A few hours after her set at the last Cocktail D'Amore at Griessmuehle, Jackie House, the Honey Soundsystem DJ, stood in the back of the room known as the Wintergarden, dressed in a black-and-white striped train conductor's uniform. Outside, cold rain fell on the shacks and silos in Griessmuehle's muddy backyard. In here, the air was thick and wet, the mostly shirtless crowd forming a "people soup," to quote one onlooker, that poured into every corner. The dance floor, a lumpy stretch of dirt, was packed shoulder-to-shoulder. People climbed onto whatever raised surfaces they could find. Some vogued, others played it cool, chatting or rolling spliffs as they danced. Jacob Meehan, from the Berlin party Buttons, was playing back-to-back with Jeffrey Sfire, a Detroit-based DJ and friend of the Cocktail family (he released one of their label's best records, a synth-pop EP co-produced by SOPHIE). Jackie gazed at the scene and quipped: "I never miss a good funeral party."

This was the final party ever at Griessmuehle, a Berlin club in a former pasta factory that closed at the beginning of February. It was not the final Cocktail D'Amore, a beloved gay party that was around before Griessmuehle and will carry on somewhere else. But it was undeniably the end of something special.

In their five-year run at Griessmuehle, Cocktail D'Amore built something that earned them a cult following and a chapter in the history of Berlin club culture. The music policy, guided by its founders Giacomo Garavelloni and Giovanni Turco (AKA Discodromo), the booker Juan Ramos and the party's 20 some-odd residents, was bold and refined, covering disco, house, rave and chill-out. The club's strange architecture, with its three rooms, countless hiding places and sprawling garden along a dirty canal, created a surreal sense of alternate reality, an effect helped along by the parties' heroic length (most started Friday night and went till Monday morning). The regulars, together with Griessmuehle's staff and the core Cocktail crew, formed a massive, cheeky family.

"That's what made it so special," said Trent, one of the resident DJs alongside his friend Dama. "You were sure to find everybody on the first Saturday of the month there. We went to basically every Cocktail. Sometimes we were not supposed to play, and then the club was too packed to close, so we go home, pick up our records and DJ till Monday morning."

"If you ever look at the Cocktail Facebook group, it's like, thousands of people," said Juan Ramos, the party's booker and one of its resident DJs. "If you go to any metropolitan city—London, New York, Paris—everyone probably has a gay friend who can say, 'Oh yeah, I've been to Cocktail.'"

This feeling was especially strong at the closing party. "It's a hard thing to describe," Ramos said. "There's that element of like, all the locals, the diehards, our family and friends, that vibe going on, then you add on top the supportive base that comes from other parts of the city, other parts of Europe, crowds and DJs from Herrensauna, Buttons, mina. That really encapsulated the mixture of where Cocktail came from and where it's headed. A lot of people who haven't been in years came to say goodbye."

At the beginning of this year, Griessmuehle became the latest symbol of the Berlin club scene's fight against gentrification, when an Austrian company called SIAG Property bought the plot of land where it sat and closed it down to start construction on an office building. This news was met with protests in the city, where signs included slogans like "Hard Trance Against Profit" and "Techno Acid Hardcore Trance Anal Sex Gabba."

Cocktail D'Amore, which had been Griessmuehle's most popular party, played a special role in this drama. The club was scheduled to close on February 1st, but Cocktail secured an extension till the 3rd, allowing time for one last party, on the first weekend of the month as usual. SIAG Property, evidently upset by the public outcry over the club's closure, revoked the extension, only to eventually give it back.

Griessmuehle was where Cocktail found a home, a place they could make their own. "We had this beautiful dystopian wonderland as a playground we could use for as long as we wanted," Giacomo and Giovanni said. "When we moved in in September 2014, that was still the time when Cocktail finished at noon on Sundays... but then the Wintergarden and the outdoors were too good, especially with the nice weather, not to continue the party, so we started having music until 22:00 on Sunday night. Even though the sound system wasn't great (due to Db restrictions for outdoor parties), people were so into that it was soon an explosion of energy. As usual in Berlin, people didn't want to leave and so we decided to re-open the main room spontaneously and the party went on to Monday morning and so since then it became the norm."

