Of all the situations that call for a drink, this is one that deserves a book of its own. Psychopaths, depressives, young women, old men, social butterflies, prowlers, writers, ski-bums, heads of state, CEOs, workaholics, and plain old alcoholics each have their own great reasons to be drinking in the company of no one else—and we celebrate them all. As deplorable as it is that a certain stigma has attached to the pastime over recent years, the dedicated among us remain undeterred.
Drinking with other people is fine enough. But what was it again that occurred to you last time you shared a drink with a friend? On your way home, you developed a theory about Other People. A big theory—it may be hard to remember in all of its intricacy. Oh, right. Here it is:
Other People Suck.
Unpacking the word “suck” in this context is really where your grand theory’s complexity lies, but the headline gives us reason enough to conclude that one thing we should always be when drinking alone is content.
So whenever it’s time for you to settle down to a drink on your own-some, open your heart to the cocktail of contentment and enjoy the company of your oldest companion: your own sweet, misunderstood, and—you know what?—goddamn-near-perfect soul.
AMERICAN WHISKEY
Whiskey is a grain alcohol aged in oak barrels. Originally, rye was the big shot in cocktailing—it was the primary ingredient in both the Manhattan and the old-fashioned, and is usually called for in a Sazerac—and it’s making a huge comeback these days. Rye is spicy and dry and made from, well, mostly rye. It’s a little severe for drinking straight but it definitely pulls its weight in a cocktail. At some point in the middle of the twentieth century, rye lost serious ground to bourbon, which is made predominantly from corn, and is frequently (though not always) far sweeter than rye. Most recipes that originally called for rye are now thought of as bourbon drinks—but again, over the past five or six years rye has started to rebound.
We aren’t playing favorites here; both bourbon and rye are capable of hanging with the best of the Old World spirits, and both are very much worth mixing into cocktails. You may find that mixing with bourbon will require a more modest dash of sugar or simple syrup than if you use rye. It’s worth noting that rye was probably the early cocktailer’s favorite because rye (the grain) was grown in the East, close to New York, where most cocktails were developed. It was also quite common in New Orleans, another hotbed of refined boozing. Bourbon was a mostly southern, rural hootch. But we are all one big urban-sprawl nation now, so use whatever you can get your hands on and leave the rye vs. bourbon dispute to the Hatfields and McCoys.
If you are wondering where the big Jack Daniel’s fits into all of this, it’s technically neither a bourbon nor a rye, but rather a Tennessee whiskey. Tennessee whiskeys go through a unique charcoal-filtering process but are otherwise similar to bourbons.
Perfect Manhattan
2¼ OZ BOURBON OR RYE WHISKEY (6.5 CL)
½ OZ DRY VERMOUTH (1.5 CL)
½ OZ SWEET VERMOUTH (1.5 CL)
LONG DASH ANGOSTURA BITTERS
Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Garnish with lemon peel.
Of all the spirits that find their way into cocktails, whiskey is the most fascinating, at once obscure and alluring. There are so many different kinds of whiskey from so many different parts of the world, and they vary tremendously in style and taste. What’s more, even whiskeys that hail from the same region and are made in the same style can be dramatically different from one another. Consequently, even though the Manhattan can be made only from rye or bourbon, it can turn into a wildly different beast depending on which one you use. And precisely how much vermouth and bitters you will want to use depends greatly on your choice of spirit.
“Perfect” isn’t used here to suggest that this is an objectively “perfect” Manhattan. Rather, a “perfect” cocktail is any one that calls for equal parts dry and sweet vermouth. A traditional Manhattan softens whiskey’s bite exclusively with sweet vermouth’s rounder, fruitier qualities. It’s a fantastic drink, in some ways really the ultimate cocktail, and we heartily recommend it. But making room for a measure of dry vermouth, as we do here with our recipe for the Perfect Manhattan, will deliver a crisper, floral quality into the mix. The combination of the two fortified wines, when properly balanced, can contribute to a sublime drink, layered beautifully and faceted like a gem. And that, right there, captures the value of drinking alone: an opportunity to muse on life’s mysterious balance, its fleeting charms, its tormenting flashes of perfection. Or something.
That first Friday in June. Is there anything better? It’s the day of the year when you stop wondering why you never moved to California, and you start thinking: this is what winter is for. For the joy that reverberates through an amazingly beautiful late spring afternoon, through birds and flowering trees and shining faces and through the stack of summer weekends piled in front of you like hundred-dollar bills. It’s a nearly hormonal buzz and, to our readers who live in a perfect climate year-round, sorry: this kind of euphoria is only possible after months of excruciating misery. Isn’t that the East Coast ethic, after all? Suffer and cuss, lift off into bliss for a few months, then suffer and cuss all over again.
