The signature moment at the Cock ‘n Bull’s bar was, of course, the invention of the Moscow Mule, a vodka and ginger beer cocktail served in a copper mug. There are conflicting stories about its birth, especially the date of its invention. The most reliable source is one of the drink’s three inventers, John G. Martin, the former CEO of Heublein Inc., which owned Smirnoff vodka. Martin has said the cocktail was concocted at the Cock ‘n Bull in 1940.
Vodka has been the bestselling liquor in the United States for decades, but prior to 1940 it accounted for less than 1 percent of spirits consumed in the United States, and nearly all those imbibers were immigrants from Eastern Europe. The folks at Smirnoff have claimed that it was the sudden popularity of the Moscow Mule that led to vodka’s current popularity, and there is some credible evidence to back up this claim.
Smirnoff was founded by the Smirnov family in Moscow in the 1860s. After fleeing the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Smirnovs tried for decades to establish the Smirnoff brand in Europe. (“Smirnoff” is the French spelling of Smirnov.) They eventually sold the U.S. rights to Rudolph Kunett, a American citizen who had immigrated from Russia. But Kunett couldn’t do it either and in 1938 sold the license to John Martin at Heublein for $14,000, which would be about $300,000 today. If Martin hadn’t bought Smirnoff, vodka likely would have languished in obscurity. And Heublein would have lost its investment in Smirnoff if John Martin and Rudolph Kunett, along with Jack Morgan of the Cock ‘n Bull and his bartender Wes Price, hadn’t invented the Moscow Mule.
Martin’s assessment was that vodka couldn’t compete with gin, so he decided to target a share of the whiskey market. “If Smirnoff was to have a chance of competing with whiskey in America it had to be as a mixer,” he said later, “and therefore I went to California with Rudolph Kunett and through him met a fellow by the name of Jack Morgan.” Martin and Morgan hit it off right away, perhaps because Jack was an Anglophile and John Martin was born to American parents in England and had graduated from Cambridge University. Like Jack Morgan, his father’s name was Percy. More crucially, however, John Martin’s mother was the former Alice Heublein, an heir to the Heublein company. John Martin had dual citizenship until he was 21 years old, when he chose to be a citizen of the United States.
Martin and Morgan had similar marketing challenges. Just as Martin and Heublein were have trouble selling vodka to Americans, Jack Morgan “had Cock’ n Bull ginger beer made for him in Los Angeles,” Martin said, “and of course couldn’t sell it because Americans didn’t like ginger beer, they liked ginger ale,” which was sweeter.
The man behind the bar when John Martin, Rudolph Kunett and Jack Morgan were blue-skying a vodka and ginger beer cocktail was bartender Wes Price. Price later said that the Cock ‘n Bull made the ginger beer in house and that by 1940 they had filled the storeroom with cases of the stuff. From his perspective, they created the cocktail because they “just wanted to clean out the basement. I was trying to get rid of a lot of dead stock – Cock n’ Bull ginger beer that we made and 100 cases of vodka that we had to buy then in order to get other liquors.”
There is a small controversy about how the copper mugs came to be essential to the Moscow Mule. Bartender Wes Price waved off the mugs’ importance. They were “something different, so people will ask what’s in it,” he said.
The mugs’ entry into the mix appears to have been circumstantial. By all accounts, a woman with access to a supply of copper mugs happened to be on hand when the drink was invented. The confusion arises from the fact that there are competing stories about the woman’s identity. One candidate was a descendant of recent German immigrants and the other had recently moved to the United States from Russia.
According to Heublein’s Jack Martin, the woman with the mugs was the former. He described her as a “great big, beautiful, buxom woman by the name Osaline Schmidt who had inherited a copper factory from her father, but unfortunately hadn’t found any sale for its products.” Martin said that he and Kunett, Jack Morgan and Oseline Schmidt met at the Cock ‘n Bull’s bar to “think up a drink for Smirnoff vodka with ginger beer.”
The other woman, the Russian immigrant, was Sophie Berezinski. Her father owned the Moscow Copper Company in Russia and had sent her to the United States with 2,000 copper mugs to sell. She had spent months visiting bars starting on the East Coast and then in the west. She told family members that she happened to be in the Cock ‘n Bull when John Martin, Jack Morgan and bartender Wes Price were concocting the vodka and ginger beer drink. She took the opportunity to mention that she happened to have copper mugs that might add to the novelty.
There are quibbles with both stories, however. A search of standard sources, including genealogical databases, produced no record of Oseline Schmidt – not that that disproves anything, of course. And it seems unlikely Sophie Berezinski would have been permitted to transport 2,000 copper mugs out of Stalinist Russia, where industries were nationalized. Maybe not, but her role in the creation of the Moscow Mule became so integral to family lore that her grandson revived the Moscow Copper Company and opened it in New Jersey. (He later sold the company but it is still operating today under the new owners.) The only inventor who weighed in this for the record was John Martin, and he credited Oselin with bringing the mugs.
