America is a patchwork quilt... and stories are its stitching.
Christian D'Andrea
Secret Cocktails
A docu-series of discovery
Logline
Secret Cocktails is a treasure hunt, through American history, with secret cocktail recipes as the prize.
Overview / format
Secret cocktail recipes are cultural treasures, shrouded in lore and legend, but also safeguarded in inner sanctums and private clubs, concealed from the outside world.
Discovering these secret cocktail recipes is an art… and, at times, an extreme sport.
This series explores some of the most fascinating secret cocktails. Their recipes. Their place in folklore. Who's been keeping them secret. And the adventures and risks that are required to unearth them.
Each episode will explore one secret cocktail. We’ll learn about their legends, travel to their points of origin, and become booze detectives, hunting for their recipes. And then of course we’ll share what we find—the recipe itself. The dramatic question driving each ep (the question the viewer will be asking) is will they find the recipe? In most cases, the answer is yes. To keep the air of mystery, once in a while the answer will be no. But even then, we’ll take a good guess at it, or cite the best guess of an authority on the story of the secret.
Other secrets that will be explored
We'll explore secret dining and drinking rituals associated with the cocktails. Toasts. Oaths. Accompanying foods. Dining protocols. Rituals… like the one where a secret cocktail is used to baptize babies.
Why us?
We have experience with secret cocktail recipes. We've already discovered what is perhaps the most famous secret cocktail recipe in the world of spirits. Check out FishHousePunch.com.
Strategic Advantage
Major spirits brands will be interested in sponsoring the project. Especially spirits brands that turn out to be part of the recipe of the secret cocktail in question.
Examples of the secret cocktails we'll pursue
BULL RUN COCKTAIL
We'll travel to Hawaii to unearth this secret recipe.
The story: Back in the 19th century, while docking on the island of Hawaii, an American trading ship allowed a slew of cattle and pigs to escape, return to the wild, and create their own permanent autonomous zone on the remote mountain hillsides of Mauna Loa. Over the ensuing years, the wild bulls developed a habit of raiding the lowland farms and luring their tame brethren into a life of savagery, and the pigs got good at ravaging cultivated pasturage in the foothills. In response, local stock owners and planters made a frequent ceremony of traveling up into the hills to cull the herds. These “pig shootings” involved multiple days of hard riding, and fair odds that your horse would be bum-rushed by a wild bull or skewered by the tusks of a wild boar. These hunts promptly became a kind of cherished sporting ritual among the Hawaiians and the immigrants who’d made homes there.
A New York journalist named Edward Townsend joined in on one such boar and bull shooting excursion toward the end of the 1800s. His first stop was a mountain hamlet—a “great sweep of grassy plain” abounding in oranges, banana, and guava—where he was afforded a pit stop at the home of the man who would be his guide, an Anglo-Australian expat re-named Pakana, who’d lived on the island for fifty years and who Townsend quickly decided was “one of the most interesting men I ever met.” Physically imposing (even “tremendous”), hardy, able to hunt on horseback uninterrupted for 24 hours, self-sufficient as a farmer, and married to a younger indigenous woman, Pakana was also some kind of sui generis fusion of local magistrate, honorary tribal potentate, and demigod, “loved and feared” by the locals, who “were not altogether certain that he was not some kind of a god who had come up to their mountain out of the ocean, a belief doubtless founded on the fact that he first landed on the island from a shipwreck.”
Pakana, who actually reminded Townsend of a bull (and who reminds me of a slightly nicer Colonel Kurtz), welcomed Townsend’s party “with a hearty bull-like bellow” and made it immediately clear that they would not be wasting the second half of the day, which still lay before them. The hunting party would be saddling up and riding out to more remote pastoral sectors, the first stop being some upland cattle pasture and its ranchland cottages, where they’d be bedding down. But before they set out, they’d fortify. To that end, Pakana “revived our wearied bodies with what he called a ‘Bull Run’ cocktail. No one but Pakana knows why his famous cocktail is called a Bull Run any more than they know what it is made of. He turns his back to the company and goes through a wonderful lot of performances, accompanied by violent explosions of laughter when he compounds a Bull Run and serves it with assurances that it alone has preserved him [and his friend, the local priest] from physical decline any time this last half century.”
THE HENRY PLAGEMANN CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL
I’ve discovered this one. Its recipe has never been revealed before, anywhere (even Grok confirms this). We'll recreate its discovery on the show.
In the late nineteenth century, a group of northern California businessmen formed the Society Harmonie. Its express purpose was to stage annual “high revels” in the woods of Marin country. In some ways reminiscent of modern-day corporate retreats, these woodland “stag parties” were designed to help the businessmen “get free of the cares of commerce” (according to a writer commenting in the 1890s). The principal activity was singing in choruses and performing world premieres of their own original operas (one such opera involved all of the principal characters being, at the end of the performance, burned at the stake). In order to lubricate and facilitate these harmonics and theatrics, a vitally important activity at these woodsy revels was imbibing a mysterious champagne cocktail, “concocted according to a secret process known only to Henry Plagemann,” who was one of the members. And to which time of day did this singing society assign cocktail hour? The crack of dawn. At the 1897 frolic, during one of the early morning sessions of cocktails and serenades, the merry band went a-wandering, and they inadvertently discovered gold in Papermill creek. They promptly set to sluicing and harvesting it, and a mining company was “incorporated at once.”
The discoverer of the gold was Mr. Plagemann himself, leading some to surmise that the cocktail—and its associated rituals—were conducive to good fortune. Thereafter, more than a few area prospectors adopted the habit of greeting the day with Plagemann’s concoction and then wandering the redwood forests, breaking into otherworldly song as they panned for gold in creeks. As the legend of the cocktail grew, so did the tendency of miners to consume it on the job, which lead a California paper to comment: “Experience has now demonstrated that mining operations cannot be successfully conducted under the stimulating and delusive influence of the Plagemann secret cocktail.”
FISH HOUSE PUNCH
This is a secret cocktail recipe I've already discovered.
It's how I got involved in this world. We'll tell the story, and go deeper into the cocktail's origins... and also hear from the haters who say I haven't found it!
One day, I happened to be in a rare books repository, looking for something else, when I inadvertently found a memo with the Fish House Punch recipe on it, written by a prominent person whose cousin had “liberated” the recipe from a private Philadelphia club (the State in Schuylkill, aka the Fish House). I’d never heard of Fish House Punch, but I was intrigued, so I took a photo of the recipe-bearing memo, refusing to do what maybe a more ruthless entrepreneur would do—i.e., steal it. Looking into the matter further, I learned that it’s the first cocktail invented in America, in 1732, and one of the most famously secret recipes in the world of spirits. Presidents and dignitaries have sought invitations to the Fish House in Philly to partake of the punch.
When I first told people about it, I was surprised at how interested they were. It got to the point where I was being invited to give talks, and host tastings from the recipe (turns out, people really like the idea of drinking an almost three-hundred-year-old cocktail… especially a secret one). But the discovery spurs other kinds of reactions, too. A handful of guys have offered to buy the recipe memo from me for sizable chunks of change. And one or two guys have wanted to beat me up.