So: minds drawn to longer days, lovelier nights, and the birds and the bees. The blood is pumping through the veins. Sweet Lord, it’s time for a cocktail, near the beach, on a front porch, or at a tree-shaded street corner. Time to just Take. It. All. In. Specifically, take in all those beautiful people passing by—who have been exactly where since last August? Perhaps they stay inside doing crunches all winter. Or maybe they are part of some sex-fueled winged migration that arrives from Miami with the goldfinches when the weather gets warm.
As for the cocktail, this is one you don’t need our help to figure out. You were born knowing this. The summer has just begun, youth is still nigh, and there is time for everything under the sun. What else could you possibly drink?
Margarita
2 OZ WHITE TEQUILA (6 CL)
¾ OZ LIME JUICE (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ TRIPLE SEC (2.5 CL)
1 DASH SIMPLE SYRUP (OPTIONAL)
Shake and serve over fresh ice in a cocktail or margarita glass (salted rim optional).
What says springtime like daisies? And, if you are in a Mexican frame of mind, what says daisy like margarita? Nothing, really, because “margarita” is, in fact, Spanish for “daisy.” Fittingly, the margarita owes its existence to the early twentieth-century American vacationers who took their love of the daisy—a sour made with a traditional spirit (gin, cognac, rum, or whiskey), orange liqueur, and lemon juice—vacationing to Mexico. Apparently the forefathers of Señor Frog’s knew how to entertain the gringos even back then. They started with the popular daisy and Mexified it with the local ingredients: tequila and lime. Mix it all together and you get a cocktail that screams “mellow joy” in English, French, Swahili, and every other language that has a word for springtime.
If you walk into a supermarket and look at the seventy-five hyphenated ingredients listed on the back of a bottle of margarita mix, you would think this was something terribly complex to make. Not so. A world-class margarita is made with freshly squeezed lime juice, a lick of salt, and two kinds of booze. It doesn’t get any easier, tastier, or more joyful than that.
LIQUEURS
Cocktails became more complicated beasts when American bartenders gained access to imported products from Europe. These exotic liqueurs and aperitifs were not carefully crafted by Italians, French, and the like for the purpose of dumping callously into a glass with whiskey and ice. But Americans, classy and restrained as ever, started using sweetened liqueurs instead of (or in addition to) sugar, and herbal liqueurs and aperitifs instead of (or in addition to) bitters. So as a historical matter and for your own purposes, liqueurs and aperitifs should be understood as expanding the range of flavors that can be rendered out of a cocktail. We know: it’s hard to pay fifty dollars for a bottle of some weird stuff wrapped in straw that you never even noticed before. But your drink options are really limited if, for instance, you don’t have at least one bottle of quality orange liqueur.
Orange liqueur: many recipes call for triple sec, a grain spirit flavored with different varietals of exotic orange peels. The original and arguably the finest is Cointreau. There are several other good options, but the cheaper stuff tends to be cloyingly sweet and will mess up your drink.
Orange curaçao is also a sweet, orange-flavored liqueur, but because it’s made with brandy rather than a neutral grain spirit, it is fuller-bodied than triple sec. Grand Marnier, made with cognac, holds title as the premium brand here. While orange curaçao doesn’t come up as frequently in modern recipes as triple sec, we do recommend it as an interesting and worthwhile substitute. Grand Marnier, for instance, will do swimmingly with heavier spirits, as in a sidecar (paired, fittingly, with cognac) or a nontraditional margarita made with aged tequila. It may prove overpowering if paired with a white spirit, unless bitters are involved (as in the Pegu Club).
Other sweet liqueurs include maraschino (marasca cherry), Drambuie (Scotch-based, flavored with honey), crème de cassis (black currant), crème de cacao (cocoa), coffee (as in Kahlúa), and crème de menthe (mint).
Chartreuse and Bénédictine are both herbal cordials with ancient beginnings—both, in fact, invented in monasteries. Each adds a unique flavor component really like nothing else, critical to some of the more intriguing classic cocktails.
SWEET LORD, WHY IS EVERYONE HERE SO HOMELY?
A night out on the town does not come cheap. Expenses add up, plus there is hell to pay in the morning. Is it fair to say that you put your heart and soul into making the most of it? Yes, it is fair to say. And it isn’t asking too much, is it, to expect that others put their best into it, too? All those other people filling the bar: you expect them to respect the evening. Look happy and shallow. Or look brooding and sexy. Embody anything, other than mediocrity. Bring magic to the evening.
It’s shameful—criminally so—when other people choose to be ugly on your night out. If they can’t simply choose to be more attractive, perhaps they can choose to be elsewhere? Is this really what it has to mean to live in a free country?
Well, yes, suffering the homely is exactly what it means to live in a free country, unless you happen to live in Miami, certain zip codes of Los Angeles, or lower Manhattan. Meanwhile, if the lords of the cocktail care an ounce for suffering, shallow souls like you, they would have invent a suitable concoction for whiling away a hard-earned evening with so many pitifully poor lookers. Fortunately, they did.