“The Moscow Mule eventually developed to be a two ounce drink of Smirnoff vodka put in a copper mug made by Oseline,” Martin said, “then mixed with ginger beer from Morgan’s Cock’ n Bull ginger beer bottle and a squeeze of lime.”
So how did they come up with the name? John Martin didn’t remember. “Just how [the name] originated,” he said, “I don’t know, but I imagine that it had to do with the kick.” In marketing the drink later, an advertising company for Smirnoff called it, “the Drink with the Velvet Kick.”
A “mule” (also known as a buck) is a cocktail made with liquor and ginger beer or ginger ale and citrus juice. If they’d been less inventive, Martin and Morgan might have called it the “Vodka Buck.” But, again, the public was averse to vodka in those days.
After the ingredients were set, Wes Price tested the Moscow Mule on a couple of the bar’s famous regulars. “I fixed this drink and served it first to [tough-guy actor] Broderick Crawford and [adventure-film star] Rod Cameron. It caught on like wildfire.”
Indeed it did. Smirnoff and other makers were soon selling 200,000 cases of vodka a year and Cock n’ Bull ginger beer quickly became a national brand. Jack Morgan made a small fortune selling ginger beer and copper mugs.
How does it taste? It’s been compared with a citrus soda, but that comparison ends when you pick yourself off the floor.
THE RECIPE
2 oz vodka
4 oz ginger beer
1 lime half, squeezed
Serve over ice in a copper mug. (Ginger beer is non-alcoholic.)
But as business was starting to take off, American life was upended after after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. “We developed the Moscow Mule in 1940,” John Martin recalled, “and then let it go because World War II came in and no Smirnoff was made.” Both Jack Morgan and John Martin joined the military. Martin served on the War Production Board in 1941 and as a lieutenant colonel in the Army from 1942 to 1946. He was awarded a Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit and the French Croix de Guerre.
The Cock ‘n Bull’s Jack Morgan entered the military in 1942 as a captain and eventually rose to colonel. His decorations included the Legion of Merit, five Bronze Stars, Bronze Arrowhead, Croix de Guerre, the Gold Cross of Merit, a European-African Medal, the Sultan of Morocco’s Decoration, and more.
Both Martin and Morgan returned to business after the war. “In 1946 or thereabouts,” Martin said, “we started again and franchised Cock ‘n Bull’s ginger beer and promoted the Moscow Mule.”
John Martin came up with an innovative marketing strategy based on a new technology – the Polaroid camera. Introduced in February 1947, it was the first camera that developed the film instantly and produced a photograph within seconds. Martin used it to bolster his marketing campaign, which was a shoe-leather approach to door-to-door sales.
He would map out a group of bars in a high traffic area and call on the bartenders early in the day when business was light. After introducing himself, he would retrieve a Moscow Mule mug, a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, a bottle of Cock’ n Bull ginger beer and a Polaroid camera from a leather case. Martin would then ask if he could make the bartender a drink and, as a bonus, he would offer to take the bartender’s photo and give him a copy on the spot.
The bartenders invariably asked what was in the drink and then declined when they learned it was vodka. “Drink that stuff? Russian dynamite and drop dead? No sir.” Martin would mix the drink and slide it across the bar. The bartender would reluctantly take a sip and invariably say something like, “Hey, it tastes pretty good.”
Martin recalled, “I would snap a Polaroid picture of him. In fact, I would snap two. One for him to take home to his wife and one I would use in the bar across the street. It worked wonders and of course the press got onto it and it received tremendous publicity at that time. No doubt it was the key influence in making the Moscow Mule famous throughout America.”
Over the years, Smirnoff invested heavily in advertising. A newspaper ad in 1943 ran with the headline “Hollywood Loves Moscow Mules.” The ad featured a caricature of a mule wearing a suit, with the caption, “Tired of the same old drinks?” The copy read, “In Los Angeles, U.S.A., the Moscow Mule was born … Already the Mule is climbing up into the exclusive handful of most popular mixed drinks … When you make a Moscow Mule at home, or ask for it at the bar, here’s what you get: Smirnoff Vodka, Cock ‘n Bull Ginger Beer and lime juice over ice cubes … It simply isn’t a MOSCOW MULE if it isn’t made with SMIRNOFF VODKA.”
An ad from 1950 read, “Hollywood fell in love with a MULE and a MUG.” The graphic showed a mule dressed for a round of golf wearing tartan plaid and sporting sunglasses and a Scottish flat cap.
John Martin remained as chairman of Heublein until he retired in1982, when the company was acquired by R.J. Reynolds Industries. In recent years, the Moscow Mule has made a comeback as part of wave of interest in classic cocktails in no small part because it was among 38 drink recipes in the “Mad Men” cocktail recipe guide. It was also one of Oprah Winfrey’s “Favorite Things for 2012.”