Coleman

The Savoy's First Lady

Ada Coleman began working at the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1903, and she served as its head bartender from 1903 until 1926 — a tenure of extraordinary influence. She was known by regular customers as "Coley," and her clientele included Mark Twain, Prince Edward, and the actor Charles Hawtrey, for whom she invented her signature drink.

That drink was the Corpse Reviver — no, not quite. The drink Coleman invented was the Hanky Panky: gin, sweet vermouth, and Fernet-Branca, a bitter Italian amaro. The story goes that Hawtrey, exhausted from rehearsals, asked Coleman to give him something with "a real punch in it." She made the Hanky Panky; he declared it "the real hanky panky." The drink appeared in Harry Craddock's 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, where it was one of the few recipes credited explicitly to a named bartender.

Coleman's influence at the Savoy extended well beyond a single cocktail. She trained a generation of bartenders in the classical English style — precise, hospitable, attentive — and her departure from the Savoy in 1926 (replaced by Harry Craddock, arriving from the United States) represented a transition from the pre-war English tradition to the American-inflected style that the expatriate bartenders brought with them.

Before Coleman: Women in the Punch House Era

Women's involvement in alcohol production and service predates Coleman by centuries. In the Punch Era, women commonly operated taverns and punch houses, particularly as widows who inherited their husbands' establishments. The Colonial American tavern frequently had a female proprietor — the "tavern keeper's wife" was often the tavern keeper, even if legal and social conventions obscured this. The exclusion of women from front-bar bartending was a nineteenth-century development, associated with the professionalization of the trade and the masculinization of the saloon.

Julie Reiner

Reimagining the New York Bar

Julie Reiner opened the Flatiron Lounge in New York in 2003, followed by Clover Club in Brooklyn in 2008 — both were significant contributions to the craft cocktail revival. Reiner was among the first generation of craft bartenders who explicitly framed their work as historically informed: she made Clover Club cocktails at the Clover Club, restoring a pre-Prohibition drink and a pre-Prohibition hospitality model.

Reiner's bars were known for their emphasis on fresh ingredients, seasonal cocktails, and a welcoming atmosphere that explicitly positioned itself against the exclusivity and masculine-coded seriousness of some craft cocktail venues. Her approach — cocktail excellence alongside genuine warmth — influenced how the next generation thought about what a bar should feel like.

She also mentored a significant number of bartenders who went on to influential careers: St. John Frizell, Tom Macy, and many others. The transmission of craft knowledge through mentorship has always been central to cocktail culture, and Reiner's work in this dimension is part of her historical significance.

Ivy Mix

Leyenda and Agave Spirits

Ivy Mix opened Leyenda in Brooklyn in 2015, a bar devoted to Latin American spirits — tequila, mezcal, pisco, rum, cachaça — and the cocktail traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean. In an industry that had largely focused its craft revival on European and American traditions, Leyenda was a deliberate reorientation.

Mix is also a co-founder of Speed Rack, a national cocktail competition exclusively for women bartenders, founded in 2011 with Lynnette Marrero. Speed Rack emerged from a specific observation: despite women's significant presence in the bar industry as a whole, they were dramatically underrepresented in high-profile competitions, leadership roles, and media coverage. The competition raised money for breast cancer research while providing a platform and professional network for women bartenders across the country.

The Pipeline Problem

The cocktail industry's gender gap in the early 2000s was not primarily about overt discrimination (though that existed and exists) but about pipelines: the informal networks through which bartenders got recommended for prestigious positions, the media through which bartenders got recognized, the competitions through which they built reputations. Those networks were male-dominated not through explicit policy but through the accumulated weight of historical practice.

Speed Rack and similar initiatives worked to create parallel pipelines and to make the existing ones more permeable. By 2020, the most lauded bars in the world — including Licorería Limantour in Mexico City and Connaught Bar in London — had women in leadership roles that would have been almost unimaginable two decades earlier.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling

The Contemporary Landscape

The contemporary cocktail industry looks significantly different from the industry of 2000. Lynnette Marrero has been a global ambassador for multiple spirit brands. Natasha David, co-owner of Nitecap in New York, has won James Beard recognition. Monica Berg at Tayer + Elementary in London is among the most intellectually ambitious bartenders in the world. The World's 50 Best Bars list, which tracks industry prestige, has moved from near-complete male dominance toward something closer to proportional representation.

What has changed is not primarily legislation or formal policy but culture: the craft cocktail movement's emphasis on knowledge, hospitality, and technique created criteria for excellence that were not intrinsically gendered. A bartender who knows the history of the Negroni, understands the chemistry of Balance, and can execute a flawless Dry Shake is demonstrating expertise regardless of gender. The meritocracy is imperfect and incomplete — structural barriers remain — but it is more real than it was.

Ada Coleman would recognize the contemporary bar world more than she might expect. The hospitality, the precision, the historical consciousness — these are continuities. The fact that a woman can be head bartender at a premier hotel bar without it being remarkable is, in fact, remarkable.