Try ordering a vodka tonic or a rum and Coke at a high–end bar in any big city across the country. You might get a subtle scoff from the bartender as he mixes something with litsea cubeba or marinated Inca berries or bubble gum flavor. The drink he offers might carry a foam, it might emit a gaseous cloud or it might come in solid form, not even a drink at all.

Mixology today is more vibrant in the US than it has been for a century. Modern bartenders are fascinated by cocktail history-pre-1920, when Prohibition sent cocktail culture into a decades-long torpor. America's great bartenders, like Harry Craddock, fled the country, taking their art to Europe, or simply closed shop. Their knowledge disappeared with them. As Neyah White, bar manager at the San Francisco restaurant NOPA, says, "Think how hard it would be to get a soufflé if every professional cook who knew how to do make one left the country for a decade."

What had once been an energetic scene involving a diverse universe of spirits, spices and fruits, was reduced to stolid drinks like the vodka martini and the Cape Cod. The seemingly permanent void left by Prohibition, however, has become an opportunity, and two schools have rushed in-one interested in the ideas, techniques and rituals of America's lost cocktail culture and one inspired by trends in haute cuisine, bringing the tools of science and technology to bear on the world of drink.

(Read the complete article in Wine & Spirits' April 2007 issue, available by subscription and on newsstands nationally.)