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Tracing the Elusive Historical past of the Lewis Bag, the Bartender’s Should-Have Instrument – VinePair
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Everybody in the cocktail enterprise is aware of what a Lewis bag is. The thick, heavy-responsibility canvas bag is used to crush ice into high-quality shards, utilizing a big wood mallet, and is generally hauled out any time a craft cocktail bar needs to make a correct Mint Julep.
What no one in the cocktail enterprise is aware of is something concerning the Lewis bag: when it was invented; how lengthy it has been in use; the way it grew to become common. Who Lewis even was — if it was an individual in any respect — is a thriller.
The early to mid-aughts of the cocktail revival had been a interval that may very well be known as the Gullible Years. Bartenders and cocktail journalists, drunk on the romance of barroom historical past and hungry for any intelligence they might find about how cocktails had been made earlier than Prohibition, had been susceptible to simply accept any story concerning the good previous days. Antoine Peychaud, of bitters fame, invented the cocktail? Cool. The Sazerac was initially made with Cognac? Superior. The Previous Normal was created on the Pendennis Membership in Louisville? Superb. (None of those tales, as soon as extensively held to be gospel, are true.)
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Concerning the Lewis bag, the acquired knowledge, which started to gel in the mid-aughts and stays agency at the moment, is that it is a instrument that dates again to the bartending strategies of the nineteenth century. The difficulty with this perception is it is based mostly on nearly nothing.
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“I, too, assumed that the Lewis bag dated again to the days when block ice was delivered to the bar and bartenders needed to break it down into completely different grades of ice for particular drink preparations,” says Tony Abou-Ganim, an OG cocktail bartender who was one of many main forces in the craft cocktail revival in San Francisco in the Nineties.
Mojitos had been huge in San Francisco again then, and to make a great one, you wanted crushed ice. Abou-Ganim didn’t have entry to such ice, so he smashed up ice cubes utilizing a linen serviette and a meat tenderizer. Then, someplace round 1998-99, an advert caught his eye: “Genuine Nineteen Forties Lewis Ice Bag” full with mallet. He purchased one.
The Lewis bag is manufactured — then and now — by a barware firm known as Franmara, based mostly in Salinas, Calif., and based in 1970. The product Abou-Ganim acquired got here in a tube that contained an off-white canvas bag, a wood membership, and a recipe pamphlet.
“Congratulations in your buy of The Lewis,” the pamphlet read. (I lately purchased a duplicate, dated 2001, on eBay.) “With it, you’ve simply acquired the key to considered one of life’s most elusive pleasures—the proper cocktail. After only one use you’ll perceive why the traditional ice bag and membership had been thought of important by grasp bartenders in the days when the cocktail was king.” Thereafter follows 16 cocktail recipes requiring hand-crushed ice, not considered one of which, curiously, is the Mint Julep.
As to the product’s identify, the guide mentioned, “The Lewis is named after the nice physician of the identical identify who, along with his ice bag and membership, has, for a few years, been making what are undoubtedly the world’s greatest Martinis.” Yeah, proper. (Franmara couldn’t be reached for an interview for this article, regardless of a number of makes an attempt.)
What small quantity of press the Lewis Bag netted swallowed the Franmara story with out query. “Within the golden period of the cocktail,” wrote The Gazette of Montreal in 1997, “grasp bartenders had a secret for making the proper Martini: solely freshly-cracked ice can impart the best quantity of water to alcohol, whereas quickly decreasing its temperature to a degree far beneath entire ice cubes.” A 2000 article in the Richmond Instances-Dispatch known as the Lewis Bag “John D. Rockefeller’s Favourite Bar Instrument.” (Rockefeller was a recognized teetotaler.)
The idea of crushing ice for drinks in the Nineteen Forties, the Lewis bag’s supposed decade of origin, was not a brand new thought. David A. Embury, in his influential 1948 guide “The Fantastic Artwork of Mixing Drinks,” really useful wrapping ice in canvas and whacking it with a mallet. Cocktail expert and creator Robert Hess, in his analysis, discovered Nineteen Forties adverts for the same canvas bag-mallet set geared not towards bars, however households. It was known as Krax Ice and made by Baker-Lockwood in Kansas Metropolis, Mo. However all proof I have discovered — and there isn’t much — signifies that the Lewis bag, underneath that identify, didn’t exist till the late Nineties. Hess, who grew to become conscious of Franmara’s Lewis bag round that point, says “I wouldn’t be shocked in the event that they had been the primary to ‘re-introduce’ this product, give it the ‘Lewis’ identify for one purpose or one other, after which the others simply picked it up from there. I haven’t been in a position to but find any reference to a ‘Lewis Bag’ which predates the Franmara product.”
