SOMERVILLE — Every morning for more than a year, when Tony Iamunno woke up, he’d check online to see what happened on that day in history. He’d pace a while, spin in a circle, stand at the door, and think. Then he’d shower and think some more.
This was his ritual, starting Oct. 1, 2015. It was all in the name of a single-minded goal: creating a new cocktail every day for 500 days straight, documenting each one on Instagram. No interruptions for holidays or travel. No sick days. It wasn’t a challenge, a dare, or an assignment he accepted from anyone. It was simply a whim — a wild, all-consuming whim.
He was working as a bartender at Trina’s Starlite Lounge when the topic of creating new cocktails for a menu came up among the staff. It’s always a challenge, some said. You’d run out of ideas at some point, they said. But Iamunno, a lifelong tinkerer, thought otherwise. He told his co-workers he could create a cocktail a day for a full year.
“I don’t like being told ‘I told you so.’ I said I’d do it. The general response continued to be that it can’t be done. Then it had to be done,” said Iamunno, 36, a man of boyish features, with a dark beard, glasses, and a forearm tattooed with a Salvador Dali drawing of fireflies and various entomological specimens.
With the kind of tenacity usually found in people training for a triathlon or writing the Great American Novel, he embarked on the project. Today, his Instagram — @oneyearofcocktails — is a stream of coupe glasses of various sizes, tumblers, flutes, snifters, Collins glasses, and tiki mugs, filled with cocktails in all shades of amber, gold, crimson, fuchsia, electric yellow, lime green. Most are shot out his back window, the trees in the background showing the passing of seasons.
“A lot of it was just propelled by wanting to make better drinks and explore flavors. Part of it was out of spite, just to prove something,” said Iamunno, now principal bartender at Stoddard’s Fine Food & Ale in Boston. “When I finished the year, I sat on the couch and cried a little.”
So in October, at the end of his 365 days, he upped his goal.
In December, he told a reporter: “I’m really going to stop at 500. There’s so much I still want to do, though, like make my own bitters, orgeat, infusions. I’ve got mushroom vermouth in the fridge that I haven’t used yet.” Iamunno called the project officially complete in the middle of February, and drinks from the nearly 17 months of work make appearances on Stoddard’s cocktail list. In fact, he says, one of the biggest benefits is that now he never has to write a cocktail menu again. He has an arsenal of drinks to draw from. And yet, new drinks keep turning up: the Blind Blake Swizzle, embedded with cocktail umbrella and a blue plastic seahorse; the Pierrepont House, a suave red-brown garnished with a trio of cherries.
When Iamunno started, he had very little inventory to work with in his Somerville home. The first drink he made contained only spirits; he didn’t even have a lemon or lime on hand. Things have changed. Now, an alcove of his living room is dedicated to storage (or display, depending on your interest level in spirits). On a metal table, dozens of bitters bottles are arranged by flavor category — aromatic, orange, fruit, savory and dark flavors (chocolate, coffee), and outliers, such as habanero. He estimates there are more than 150 bottles of spirits on the packed bookshelves; more are crammed on a nearby table. His refrigerator is stacked with Mason jars of syrups, from traditional to inventive (potato, beet), cordials, infusions, and other endeavors in culinary alchemy, like the mushroom vermouth.
His collection comes not just from impulsive buying sprees. (“I’d go to the store for Campari and come back with hundreds of dollars’ worth of bottles,” he says.) A lot was accumulated during travel. He went to Cuba before restrictions were lifted and has a bottle of Havana Club Rum with a Cuban tax stamp to prove it. (“I smuggled it back buried in my luggage. I bribed the porter to stuff it through security.”) He has bottles of European liqueurs unavailable in the United States that friends have fetched for him. He went to Oregon for an industry event and returned with an assortment of made-in-Portland spirits. He’s worked everything intoa drink.
He brings bar tools with him wherever he goes. He once made a cocktail on the Long Island Railroad en route to his mother’s house. And every so often, he’ll stray from his morning routine, like one August day when he bought juice and a shaker at a store, borrowed glassware from his friend’s downtown bar, saved a garnish from a drink from lunch in Chinatown, and, with his girlfriend, snuck a few small bottles onto the Boston Common. The result, the Sesso Pericolo (Italian for “sex danger”), contains Aperol, lemon juice, blood orange cream liqueur, and grapefruit soda.
“I was sneak-shaking in the daytime, hoping nobody would notice. Nobody did. I took the picture on the Common. It was my guerrilla cocktail,” he says matter-of-factly.
His dedication to the project has impressed many who’ve followed it.
“I knew he could do it for a month or two, but I told him it’d be hard or even impossible after three months, but he has just a tremendous knowledge base,” said Josh Childs, co-owner of Trina’s Starlite Lounge and Silvertone, both of which Iamunno has worked at over the years. “There was never any pretense about it. He was just doing it because of his commitment to the craft. Day after day, he never phoned it in. There was so much passion and love behind it, like a composer working on a symphony.”
Iamunno still hasn’t run out of ideas. At first, he would base each day’s drink on a particular spirit. Then, interested in exploring the potential of flavors, he would pick an ingredient, like ginger, and build off that. When he was stumped, he’d look to the past.
“Every day I’d check out ‘This Day in History’ and try to make it relate,” he explained. “I have so many drinks about Napoleon because he did so much stuff.” The cognac-based Devil’s Favorite, for instance, was so christened because that was the English troops’ nickname for the general. Cowboy types — Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill — and anything related to the gunslinging Wild West were another popular go-to: Goodnight, Doc Holliday, a mezcal and sherry drink, was created on the anniversary of Doc Holliday’s death from tuberculosis.
Still, the creative process remained challenging.
“Sometimes I’d panic after a while. I’d get fixated on an idea — I’d be determined to make it work somehow,” Iamunno says. “Sometimes I got it on the first try. Sometimes it’d take a lot longer, and I’d have to accept that I’m going to be late for work. Most of the cocktails are good. If I luck into something exceptionally good, I’m happy.”
As for what’s next, Iamunno hopes to turn the project into a book. Some days, he misses the routine.
“I’m very glad that I did it. Honestly, I wish I could have done more,” he says. “That’s why I haven’t really stopped, just slowed down. Occasionally I’ll go to the laboratory and work on a new drink. But if I don’t feel like doing something one day, I don’t. Now I sleep later.”
Liza Weisstuch can be reached at liza.weisstuch@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @livingtheproof.