Police Gazette Bartender’s Medal | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

was an annual prize awarded to American bartenders in the early years of the twentieth century in one of the country’s first cocktail competitions. Sponsored by the National Police Gazette, the contest solicited bartenders from around the country to submit their best original recipes for a mixed drink. The creator of the winning recipe received an elaborate gold medallion, while second and third place won a $10 and $5 gold piece, respectively.

The National Police Gazette was founded in New York City in 1845 as a sensational crime tabloid, but after Richard Kyle Fox took over as publisher in 1877, it evolved into the country’s leading sporting weekly. Blending elements of the sports pages, gossip columns, and girlie magazines, the Gazette both reflected and helped shape the rising “bachelor culture” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Crime and gossip took a backseat to sporting news, especially boxing and wrestling, and the Gazette became the “bible of the barbershop”—and of the barroom too. Both were male havens and prime sources of circulation for the magazine. Fox began running prose portraits of “well-known bartenders” from noted saloons and hotels in the larger American cities, and just before the turn of the century he struck upon what he considered one of his best ideas—the Police Gazette’s Bartender’s Medal. See Fox, Richard K.

The year 1899 appears to be the first one that a medal was awarded, and it went to Philip O. Gross of the Honing Hotel in Cincinnati for the Commodore, a blend of whisky, curaçao, lime juice, and sugar named in honor of Admiral George Dewey, a Spanish-American War naval hero. Gross’s prize was a large medallion in the shape of a six-pointed gold star with a glass or mug embossed on each of its points.The competition was held annually until at least 1909, and thousands of bartenders submitted recipes each year. In addition to the medal itself, which was valued at $100, winning the competition brought fame and career advancement to aspiring mixologists. Peter Sindar, who won the 1901 prize with his rye- and port-based Elk’s Fizz, found himself, as one newspaper put it, “in great demand in the fashionable drink emporiums of the East where mixed drinks are the vogue.” The influence of the prize, and of the Police Gazette itself, faded after World War I, but for a brief period at the turn of the twentieth century it helped establish bartenders’ status as admirable figures in American male culture.