Swizzle Me This

Lawyers need bartenders more than bartenders need lawyers. When it comes to cocktails and the names they’re given, a recipe can’t be copyrighted and a name isn’t usually trademarked, and there’s no governing body, no law of the liquor land that stops the duplication of a recipe or a cocktail name. Which makes cocktail naming—shall we call it mixonymics?—special among naming practices in the modern world: It’s the bartender tribe, not the law, that defines prior art.

Trey Hughes, a bartender at the Blue Spoon, a restaurant in Portland, Maine, assiduously avoids repeating either a recipe or a name if he knows someone else has used it before. He looks up ingredients to make sure there’s nothing similar in terms of what’s going on in the glass, then he Googles the name. “If it’s already taken for another drink, I usually stop right there and come up with another name,” he said. “For me, I feel more comfortable knowing that there was no duplicate. I try to minimize confusion. I don... Continue Reading