Cocktail was the first hit party at Griessmuehle and helped put the club on the map. The crew behind the party—Giacomo, Giovanni, Juan Ramos, the graphic designer Pindar and, in the beginning, Boris, the Berghain and Panorama Bar resident—put a lot of love into the space itself, sound-treating the main room and installing record crates in the booths. They were musically creative in how they used the space. The cavernous main room became the rave spot. The Wintergarden, with its broad windows that went wide open in the summer, was a breezy afterhour. The Silo, a dusty pit at the bottom of a metal staircase, became the Cosmic Hole, a dance floor and dark room where the tempo had to stay below 120 BPM.

"We went to check a new venue around Ostkreuz" in February, they said. "It was some former warehouse with no character turned into corporate event space and now wanting to host parties too. Reality hit so hard in that moment: Griessmuehle is gone forever and this is Berlin in 2020."

The weekend of the closing party was cold and wet, a far cry from the sunny, canal-side scenes many people think of when they think of Cocktail D'Amore. People queued for hours, first in line for the club, and then again for the coatcheck. The club hit capacity numerous times throughout the weekend, bringing even the guest list line to a standstill. Inside, sometimes there was nothing you could do but let yourself be carried along by the people soup.

Still, the mood in there was one of pure kindness. When someone charged through a crowd by the bar a little too impatiently, a man, shirtless and slick with sweat, called sweetly after him: "It's OK if you need to get by, just say excuse me!" In the Wintergarden, as a mass of bodies surged side to side, a sculpted giant of a man tapped my shoulder, gestured toward the space in front of me and asked, "May I?"

"Everybody's shoes were muddy, it was this smoky swamp in there, but there was this loving feeling," said Doc Sleep, the Room 4 Resistance resident, who played on Saturday afternoon. "I could feel it from the booth. So many smiles and hugs on the dance floor. Everybody knew the gravity of what was going on. I'm sure all the debaucherous stuff was happening, but to me it seemed all about release and celebrating this era ending."

Juan Ramos found the closing party "particularly saucy." Like many of the party's resident DJs, he got his musical education DJing at Cocktail. He poured these five years of experience into his final set there, the last one ever in the Cosmic Hole.

"By the end, I feel like I really expressed how I grew up as a DJ there," he said. "I played the theme song from Golden Girls at the end, cause I thought, you know, 'Thanks for being a friend.' If not for the people that came to the party, we wouldn't have anything. I wanted to respect that and give that warm goodbye. Those people mean a lot to me, even though I'll never meet every single person that came along."

Luigi Di Venere is another DJ who honed his craft at Cocktail D'Amore. "I practiced a lot, in different situations—Main Room, Cosmic Hole, The Garden," he said. "It's all about building different atmospheres. Lots of friends come, you don't want to play similar music, you want to have your friends always satisfied, so you need to be fresh. The background mood of being able to play Cocktail is quite special, Giacomo and Giovanni have really specific taste, and you have to be able to fulfil that and explore more."

Like many of his sets there over the years, Di Venere's final appearance in the Wintergarden was guided by a particular fantasy. "It's always about reproducing this idea of the coolest party in Italy in the dream-house era," he said. "I was conjuring that, this hip-house, dream-house vibe, this image I have in my mind of an amazing club in Italy in the '90s. And I played some South African bubblegum too, I like to do this kind of parallelism that maybe only I understood. And of course Italo disco, some Cocktail anthems. It was quite an emotional set. I love the Garden, such a special afterhour. It's a kind of lost-in-time party vibe."

The Cocktail family included new DJs as well as more experienced heads, including the likes of Daniel Wang. "I'm one of their house DJs, they have about 20 people who they always call," he said. "But I'm also a guest, in the sense that even if I never DJ'd for them, I'd go there and do all the dirty deeds anyway."

Wang played the main room on the Saturday of the final party, hung around for ten hours or so, then left. "I missed the best part because I left to go lab.oratory and basically have a sex binge," he said. "Cocktail gets me really horny, I mean you know how it is there. But I have so many friends and know so many people there that I can't really have sex at Cocktail. So yeah, I missed the best part because Cocktail made me too horny."

