Rediscovering an Award Winning Cocktail from 1960 | The Evening's Delight

Today we start our journey into award-winning cocktails from the 1960s with The Evening's Delight. I spent a lot of time in online archives, newspapers, magazines, and books, and about two years ago I started diving deeper into one of these award-winning cocktails from the 1960s, which was of course the Saturn, and in doing so I came across many other award-winning cocktails. So today's video will be the first in a series of videos exploring these award-winning cocktails from the decade of the 1960s. It's 1960s, no apostrophe s. So what award are we even talking about? Well, for today's cocktail it's United Kingdom Bartenders Guild annual competition, which took place at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. Now those of you that know your Saturn history will know that it won the 1967 California Bartenders Guild Championship, not the United Kingdom Bartenders Guild, but up until 1961 it was the United Kingdom International Chapter that was set up in California and it ran these competitions, and in 1961 the California branch created its own chapter, the California Bartenders Guild, with its first competition taking place in 1962, which we will get to sooner than you would think. Starting off the decade strong was The Evening's Delight from bartender Nick Beeler, who was the bar manager at the Sheridan West in Los Angeles. The recipe includes Grand Marnier, creme de banana, pineapple juice, and cream. And yes, I said that right, there's no spirit in this cocktail, and I found multiple references to this recipe online that were the same, so it's accurate and we'll see how it goes. One recipe calls to use Bowles banana liqueur, which I have a bottle of but I can't use it. I've never had this yet and I'm waiting to try this when I do a larger comparison of now the 10 plus bottles of banana liqueur that I currently have. There's just so many, so much banana. So let us make The Evening's Delight. Start with one dash of orange bitters, half an ounce of pineapple juice, three-quarter ounces heavy cream, half an ounce of a banana liqueur, and three-quarter ounces of Grand Marnier. We'll serve this into a period-specific Libby cocktail coupe with no garnish, which is what you would expect from a competition. So there you go, the award-winning cocktail from 1960, Evening's Delight. All right, let's try it. Cheers. I can't tell you anything more about this drink other than it won an award and who made it and where it happened, so I don't really know the intention of it. Evening's Delight makes me think with those ingredients that it's a nightcap, a dessert cocktail, a final cocktail of the night. As a cocktail, there's no spirit here. Grand Marnier is 40% ABV. There's three-quarters of an ounce here, but what is interesting about this as a whole is it tastes pretty good. There's some depth to it. There's a little bit of complexity. None of the flavors are too strong, but on paper, I thought it would be more of like an orangey creamsicle, 50-50 bar. There's less of that. The orange bitters provides orange flavor and bitterness, and the Grand Marnier provides that orange flavor, but it's not orange juice flavor for either one of those. So what you pick up is this nice orange peel, banana, pineapple creaminess, and those flavors all worked together very well. Is this the best cocktail that you've ever had? It's not, but it's not bad at all for one of these, you know, of the time period cocktails, and if you think about the cocktail competitions of today, like a lot of bars will have a cocktail competition, which is events with a couple judges and a couple bartenders. We're talking about a banquet hall full of hundreds of people, 600 plus people, and a full day event, and bartenders from, in this case, probably just Southern California, competing for cash, and a lot of cash. If you adjust the the numbers to today, you're talking thousands and thousands of dollars the winner takes home, plus they get a trip to Europe to compete in the international competition. How on the up and up these competitions were, who knows? It seems like the winners of these things were often, you know, the different directors of the association at that time. It seems like a few years go by, they win again, but regardless of that, a big competition with somewhat independent judges judging these things, and this cocktail won for 1960. So it's a sign of the times, and I think it is a pretty good drink, a low ABV, a little snack of a cream drink, and if you want to relive the 1960s and its award-winning cocktail, the first cocktail of that decade to win an award at the United Kingdom Bartender Guild's competition, then you'll have to try the Evening's Delight. So that's it for this one, the first in a series of videos featuring the award-winning cocktails from the 1960s. Eventually there will be a playlist, which I will add to the end of this video. I don't know the exact number, you would think like, hey, there's nine or ten, but I'm not yet sure that I have every single year covered, but I'll still do some digging to find out. But that is it for this video. If you enjoyed it, give it a like below, consider subscribing to the channel, otherwise I'll see you on the next one.