The Roaring Twenties — One Gin’s Love Letter to New York’s Prohibition–Era Past

In the spring of 2020, when COVID-19 cases in New York City were skyrocketing, Al Sotack— partner and self-professed “bar dork” at Jupiter Disco—received an unexpected visit. Like every other such establishment in New York, the Bushwick bar was shuttered, but that didn’t stop the staff at the nearby New York Distilling Company from swinging by to drop off their homemade hand sanitizer.

“Local communities have always been important to us, and we’ve always thought of [New York Distilling Company] as our neighbors,” Sotack says. “In this industry, there are a lot of fluffy relationships that don’t feel so real, but with those guys it’s always been that: These are good dudes making good stuff.”

As a veteran of the New York cocktail scene for the better part of a decade, Sotack has been pouring spirits from New York Distilling Co. since his days in the East Village bartending at the legendary Death & Co. He’s a fan of the whole line of liquors—including the distillery’s Ragtime Rye, which is made entirely from locally sourced ingredients—but to him, one spirit feels synonymous with the city of New York: Dorothy Parker Gin. 

“In terms of a category that I don’t often love, which is American gins, theirs are a standout and ones that I love to use,” Sotack says. “It’s hard for me to describe the way that [Dorothy Parker Gin] feels, but it plays well with other ingredients. It’s important to mention that it has character—gin is an infusion, so it’s supposed to taste like juniper. Some brands try to be quieter on their bouquet, but I don’t think New York Distilling Co. does that.”

Like many bartenders, Sotack considers himself a gin person, all the more so because of a brief stint at Beefeater earlier in his career. While he tends to prefer the London Dry style that’s most common across the pond, he’ll make an exception here, both because he enjoys supporting his neighbors and because the spirit in question is something he likes to drink. 

Though whiskey may be the spirit that’s most associated with American distilling, gin has always been the workhorse behind the American bar. During the dark days of Prohibition, gin was among the era’s most popular spirits, in part because its potent juniper oils could help mask the foul taste of the diluted industrial alcohol that was so prevalent. From the French 75 to the Bee’s Knees, gin was the backbone of most of the tipples that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contemporaries and characters would have been sipping. 

“Gin is a cornerstone of so many classic cocktails. If you were working in the cocktail renaissance of the early aughts, it was hard to avoid gin,” Sotack says. “Bartenders like to pour it. Even though you may not always want a mouthful of juniper—or maybe you do—you still want that taste available, because it’s such an iconic flavor in cocktails.” 

Despite a history that runs deep, there is still a shortage of well-loved New York gins to be found in New York bars. That’s not a coincidence—although the state boasted hundreds of distilleries, both legal and otherwise, prior to 1920, by the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, they were down to precisely zero. Thanks to a combination of fiendishly bureaucratic State Liquor Authority laws and distilling licenses that could cost upwards of $65,000, it stayed that way for decades. It wasn’t until 2007, when a series of overdue legislative changes dropped the rates for microdistilleries, that anyone thought to once again make gin in New York City.

UNEXPECTED BEGINNINGS

In 2011, the year that Dorothy Parker Gin and New York Distilling Co. were born, Sotack was already entrenched in that cocktail renaissance, though he hadn’t quite made it to Brooklyn yet. After following a girl to Philadelphia in 2006, he started bartending to pay the rent while trying to make it as a writer. 

“I took to bartending because it was a way to make money in three days a week instead of five,” he says. There was not much in the way of a cocktail scene in Philadelphia at the time, but it turned out Sotack had a knack for slinging drinks. In 2009, he became the head bartender at The Franklin, a subterranean speakeasy tucked behind an unmarked entrance. 

“Gin is a cornerstone of so many classic cocktails. If you were working in the cocktail renaissance of the early aughts, it was hard to avoid gin. Bartenders like to pour it. Even though you may not always want a mouthful of juniper—or maybe you do—you still want that taste available, because it’s such an iconic flavor in cocktails.”

“The Franklin was a big deal in Philly if you cared about cocktails. I like to think that we set the standard in those years,” Sotack says. Three years later, he had a James Beard nomination to his name, as well as a nod as Eater Philadelphia’s Bartender of the Year. Yet for all of his success, the gravitational pull of nearby New York was difficult to ignore. His close friend Maks Pazuniak was manning the bar at the now-shuttered Counting Room in Williamsburg, and he kept dreaming of opening up a place of their own.

“He’d come to Philly and stay at my house and we’d go drinking,” Sotack remembers. “We’d had this in mind that we would open this bar in New York. I don’t quite remember when it went from drunk talk to real talk, but it happened.”

By the following year, when Sotack moved to take up residence behind the bar at Death & Co., New York’s cocktail scene was reaching a high-octane pitch. Darkly lit drinking dens—full nods to bygone speakeasies—were clustered around downtown. For the first time in a century, it was possible for bartenders to pour locally sourced spirits from the likes of New York Distilling Co., Kings County Distillery, and Van Brunt Stillhouse. In a moment when cocktail culture and chef culture were converging towards singularity, it only made sense for bartenders to mirror the locavorism exhibited on the tables around town. 

