From the 1850s to the 1870s the Brandy Cocktail was America’s favourite drink, perhaps nowhere more so than in that greatest of all great drinking cities, New Orleans. The stimulating mixture of brandy, sugar, and bitters was the choice de jour for millions of Americans enjoying the dawn of the Gilded Age, a time when new-found wealth, the arrival of the railroads, the spread of industrialisation, and a gigantic influx of, mostly European, immigrants, invented, constructed and forged modern America.