Moscow Mule is still kicking
NEW ORLEANS — Many classic cocktails are shaken or stirred with a good measure of backstory. But the tale of the Moscow Mule is so theatrical that it lent itself to one of the most imaginative presentations at the recent Tales of the Cocktail spirits confab in New Orleans.
Set in a saloon, the “immersive theater” production featured actors who humorously dramatized the birth of the Moscow Mule — a story already so rich it hardly needed showy embellishment. But this being the 75th anniversary of the Moscow Mule, a merger of vodka, lime juice and ginger beer that is one of the most popular
cocktails in America, a little thespian flair didn’t hurt.
The story of the Moscow Mule, which Smirnoff vodka has called the country’s first vodka cocktail, is as tasty as the drink itself. It begins with copper cups — the familiar copper mugs that the drink is traditionally served in (and have since become so appealing that they often leave the bar with stickyfingered drinkers). In 1941 a Russian immigrant named Sophie Berezinski arrived in the United States with 2,000 solid copper mugs from a factory her father owned and operated called the Moscow Copper Co. The design of the cup was Sophie’s creation. But neither Sophie nor her father could sell the mugs in Russia so that’s why they came on the voyage to America. Sophie’s husband, Max, was so tired of the mugs cluttering up their home that he told her, “Find a buyer or I’m tossing them.”
During one of her long days in search of a buyer, Sophie happened into the Cock ’n Bull pub on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. It was there she met two men in a similar predicament. Enter John G. Martin, president of an American alcohol company, Heublein, which owned the rights to Smirnoff vodka. Martin was also in a pickle: He was struggling to get Americans to drink his vodka at a time when brown spirits were the rage. The third player in the story is Jack Morgan, owner of the Cock ’n Bull, who was trying unsuccessfully to market his own brand of ginger beer.
So there we have it: A woman with funny looking copper cups; a man trying to push vodka that nobody wants; and another man with too much ginger beer on his hands. Together they created something that solved all their problems. And soon the Moscow Mule took the country by storm; paving the way, according to Smirnoff, for other popular vodka cocktails such as the Screwdriver, the Gimlet and the Bloody Mary.
Today, the Mule continues to thrill, even more so as boutique ginger beer manufacturers thrive, as bartenders become more creative (hello, frozen Mules; welcome bourbonand gin-based variants), and as the 75th anniversary gets more drinkers to take a Mule ride.
The Moscow Mule is so on trend that it was the official drink of the 2016 Tales of the Cocktail, the world’s premier cocktail festival. The winning Mule dazzled judges with its addition of sherry, cranberry juice and Angostura Bitters.
The Mule renaissance also accounts for the recent re-introduction of the Moscow Copper Co. by Berezinski’s greatgrandson, JJ Resnick, whose Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company has relaunched the original cylinder-shaped copper mug that helped give rise to the Moscow Mule. This year Resnick’s business can barely keep up with the demand for the 100 percent copper mugs that have come to epitomize the Mule.
“The copper conducts and gives this nice, frosty appeal,” Resnick said of Berezinski’s original design. He doesn’t hold back when it comes to other mug shapes on the Mule market: “I hate the look of all the other mugs out there.” And don’t get him started on serving a Mule in a cocktail glass. Shudders. “It’s like serving your coffee in a martini glass.”
The year of the Moscow Mule continues with the eventual publication of “Mulehead,” a cocktail recipe book in collaboration with Tales of the Cocktail and the 2016 “Year of the Mule” cocktail competition.
Resnick’s relaunch of the company responsible for the original mug design ensures that the cocktail lives on for many years beyond its diamond jubilee. Surely, the story of its origin is enough to give it legs for at least another 75 years. So let’s raise a copper mug to the Moscow Mule.