“Dorothy Parker [Gin] is historically significant because back when it was released it was a completely unique product,” says Amanda Schuster, author of New York Cocktails: An Elegant Collection of Over 100 Recipes Inspired by the Big Apple. “Nobody had had a gin that was made in New York City. Then all of a sudden you could be in a bar and sip a cocktail made with Dorothy Parker Gin that is of a time and place.”

It didn’t hurt that the gin’s namesake was as New York as they come: a whip-smart literary satirist, screenwriter, poet, and feminist icon of the Roaring Twenties who was a staff writer at the New Yorker and a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Born Dorothy Rothschild, she was, like the best New Yorkers, a maverick in her time. After penning a barbed piece entitled Why I Haven’t Married, Sketches of My Seven Deadly Suitors, she went on to marry three times, all the while cramming in what feels like three lifetimes’ worth of career achievements. Through it all she was notoriously unapologetic in speaking her mind—her politics would eventually earn her a place on the Hollywood blacklist—and continued to do so until her death at 73. 

“I think the name is brilliant,” Schuster says. “If you’re going to have a gin from New York City, name it after Dorothy Parker.”

‘A DAMN GOOD DRINKER’

For Allen Katz, the distiller behind the gin and a veteran of New York’s hospitality industry for roughly three decades, the name spoke to both his literary and historical obsessions. Having already named a 57% ABV, or navy-strength, gin after Matthew Calbraith Perry—a commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard—he wanted to christen his elderflower- and hibiscus-accented gin after another New York icon. Katz had been a fan of Parker’s since college, and had read everything she’d ever written long before New York Distilling Co. opened. 

“In addition to being famous as a writer, she was a damn good drinker,” Katz says. “We’re not claiming Dorothy Parker approves of this gin, obviously, but it’s an homage to Dorothy Parker as an American, as a New Yorker, as a feminist, as a creative zeitgeist who participated in a cultural revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.”

That tie to New York’s past was crucial for Katz. To call New York Distilling Co. nostalgic would be an oversimplification, but there’s an unmistakable sense of romance to the parallels it draws with the history of its home city. Since the distillery’s arrival marked a reversal of some of the damaging effects of Prohibition, it was inevitable that that tumultuous period would so heavily influence it. 

“Dorothy Parker is historically significant because back when it was released it was a completely unique product. Nobody had had a gin that was made in New York City. Then all of a sudden you could be in a bar and sip a cocktail made with Dorothy Parker Gin that is of a time and place.”

When Katz started bartending in the East Village in the early 1990s, high-end speakeasies like Angel’s Share, the Tokyo-style bar tucked above a sushi restaurant, had yet to set up shop in the neighborhood. Back then, the Slow Food Movement that was creeping into American restaurants had yet to really penetrate its cocktail culture.

“We didn’t care what kind of rum was in the well then—we just wanted to make a decent daiquiri and have a good time,” Katz says. All that started to shift around the turn on the millennium, with the arrival of bars like Milk & Honey. “You could tell that something was happening, that there was going to be this cultural shift in attitude about distilled spirits. It felt like a community was created out of nowhere and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.”

A casual interest in better spirits quickly morphed into an obsession for Katz. Over the course of two years, he visited more than 30 distilleries, with a focus on whiskey and gin, since those formed the backbone of Prohibition–era drinking habits and cocktails. While he loved sipping whiskey out in rural Tennessee, he was especially drawn to Plymouth Distillery, a compact urban distillery in the U.K. producing historically faithful renditions of navy-strength and sloe gin. Since he had no desire to move to the countryside to open a distillery, he wondered why he couldn’t simply make spirits in the city itself.

“I’ve lived in New York for almost 30 years and I thought, this works—so I started noodling on the idea of a distillery,” Katz says. “I’m a New Yorker. I love living here, and this is where I wanted my work life to be. Very few distilleries had been licenced in New York State and none at the time had been licensed in New York City.”

Katz joined forces with Tom Potter, who had recently left Brooklyn Brewery, and Tom’s son, Bill, to start the long, bureaucratic slog to obtain the necessary permits. The trio met a certain amount of skepticism—opening any kind of business, particularly one with such sprawling spatial requirements, is a dauntingly expensive endeavor in New York. The fact that no one had done it in the better part of a century didn’t help matters. By now, however, it’s clear that the tradition of distilling and cocktail culture in New York is here to stay. 

“We’ve reclaimed our taste buds,” Katz says. “We’re not drinking insipidly sweet cocktails anymore. We have an appreciation for herbal flavors, for amaro and vermouth. We’re going to hold onto that and celebrate it even more, with a great appreciation for what we have in the moment.”

