I’d bet most are using the Chico strain (Wyeast 1056) or the Ballantine strain (Wyeast 1272), both of which are relatively low ester producers at typical ale temps (more or less 65 degrees).
But if you tried brewing with those yeasts at the 45-50 degrees typical of lager strains, they’d probably have trouble fermenting effectively so low, and conversely, the lager strains would generate massive amounts of funky stuff at 65 degrees.
OTOH, if you use Wyeast 2112 at that temperature you can crank out a pretty decent California Common (Steam) beer.
Because then people won’t understand what you are offering. It’s how language works.
The Martinez… different name, and a delightful drink in its own right.
Nobody really knows where the name “Martini” came from- Martini and Rossi, Martini rifles, some bartender with the last name Martini- all are proposed.
FWIW… if you’re interested in this stuff, go read some David Wondrich’s “Imbibe!” or maybe Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh’s “Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails”. Those books are great for learning about the old drinks and where they came from. Wondrich in particular traces the development of cocktails into mixed drinks - basically you had the original cocktails which were spirits, bitters, sugar and water/ice. They gradually evolved with the addition of stuff like absinthe, curacao and/or maraschino in small amounts as additional modifiers.
Then at some point in the 1880s, someone got the bright idea of mixing vermouth in- specifically sweet vermouth into a rye whiskey cocktail, giving us the Manhattan. From there, variants blossomed- some classic like the Martini (like the Manhattan, but with dry vermouth and gin, and without the sugar) or the Rob Roy(basically a Martini with Scotch instead of gin), and others relatively obscure- the Metropole (a Manhattan with brandy and Peychaud’s bitters).
From there, they get a little crazy with the formula and proportions…
So ultimately the Manhattan came first, and the Martini is a gin variant. There are also vodka variants, but in terms of cocktail aficionado-ism, they’re kind of silly, in that vodka is kind of the exact opposite of what you want in a true cocktail. True cocktails are intended to point up the flavor of the base spirit and are relatively strong. Using something like vodka that has no inherent flavor… well, how do you point that up?
The book also explains Ukulele Ike’s punch -> sours derivations as well!
Then there are variants such as the Gibson - cocktail onion instead of olive, or “dirty” martini (olive juice?).
My wife and her sister occasionally drink cosmos, and when they do, they are shaken with ice and served in a martini glass. I guess I never wondered why those were called cosmos, instead of a something-tini.
Gin was my poison of choice back when I imbibed, but I don’t think I ever drank a martini. Just gin on the rocks with a lime. Occasionally a splash of tonic. No taste for vermouth nor olives. Always thought it odd when people asked for an extremely dry martini, which was essentially a glass of gin.
Yeah, the traditionalist in me thought a vodka martini not wquite right, but it didn’t bother me that a default martini was gin, and a vodka martini needed to be specified.
Drinks such as “appletinis” always struck me as abominations. The only justification for the misnomer was a desire to assume some cool factor from martinis. I guess I always assumed -tini denoted that the concoction was a pretty stiff drink, but I’m not sure about that.
BTW - did you hear about the bar that served martinis so dry that in the men’s room, instead of urinals they had dustbins? 
The traditionalists can wring their hands and tut-tut all the want, but in 75% of bars in America if you order a “martini” it’s basically a coin flip whether you get a vodka or gin martini. I’d confidently wager (informed by over a decade of bartending) that vodka is the more popular and thus the default for many bartenders. There are those 25% of bars that have well trained bartenders that know mixology and booze snobbery.
Maybe, but who bellies up to a bar and calls for a “martini” without any specifications?
For years my regular mantra to a waiter asking if we’d like a drink before dinner was “Tanqueray martini, very dry, straight up, one olive, as cold as he can make it.” My kids though I was a major asshole, but at least I would get a semblance of the cocktail I wanted.
Otherwise I’d be sure to get vodka on the rocks drowned in vermouth with six olives displacing precious booze, somehow still lukewarm.
I’d hate to think of myself as a martini snob, but I would expect the barkeep to ask at least “Gin or vodka, amateur?”
Thanks! I may have it engraved on my tombstone.
Anybody can call anything any name they want to, of course.
People’s expectations are not exactly that, though - they expect all of the above PLUS “…and I’ll be justified in calling it that!”. Nope, sorry, words do indeed have meanings. When YOU say “martini”, YOU mean “Gin, vermouth, bitters, and a lemon twist or an olive” - even if it isn’t what you wish you meant. If you don’t mean those things, fine - then choose words that suit your meaning.
I could say “Victrola” when I meant “box of chocolates”. I’d be wrong, wouldn’t I.
You would be mis-understood, not “wrong”. “Wrong” implies there is some way to measure what is “right”. If you have a friend who knows you mean a box of chocolates when you say “Victrola”, and that’s who you say that to, then it’s clearly not “wrong”, and not only that, but you’ll be “understood”.
