When Dale DeGroff—known in some circles as King Cocktail—releases a new book like this month’s The Essential Cocktail, people take notice for the same reason San Francisco’s top bartenders volunteer to pour his drinks at his book release: He is cocktail royalty. While the rest of us were sipping gin and tonics in the ‘80s, DeGroff was pioneering the world of gourmet cocktails. When it comes to booze, you trust DeGroff like you trust Neil Armstrong about the moon. He was there. And he was there in the beginning. San Francisco got a chance to chat with the King while he was in town with Pernod Ricard's BarSmarts, a bartender training and education program.

Who exactly is your target audience with this book?  It’s the same as The Craft of the Cocktail, which was my first book. Back in 2002, there wasn’t a clear, concise sort of masters' class in basic bartending. And that’s what Craft turned out to be. It appealed to the beginner bartender in a very real way because they needed to learn their craft, but it is clear and easy to read and the recipes work, so it appealed to the normal bartender too, which is exactly what I was hoping for. And that’s what I’m hoping for this book as well.

Does that mean the recipes are relatively simple?  I make recipes that work. I'm not going to say they’re simple because some of them have more or less ingredients depending on the drink. Some only have a couple—maybe three—ingredients, you know? But even though there are only three ingredients, no one said that that was going to translate to an easy recipe. Less ingredients doesn’t necessarily mean they’re easy. You can take a drink that has three ingredients that can be much harder to balance than a drink that has four or five or six ingredients. For example, sour drinks have a sour, a sweet, and a strong. If you don’t know how to put those things in balance, the drink is undrinkable. Whereas if you have a punch, like a rum punch, it can almost be easier to make, because you have so many juices and ingredients. It’s harder to mess it up. It’s always going to taste sort of OK.

Does The Essential Cocktail build on Craft?  Yeah—everything I’ve come up with are either new or adapted classics. I’ve done a lot of jobs for different industry professionals and suppliers, and it’s led to a whole stable of new cocktails that I wanted to showcase. I’ve done some work with foams: deconstructing cocktails and reconstructing them with one of the ingredients foamed on top. That’s something new that has happened since I wrote Craft. I’ve tried to reflect some of the culinary styles that have crept into the cocktail recently. The whole idea of the culinary cocktail has really come to the mainstream.

What about the American cocktail has been lost overtime?  The 20th century was an absolute disaster for the food and beverage industry on every level. We began with a world war and when the world war was over, the boys came home from Europe and they were slapped with Prohibition. A generation of people did not have access to fine spirits, except for the very privileged.

What about after the Prohibition?  Well, when Prohibition ended, the biggest depression in recorded history smacked us across the face, followed by upheavals in weather that led to crop failures and the dust bowl, followed by another world war. During this time, we start processing and canning food, trying to find ways to powder it and send it overseas to the boys. Then all the wars end, except for the Cold War, but all of food processing folks decide to embrace all of these new technologies and everybody is so excited about the fact that they can have green beans year round—forget the fact that they’re grey. It was like it was the best thing since sliced bread. But sliced bread was another serious problem. You could ball it up and bounce it on the ground for Christ's sake. By the time the '60s were around you could walk up and down the isles and see things that didn’t even resemble food in any way, shape, or form.

Would I be wrong then in assuming that the cocktail world followed the lead of the culinary world into a similar type of conformity?  Exactly. When the Prohibition ended, instead of having big professional schools like they did on the culinary side, we started inventing shortcuts—like 7-11 mix, an artificial sweet-and-sour mix. Because the hardest cocktails to make were the sour cocktails, they didn’t have to have a skilled guy. They could just throw in a shot of booze and a couple ounces of this stuff and it was an instant cocktail.

How did that affect the overall markets for cocktails?  By 1970 people stopped drinking cocktails. They drank highballs, lowballs, Perrier, Tab, wine. Fancy cocktails were dead. All those exotic liqueurs—liquor companies weren’t interested in importing them anymore because people weren’t drinking those kind of drinks anymore. We lost a lot of our really interesting liquors and liqueurs and they were replaced in the '70s by these bubble gum schnapps products.