THE TIPPING POINT

The lessons of history are available for anyone with the patience to hear them, and the comparisons between this precarious moment in New York to the previous century are everywhere these days. As soon as Governor Andrew Cuomo began rolling back COVID-19 restrictions, declarations of a new Roaring Twenties began. Much of this wishful hedonism centers more on a Baz Luhrmann-inspired vision of the decade than the gritty one that Parker and her peers inhabited, but it is tempting to see certain parallels. For hospitality businesses, the past year has been financially ruinous in a way that reminds of the devastation of Prohibition. Tallies of industry closings are staggering, yet still startlingly incomplete, in part because it’s all happened so quickly. 

“In many cases, those places are not coming back,” Katz says. “There will be new things. But right now, I find myself looking around the neighborhood and saying, ‘Thank God this place, this personal touchstone is still here.’ I think as we come out of the pandemic and we realize what we’ve lost, it will be devastating.”

“In addition to being famous as a writer, she was a damn good drinker. We’re not claiming Dorothy Parker approves of this gin, obviously, but it’s an homage to Dorothy Parker as an American, as a New Yorker, as a feminist, as a creative zeitgeist who participated in a cultural revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.”

As the city lurches into this new phase, Katz is holding onto a fragile sense of optimism. At the moment, bars around New York are scrambling to hire enough workers to accommodate the sudden surge of customers. Parties are packed, clubs are open, and subway cars once again rumble into the moment when the kids coming home intersect with the commuters heading out. A sense of anxiety-tinged abandon hangs in the densely humid summer air, a certainty that the arc of history is bending once again, even if no one can yet say how. 

“It feels like we’re coming out of the foxhole or the trenches and I do not say that lightly,” Katz says. “We might just blow the lid off things here. I say it softly, because damn it, I hope it happens. I really do.”

A NEW ERA

Jupiter Disco opened its doors the day after the 2016 election, when many New Yorkers found themselves in desperate need of a drink. By then, Pazuniak and Sotack had spent years and many a late night brainstorming the type of bar they wanted to make. The result was a hybrid of a dive bar, a cocktail den, and a dance club. More than anything, the duo wanted to “put the cocktails back in a place that was fun.” The interior feels like the antithesis to the hushed, reverent speakeasies often associated with modern cocktail culture. Neon bulbs cast a surreal glow over the sort of watering hole Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard might have frequented in Blade Runner. 

“We’ve always been cognizant of a certain level of historicism and a certain style of places we—I don’t want to say bring back, but aspire to,” Sotack says. “In short, we’re doing the same thing that people have been doing for a hundred years. We try to make great cocktails and do it with a big smile.”

Prior to the pandemic, glitter-spangled twentysomethings would gather in droves at Jupiter Disco to warm up for the nearby clubs or to stay the night and dance. The vibe was always a main draw, but regulars knew that the cocktails were as serious as anything in town. While the list of spirits is vast, New York Distilling Co.’s gin has its own place of honor.

“I would always put quality first. That said, Jupiter Disco as an entity has always been conscious of its place in New York City,” Sotack says. “We try to support other local businesses because we like being part of the community. When you get both in your distilling company, you get lucky, because you can support someone in your neighborhood who’s local, but you still get good juice.” 

Even when New York officially reopened and bars were allowed to return at limited capacity, Sotack and Pazuniak opted to remain defiantly shut. The idea of operating at 50% capacity, with no more than 35 guests sitting at tables and quietly sipping their drinks while nibbling some hastily cobbled-together snacks, seemed antithetical to the bar’s identity. 

“Jupiter Disco is made to drink fancy drinks and dance with strangers,” Sotack says. “It’s sometimes three deep at the bar and people are yelling over the sound system. It’s really the least ideal bar to be operating during a plague.”

On June 16, Sotack and Pazuniak deemed New York sufficiently vaccinated for the kind of party they like to throw. They know that it will take months, maybe years, to process all that the city has lost during the pandemic. Bar culture, be it illegal speakeasies in the ’20s or the dives of today, is the steam valve that has always allowed New York to maintain its relentless forward kinetic energy without combusting. 

“I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that COVID was the most detrimental thing to happen to nightlife in our lifetime,” Sotack says. “Most bars that closed will not reopen. It’s like John Lennon—you don’t know what you got until you lose it, baby. One day people will wake up and realize that so much of New York’s culture is based in bars.”

For Schuster, New York’s cocktail scene is as much about serendipity as it is about gin or any other liquor. “I think what used to make New York so distinctive was being able to sit at a bar and have a conversation with anyone from almost anywhere—the spontaneity of those moments,” she says. That sense of possibility, of chance encounters and unexpectedly late, booze-soaked conversations was conspicuously absent for so long. Still, she’s seen the city pass through dark times before, and she has faith in the battle-hardened bartenders and owners who have managed to reach the other side.

“New York has always been about survival,” she says. In the coming months, as the city eases into the 2020s, much of that survival will come down to New Yorkers looking out for their neighbors.

Words by Diana Hubbell
Illustrations by Ryan Troy Ford