That sort of popularity has meant a golden age for an entire professional class of people who can now make a living and feed their families thanks to fancy cocktails. Amazon turns up 55,000 results when you search for "bitters." The original bartender who started it all, "King Cocktail" Dale DeGroff, now helps run the Beverage Alcohol Resource, which features a five-day certification that's "the world's most comprehensive distilled spirits & mixology program," costs nearly $4,000, and is essentially the PhD you receive after you complete their undergraduate BarSmarts online program. The industry's biggest conference, Tales of the Cocktail, now gets almost 20,000 attendees to its main event in New Orleans and features its own international road show as well as a membership program with seminars and product discounts. It shouldn't come as a surprise that last year Nielsen CGA reported nearly a quarter of all Americans regularly drank cocktails outside their home.
In the past year, I traveled to 30 American cities to examine the current state of American dining culture (and also eat a lot of burgers), and in nearly every one, there were at least a handful of places where you could get a daiquiri, negroni, or old-fashioned, and often much more, made with impeccable (or at least very competent) technique and better ingredients: fruit juices, homemade syrups and bitters, refrigerated vermouth and higher-quality spirits. The battle has been fought. Cocktails have won. As I so eloquently put it above, it's never been more clear that the craft cocktail "revolution" we first experienced 10 years ago is OVR.
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