And but, by 2010, the Lewis bag was the identify accepted by the bar world as a should-have instrument in the craft cocktail bartenders’ arsenal. So how did this occur?
Nobody’s fairly certain, but it surely occurred shortly. Within the early days of the cocktail revival (late ‘90s, early ‘00s), no one was utilizing Lewis baggage or something like them. Chris McMillian, the New Orleans bartender who is now well-known for his hand-wrought Mint Juleps, was on the Ritz-Carlton in the early aughts. When somebody ordered a Mint Julep, he received inventive instrument-sensible.
“I used shoe baggage on the Ritz,” McMillian says. “Model-new, Ritz-Carlton shoe baggage. They labored completely. I used them for years till my provide ran out.” Charles Joly, working at The Drawing Room in Chicago, used lint-free towels and a mallet to interrupt up ice. And at Blackbird, the brief-lived Manhattan cocktail bar opened by Dale DeGroff in 1999, cubes had been crushed by hand. “Missing entry to any sort of superior bar instrument websites, Dale taught us to individually crack the cubes with our wood muddlers,” remembers Audrey Saunders, who labored with DeGroff at Blackbird.
DeGroff was a extremely influential determine and something he did shortly caught the eye of the bartending group. Throughout his lengthy tenure on the Rainbow Room in the Nineteen Eighties and ‘90s, he had entry to a crushed ice machine. However in his 2002 guide, “The Craft of the Cocktail,” DeGroff suggested, “You gained’t want cracked ice too typically, however if you do, simply crack giant cubes by hand by folding them in a clear dish towel and whacking them with the bowl of a heavy serving spoon.”
By 2006, nevertheless, DeGroff and the Lewis bag had discovered every other. An commercial that yr in the Honolulu Advertiser for a DeGroff class on the historical past of the Julep, mentioned the entry charge got here “with a complimentary Lewis Ice Bag.” And in a 2008 article selling his new guide, “The Important Cocktail,” DeGroff really useful that ice for a Julep be positioned “in a canvas bag, known as a Lewis bag.”
Quickly after, there have been sources other than Franmara for Lewis baggage (as they had been by 2009 universally known as). “Hendrick’s Gin and other corporations began so as to add the Lewis bag to the added-worth gadgets they created for the craft group,” remembers DeGroff.
Charlotte Voisey, who labored for Hendrick’s as a model ambassador in the late aughts, remembers these baggage. “Sure, we did certainly make and model and provides out Lewis baggage to bartenders,” she says. They had been commissioned from a bartender-artist named Allison Webber and embroidered with the Hendrick’s identify.
Different liquor corporations did the identical. The Lewis bag grew to become Lewis swag. And, as you can think about, doling out free Lewis baggage to a whole bunch of bartenders led to a rise in the use and consciousness of Lewis baggage. By 2010, barware corporations had gotten in on the game. Cocktail Kingdom, amongst others, started promoting their very own model of a Lewis bag.
That was in all probability a great factor. As a result of, as Abou-Ganim remembers, the precise Lewis baggage weren’t all the time as much as their assigned job. “That lasted a couple of week in service earlier than it fell aside and we had been again to the linen napkins.” (Abou-Ganim ultimately produced his personal Lewis bag via his Trendy Mixologist line.)
Different members of the bartending group took issues into their very own arms. Boston bartender Josey Packard, a former seamstress and designer, produced her personal Lewis baggage for a couple of years round 2010. She known as them Packard baggage.
So, the up to date icon that is the Lewis bag arguably happened via a uniquely American mixture of gross sales hokum, company adoption, and outright capitalism, aided by a type of cocktail-world thoughts meld.
There are in all probability chapters to the Lewis bag story which are but to be uncovered. However, for now, one central thriller stays: Who was Lewis, this individual whose identify bar varieties invoke every day? A health care provider? A phantom? Was there ever a Lewis in any respect?
Solely, maybe, Franmara is aware of.
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The Lewis bag is a thick, heavy-responsibility canvas bag used to crush ice for cocktails just like the Mint Julep. Regardless of being extensively used in the cocktail enterprise, its origins are a thriller. The early aughts of the cocktail revival noticed the assumption that the bag dated again to the nineteenth century turn into extensively accepted, although this is probably false. The bag was made by Franmara in the late Nineties and was popularized in the early 2000s by bartenders and liquor corporations giving out free baggage as swag. The precise baggage weren’t all the time as much as the duty, resulting in bartenders making their very own. The thriller of who Lewis was stays unsolved.
Dave Petchy
