What a cocktail is

A cocktail is a mixed drink of two or more ingredients, served at any time, long or short. That's the definition I was given, and it's so broad it includes a gin and tonic, a Negroni and a glass of orange juice with a dash of something in it. The word has covered a lot of different drinks for two hundred years, and that isn't going to change.

The useful version is narrower. Almost every drink you would want to make is a spirit base, something to sweeten, something to sharpen, and something to season. Once you can see those four elements in a recipe you can guess what an unfamiliar recipe will taste like, and fix one that has come out wrong, because you know which of the four to adjust.

A short drink is spirit-forward and served in a small glass - a Negroni, an Old Fashioned, a Martini. It's mostly alcohol and it's meant to be sipped. A long drink is the same idea diluted with a mixer and served over ice in a tall glass - a Collins, a mule, a highball.

A mocktail is the same construction with the alcohol left out. It's usually treated as an afterthought. That's no longer the case, and it gets its own chapter later.

Nothing in the definition mentions balance, and balance decides whether a drink is any good. Two bartenders can follow the same four part shape and produce one drink you want more of and a drink you can't finish. That gap is what Part IV is about.

A stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.

The Balance and Columbian Repository, 13 May 1806

That 1806 definition is the first in print, and it's the better of the two. Spirit, sugar, water, bitters. It names all four jobs, and the water is the part people forget, because it arrives on its own from the ice while you're shaking.