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Premixed Cocktails Join in the Spirits Revival

Charles Joly developed Crafthouse Cocktails.Credit...Nathan Weber for The New York Times

It has never taken much work to assemble the bottles you need to construct a classic cocktail like a manhattan or a martini. But it takes even less now that you can get all the ingredients in one container.

Bottled cocktails, premixed potions that are ready to pour, are shedding their bottom-shelf reputation and finding a place in the discerning drinker’s shopping cart.

The High West Distillery, in Park City, Utah, sells a bottled, barrel-aged manhattan. Jefferson’s, a distiller in Louisville, Ky., known for its bourbons and ryes, will bring out its own manhattan in the spring. Crafthouse Cocktails, in Chicago, concentrates on white spirits, bottling a Paloma, Southside and Moscow Mule.

Another Moscow Mule is made by Arty’s, in Clintonville, Wis., which also sells a brandy old-fashioned and a Bloody Mary. And Fluid Dynamics, made by Craft Distillers in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, offers a brandy manhattan and a Saratoga.

This is not just an American pursuit. Ryan Chetiyawardana, the man behind the innovative London bars White Lyan and Dandelyan, has a line of five bottled cocktails. Originally sold at the department store Selfridges, they are now available across Britain and online.

The bottle first met the cocktail long ago. A former Connecticut company, Heublein, is generally credited with creating the market, introducing a line of “Club Cocktails” in the 1890s. Bottled drinks enjoyed wide popularity in the 1940s and ’50s with home entertainers and, as one blunt New York Times article put it, men “who cannot mix a passable cocktail to save their lives.”

But by the 1970s, the genre had moved to the shabby environs where it largely remains today: a world of garishly packaged, low-grade margarita and daiquiri mixes with ingredients as cheap as their prices.

Today’s high-minded purveyors still have to wrestle with this lowbrow reputation. “Every other category in spirits has had a renaissance and is going into a higher, premium end,” said Jason Neu, an owner of the Milwaukee company Black Fawn Distilling, which will produce a bottled brandy old-fashioned called Soul Boxer this year. “But if you go into the bottled cocktail section of any liquor store, it’s a pretty sad state of affairs.”

Like the new breed of craft cocktail bars, these new products are trying to distinguish themselves by using quality ingredients: good spirits and fresh juices.

“I didn’t want to put an imitation flavor out there,” said Timothy Pappin, the founder of Arty’s. “I wanted it to be a true cocktail.”

Still, most of the new producers view their concoctions as the opposite of fancy, hoping that the premixed drink will find a place at picnics, tailgates, camp-outs and parties. And that’s just the way some consumers use it. “We give it as hostess gifts,” said Stephanie Bennett, a Chicago real estate broker and a fan of Crafthouse Cocktails. “People are always intrigued by it.”

Charles Joly, a noted Chicago bartender and a partner in Crafthouse, has managed to get his drinks into a few basketball stadiums and has his eye on Ravinia, the summer music festival in Highland Park, Ill., where patrons routinely wine and dine alfresco. “We never intended them to be served by your neighborhood bar, necessarily,” he said of the premixed cocktails. “But any place where people consume adult beverages and can’t get their hands on a great cocktail, we knew we had opportunities.”

Mr. Chetiyawardana said the idea was “to take all the faff away from making a cocktail — no equipment, range of booze or even ice required, so you could enjoy the magic a cocktail has in any setting.”

Many of these cocktails can be found in liquor stores, but some are marketed only in certain regions. Here’s where to find a few online: Crafthouse Cocktails: binnys.com and wlvliquors.com; Fluid Dynamics: caddellwilliams.com; Mr. Lyan’s Bottled Cocktails: masterofmalt.com and thewhiskyexchange.com. To find stores that sells Arty’s, go to drinkartys.com; for High West, highwest.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Premixed Cocktails Join the Spirits Revival. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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