Beautiful cocktail recipes for alfresco fun - Garden Leisure Shop. UKs leading garden leisure furniture specialist.

Everyone loves a cocktail… but why the weird name? In this article we dive into the sources of top cocktail recipes to make your BBQs a blast as well as exploring the origins of the word itself.

As it turns out the origin of the word ‘cocktail’ could be one of several things. Some say the French word coquetier or ‘egg cup’ is at the heart of it all, but we’ve struggled with the idea of a person wanting a drink so small it fits into an egg cup. Hm, certainly not at the kind of barbies we enjoy!

Others say it comes from the idea of a horse with a docked tail, a tail cut short, but again, why on earth would that image apply to a mix of alcoholic drinks? Then there’s the story that it comes from a racehorse whose genetic background isn’t pedigree but mixed. Hm. We still smell a rat.

Maybe the name comes from a combination of the barrel tap or ‘cock’ used to pour booze out of a barrel and the silty stuff left over at the bottom of the barrel called the tailings… which seems a bit more likely. But there’s more. Perhaps the word comes from the West African ‘kaketal’ or scorpion which, like a cocktail, has a sting in its tail. Then there’s cock-ale, old English spiced ale some say had ‘a ground-up red cockerel’ mixed into it. But that’s just ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind kills a bird, grinds it into dust, then adds it to booze. That’d be totally toxic.

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Wherever it came from, the word cocktail first turned up in the USA during the Wild West days of the early 1800s, when men were men and women were scared ;). Then there’s the New York newspaper article dating back to 1896, which described a cocktail as ‘a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters’. Now that’s more like it!

So, basically, the origins of ‘cocktail’ are lost in the mists of time. But one thing’s for sure, cocktails are a wonderful way to add extra pzazz and oomph to a celebration, the kind of drink reserved for special occasions, not your everyday fare. A bit of luxury. Something different. Something naughty, even a little bit dangerous.

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Cocktail recipes – Can you DIY your own recipes for cocktails?

It seems simple enough. Choose your favourite spirits and juices, mix them together and voila… but oh dear, that’s grim! The thing is, cocktails are a fine art. Some drinks taste great together, others are just awful. So unless you have a skill for that kind of thing, an innate talent for putting flavours together, cocktail recipes are best left to the experts. Luckily there’s a wealth of thrilling ideas out there on the interwebs, some of which we’ve collated here for you. Get your drinking hat on, dive into these boozy delights, and fall truly, madly and deeply in love.

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How about non-alcoholic cocktails?

We don’t all enjoy getting roaring drunk, stotious, banjaxed, out of our trees, intoxicated, inebriated. hammered, wasted, blitzed, skunked, steamed, wrecked or utterly trousered. For those of you who prefer to keep a clear head, or you’re driving, here are some links to extremely tasty mocktail recipes.