So how did we get to where we are now then?  There was a total revolution in the culinary side. I’ll date it to 1959, when a genius in our business named Joe Baum opened the Four Seasons Restaurant on Clark Avenue [in New York City] followed by La Fonda Del Sol over in the Time-Life Building over on 6th Street. Those two restaurants inspired and just set on fire the industry. Seasonal. Classic. Regional. Menu changing four times a year—even the decor changes. He was a genius. He inspired lots and lots of people. What he did became an important building block. By the time the '80s rolled around, you started to see American chefs rising to the top in New York where chefs were usually French or Italian at celebrated three-star or four-star restaurants. And that was all because of this culinary revolution, partly fueled by the fact that Americans were falling in love with big flavor. Ethnic was becoming much more mainstream. People just got choices.

But how did that affect the cocktail world?  So what happened was that when you went to the bar now, ordered a margarita, and somebody pushed the button to get the sour mix out, they were like “What’s the deal pal? I can go into the dining room and have tuna tartare made with fresh lemon juice and you can’t get a fucking margarita with lime juice in it?” We’re doing what food did.

So where do you fit in all this?  When Joe Baum hired me at the Rainbow Room, he said to me, "I don’t want any mixes, I don’t want any soda, I don’t want anything but real honest recipes with real honest ingredients. I want you to investigate the classics." This started in ’85 when I first went to work for him. I had two years to work up a program and we did a menu at the Rainbow Room that inspired people—at a time, by the way when there were no other cocktail menus in the city of New York, except in The Plaza and a couple other big hotels. And still, no one was using those except the Europeans.

What made you want to get into cocktails?  What else? The cocktail is a metaphor for the American people for Christ's sake. It is an American invention. The cocktail was our beverage tradition, the same as wine, cognac, and armagniac in France, or beer in Germany, or liqueurs in Italy. The cocktail was all of those things put together in one glass.

As far as contemporary American cocktail culture, do you see a difference between the New York scene and the San Francisco scene? Is there an East-West schism?  Yeah, sure. First off, the restaurants where these bartenders are working are so driven by seasonal and local ingredients that it makes perfect sense that they start mastering that skill in their cocktails.

What about internationally? Is there much influence from abroad?  A lot of what’s going on right now happened in the style bars of London. Suddenly it became sexy to have cocktails and you had a bunch of young cats who didn’t grow up in any kind of cocktail tradition. They were pub guys, so they just started doing whatever they wanted. They were the ones who brought in a lot of the exotic fruits, basil, and that stuff. The English-style bars inflamed a lot of the rest of the world: Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia. Those bartenders traveled a lot and they spread the word, the gospel.

In the overall scheme of things, how has that global exposure affected cocktails?  There’s been a morph, a genetic change in the cocktail. We’ve gotten away from just Manhattans, martinis, and sours. Like with the Manhattan East, I took a basic idea: rye whiskey, a fortified wine, and a flavor additive, Angostura bitters—a Manhattan. OK. How about Rye or Bourbon whiskey, Sake and ginger? You got a spice, a flavor additive, a wine product, and you got a whiskey. Call it the Manhattan East. That’s something that would have never happened 30 or 40 years ago. It’s a genetic change.

You teach a lot of bartender trainings, what are the common mistakes of beginning bartenders?  Thinking they know too much. I did that. I learned a bunch of lousy drinks back in the '70s and thought I knew it all. And then when you start to realize that you don’t, it can start to manifest itself with a little bit of standoffishness or arrogance because you’re not confident. It can manifest itself as a “well that’s how we make it here. Take it or leave it” kind of attitude. I would say approach it like a chef. Utilize your tools. First off, realize that you have tools, and then learn how to use them. Take a cooking class where you have to mix ingredients, study your ingredients, know all the spirits, do wine tastings, know recipes, learn your basic sauces, and then get creative. By that, I mean with your classics. Approach it as a profession—plain and simple.