The best part, at least in Wang's FOMO fantasy, happened on Sunday evening. Alex From Tokyo played the final set in the Wintergarden, stirring up the people-soup with classics like Giorgio Moroder's "The Chase" and Night Moves' "Trance Dance." As always, the volume had to go way down at 10 PM—the Wintergarden is a ramshackle structure tacked on to the club's main building that barely contains the sounds of the party. From 10 PM on, though, Alex kept playing, quieter now, as the room transitioned into a chill-out space.

"It was like a living room," said Dama. "Chilled, a couple of joints, for me it was too good to leave." He sighed. "And that was the end of the garden."

You imagine Dama must have really needed a chill-out set by then. By 10 PM on Sunday, he and Trent had just finished the longest set of the weekend, and possibly Cocktail history. They'd been booked to play in the Cosmic Hole from 10 PM on Saturday night till 10 AM on Sunday morning, at which point the music would stop and the space would become a dark room for the rest of the weekend. But when 10 AM rolled around they weren't ready yet.

"We knew the moment we stopped, that would be the last time," Dama said. "So we kept going. It was very emotional."

By 2 PM on Sunday, the room was as packed as it had been at any point. "Everybody was enjoying their trip, enjoying the music," Trent said. "We had brought some eggs, some fruit, some nuts, that saved us. And we just went on."

In the end they finished on Sunday night, 24 hours after they'd started. Sometime near the end, they played Future Sound Of London's "Papua New Guinea," pitched down to the room's BPM specifications. "It was amazing," Dama said. "A proper rave."

"It was the best period of my life, and it's sad to see it's over," Dama said. "I left on Sunday night. I didn't want to stay until the end, listening to the music till the last track, leaving the club with no music."

"I can tell you," Trent told him, "it was too much."

"The end was floating above everybody's head the whole time," said Omer, another Cocktail resident. "I tried not to get too sentimental about it, thinking, 'That's the last time I go to the toilet… That's the last time I go to the Garden, the last time I go to the Cosmic Hole... agghh!"

The final set of Cocktail D'Amore at Griessmuehle was meant to be a back-to-back with three Japanese DJs: 5ive and Chida, who play together as Mascara, and Powder, a longtime friend of the family who enjoys a kind of royalty status at Cocktail (one of her early records, H, came out on Cocktail D'Amore Music). But in the end Powder and 5ive couldn't make it from Japan, so Chida played the eight hours on his own. His set felt like the closing ceremony it was, weaving between krautrock-y disco and more flamboyant classics—Skatt Bros' "Walk The Night," Metro Area's "Proton Candy," Charles B's "Lack Of Love," Aaron Carl's "Down"—and, in the final stretch, more solemn and tender selections for an exhausted and increasingly emotional crowd. Some 40 minutes before the end, he allowed a moment of silence, then played Bob Holroyd's "African Drug," a haunting ripple of chimes and hand percussion that he mixed into Cold Cut's remix of the same song.

Green and purple lights strobed on sweaty, swaying shoulders. People danced with closed eyes. Chida was feeling it as much as they were. "It was the best experience as DJ I've ever had," he said later. For his last track, he reached for a wild cut of gabber, instantly flipping the somber vibe into a moment of wild release.

The music stopped, the lights came on, and everyone cheered for ages. Almost everyone who'd played that weekend could be spotted in the crowd, dreamy expressions on their faces. Giacomo and a crowd of others stood on a raised platform by the booth, ditching the club's no-photos policy to catch a video of this final moment.

"It was nice to say goodbye in a happy way, not in a grieving way," Omer said. "Seeing the last moments of the party, the club is fully packed, the lights were really nice and crisp. It was really really cute."

Luigi Di Venere was gone by then. "I left on Sunday night, it was 1:30 AM," he said. "I just left, didn't even look back. I have memories there, I live them fully. That's it. I don't cry. I'll always have Griessmuehle in my heart, but we'll find another home for Cocktail." Then, after a moment, "I hope Berlin can still offer that."

Farewell mix: Dama & Trent in the Cosmic Hole

Here's the duo's final DJ set on their favorite dance floor—all 24 hours, seven minutes and eight seconds of it.