Toast of New Orleans: cocktail museum

Start with hundreds of antique liquor bottles. Add Art Deco cocktail shakers, vintage swizzle sticks and Tiki cups. Mix well. Serve inside an 1823 French Quarter townhouse.

The result: The Museum of the American Cocktail.

The brainchild of highbrow alcohol enthusiasts who enjoy talking and reading about liquor nearly as much as consuming it, the museum is an institution of higher mixology, complete with an annual scholarly journal, a library and monthly seminars for bartenders with a thirst for making tastier drinks.

“It’s something we’ve been talking about for years -- people who are really into the cocktail and the impact the cocktail has had on American culture over the last 200 years,” says Dale DeGroff, author of the 2002 book “The Craft of the Cocktail.”

The museum ( found at www.museumoftheamericancocktail.org/) opened last month, with shelves full of drinking paraphernalia, plus a timeline tracing the American cocktail from the early 19th century to Prohibition to drink’s heyday in the 1930s to the cocktail revival that began in the 1990s.

But the collection needs a permanent home. Part of it is now on display on the second floor of another quirky Big Easy institution, the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum. The founders are looking for permanent space in the French Quarter for thousands of drink-related antiques, with extra room for their library, which contains thousands of books -- many from the 1800s -- about drinking, bartending and drink recipes.

It’s billed as the only cocktail museum in the country. Naturally, it will have a bar. The plan is for a bartender to serve nearly forgotten drinks, such as the whiskey swizzle (rye whiskey, soda, lime juice, sugar, aromatic bitters) or the sherry twist (cocktail sherry, orange juice, bourbon, lemon juice, Cointreau).

“It’s going to be a tourist attraction, an important part of what the French Quarter has to offer,” DeGroff says.

The exhibit begins in 1806, with the first known printed reference to the term “cocktail,” in the Balance and Columbian Repository, a Hudson, N.Y., newspaper. In response to a reader’s request, an editor defined a cocktail as “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.”

An American institution was named. Its roots were in such European drinks as punches and toddies. The liquor was Scotch, rum or gin. Other elements were a liqueur such as creme de menthe or apricot brandy, and possibly a wine, Port or sherry.

“The people who came here from Europe, they brought with them very strong beverage traditions of their own. We basically put them all together in one glass and called it a cocktail,” DeGroff says.