If you go to a bar, and you order a “martini”, with no other qualifiers, and you get handed a drink with anything other than gin and vermouth in it, you might be surprised, because that may be what you think most bartenders will serve when they hear the word “martini”. If you go to a bar, and you order a “martini”, expecting to be served a vodka and vermouth drink, you may well be disappointed, for reasons expressed above. But since some people think the word means a drink with vodka, you can’t be considered to be “wrong”.
One can’t mean and not mean something simultaneously. One means what he intends, not says. That said…
You wouldn’t be as wrong as looking for chocolate on the internet by searching for "“victrola”, but you’d be pretty wrong. Bartenders are taught (or should be) that “martini” said alone is not a vodka based drink. If you order a Bloody Mary expecting a rum, Coke and Galliano, don’t blame the bartender.
That’s because a lot of bartenders are waiters who “moved up”, not craftspeople who actually take pride in knowing their craft.
My wife actually ordered a daiquiri some years ago at a major, high dollar Dallas steakhouse (Al Biernat’s), and got back some kind of strawberry mess. We sent it back and had to explain how to make a daiquiri to the bartender. And that’s at a place that honestly should get it right the first time.
I’m not a drink snob at all - if a person likes a certain drink, then they should damn well drink it, whatever it is. Just don’t call it by a name that means a different drink.
Probably 50% of people. Any bartender or server who’s worked anywhere without a laminated cocktail list sitting on the table will always ask some form of “what do you want that mixed with?” Or at least they will after the first week or so.
There’s basically 3 kinds of people. Old timers and hipsters who have this absolutist attitude who are just begging for an opportunity to complain, the mass of folks who order their booze by name “Goose”, “Hendricks”, “Beefeater” whatever the drink, and those folks that order things they saw on TV or heard someone else order one time.
It’s the first and the last that you need to worry about, so it’s best to never assume. And sometimes there’s people have had a bartender at their regular spot who pours it one way and they think that’s the only way. Of course, then there’s drunks too…
And you’re right, but this acknowledgement of the way things are is counter to argument you made earlier. No bartender is gonna be pissed about a customer being specific. they will be pissed if you try and toss out some not-so-witty quip about holding the vermouth bottle up to the light so that it shines through into the glass.
Sometimes, but the reality is that this idea that bartending is a “craft” is a very new concept. Often it’s all artifice, too. Best to accept that most bartenders are just there to get you a drink as quickly as they can within a certain range of acceptability. Most drinkers want alcohol, not a history lesson or a performance.
If a bartender pours you a vodka martini by default, they might be an idiot, but they probably just grew up watching James Bond movies and have a handful or regulars who prefer vodka martinis and the question they usually ask is “what garnish.”
You can fuck up a drink, no doubt, but pouring a nice, cold, dry vodka martini when a gin one was expected ain’t it. That’s just bad communication.
More in the vein of “rediscovered concept”. Prohibition messed it all up; prior to that, there was definitely a notion of the bartender/mixologist as a craftsman on par with a chef, but after prohibition, most of the cocktail culture, etc… was lost.
My wife has done basically that on many occasions. She’ll ask for a dirty martini and I will say, “Hon, don’t you really want a dirty martini with Tito’s vodka?”. After this many years I don’t think she’ll ever get it, so I take it upon myself to make sure she gets what she actually wants.
Several times she has gone out without me and mentioned that the martini wasn’t very good at whatever place she went. I wonder why.
How do you know?
Most bars were owned by beer companies prior to prohibition. Why would you think they are all mixologists? Period piece movies maybe?
I mean that the idea of having actual mixologists and bartender-as-craftsman is not something new- it dates from before Prohibition. And in places with cocktails, based on what I’ve read, it seems that there was more craftsmanship with mixed drinks/cocktails than what was seen between the end of prohibition and maybe 5-10 years ago, with the exception of some of the tiki bartenders. The fact that the vast, vast majority of drink recipes predates Prohibition, or were devised by expat Americans during/after Prohibition, is proof of that, I’d say.
I mean, where would you have found an actual bartender-as-craftsman in say… 1950’s America? It’s easy to point out where in say… 1910 America, just like in 2018 America. But in the interim? They’re hard to find.
Bartenders as craftsmen are rare today…but there’s a ton of books, magazines, movies and YoutTube videos talking about their recipes and mythos. In the “gilded age” the same was true, most of these folks were working at a few high-end places in the biggest of big cities. They definitely weren’t the equivalent of the cobbler, apothecary and the haberdasher of the era. They embodied that sexy role that lives on in books and movies, the average drink slinger in say, Peoria ain’t that. Your average prohibition era housewife didn’t know what was in an aviation or a sling any more than they know a martini is “exclusively” made with gin.
I guess I learned my drinking preferences from my parents, who drank gin or scotch on the rocks. Ask for a glass of gin over ice, and it is rare that your order will be screwed up.
Yeah, Ike, I was a Tanq fan myself. Used to debate with my ma who preferred Beef. Dad was Glenlivet.