American Beauty
1 OZ COGNAC (3 CL)
1 OZ DRY VERMOUTH (3 CL)
1 OZ ORANGE JUICE (3 CL)
2–3 DASHES GRENADINE
2–3 DASHES SIMPLE SYRUP
Shake and strain into a cocktail glass.
Garnish with well-rinsed rose petal (optional).
Flip the script and enjoy this classic beauty, whose balance and sophistication will stimulate your mind and distract you from the homely masses. You can only stare into the mirror and thrive on your own self-confidence for so long, so order up an American Beauty and revel in your drink instead. With only a solitary ounce of hard liquor and another ounce of Sunday school orange juice, the American Beauty is not as booze-forward as most of the other drinks you will find in these pages. But just as well. Better you should keep your wits about you and make it out of here alone.
The Bloody. We love it. Like barbecue, it’s an American gastronomical passion we can all be proud of and, unlike barbecue—no disrespect here—the Bloody doesn’t involve hacked-up animal parts, lighter fluid, or carcinogens. Bloodies are fun to talk about, more fun to make, and really fun to drink.
We could try to be original and come up with some other cocktail you should be imbibing to wash down the bacon. With your liver still pumping through last night’s toxins, we could pry into why you feel the need to take a cocktail with your breakfast at all. And it’s true that the kind of person who brunches regularly is the kind of person who has given up any pretense of anything approaching prudence or moderation. Fortunately, the Bloody is the one drink you can have at breakfast without feeling judged. (Don’t even think the word mimosa. You think if there’s a Fox News correspondent sitting at the adjacent table, she won’t skewer you for swilling brut champagne in the morning?)
Morning is no time to be a contrarian about selecting your drink. Truthfully it’s not the wisest time to be drinking at all—but too late now. Just pour yourself a good Bloody, get to work on that heaving slab of carbohydrate-rich French toast, and, while you’re at it, give that Fox News correspondent a piece of your mind.
Bloody Maria
2 OZ TEQUILA (6 CL)
4 OZ TOMATO JUICE (12 CL)
LEMON JUICE TO TASTE
BLACK PEPPER TO TASTE
CELERY SALT TO TASTE
HORSERADISH PASTE TO TASTE
WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE TO TASTE
CHILE SAUCE TO TASTE
OLIVE BRINE TO TASTE
Build in an ice-filled collins glass and stir briefly.
Garnish with lemon wedge, olive, and celery stalk.
Bloody Maria, you say? After all our talk about taking the straight and narrow, we abandoned blond-haired, blue-eyed vodka for saucier, south-of-the-border tequila? Of course you can always stick with vodka if you wish—it’s how the drink was originally conceived. But swapping in tequila, in addition to providing some additional excitement to your morning, has a way of pulling together all of those disparate ingredients into something more memorable. It’s a far more dynamic spirit, and its unique vegetal bite works beautifully with tomato juice.
Our oldest friendships provide us a critical service. Call it grounding therapy. How far you have come in the world is, in another light, how far you have strayed. Sitting down with the original clan snaps you right back down to earth, and can put you more in touch with who you really are than a year of meditation in the Himalayas. In a minute or less, it becomes crystal clear that all the stuff you checked at the door—your job title, your zip code, your well-stamped passport—is secondary to your identity.
Do you want to know the truth about this book? It’s buried right here, deep in the middle, where our editor won’t find it:
The truth is that the right drink for right now isn’t necessarily this cocktail or that cocktail. The right drink is always, always, always whatever you bloody well feel like drinking. You don’t win any points in this world for ordering a mint julep at the horse races. You win points for betting on the right horse. But win or lose, trying new drinks is fun. We wrote this book to give you a few more ideas, and, while we were at it, to give you some suggestions about when to try them.
We are making this point now because your oldest friends will be the first to dress you down if you try and pull any bullshit with your drink order. Putting on airs will always catch up with you sooner or later, but with old friends it will catch up with you as soon as the words “Mary Pickford” come out of your mouth (not that it’s a bad drink…far from it: see chapter 2).
If hanging out with old friends is all about going back to the basics, we recommend sitting down to a long night of gin and tonics. Like your original gang and that story about your tenth-grade teacher finding urine in her coffee mug, the gin and tonic is the kind of thing that never gets old. And whenever you have had the first in a long while, you will always find yourself wondering why you ever sat down with anything else.
Gin and Tonic
2 OZ DRY GIN (6 CL)
TONIC WATER
Build in an ice-filled highball glass. Top up with tonic.
Garnish with lime wedge and stir briefly.
While tonight is all about honoring your formative experiences, you will be well-served to avoid that cheap well gin you drank with this same crew back in the good old days. A classic dry, London-style gin (Beefeater comes most readily to mind, but is far from the only option) holds up beautifully with tonic and embodies the sort of timeless, stalwart loyalty that is the very bedrock of the perennial get-together.
Bottled tonic water is always better than what passes for tonic out of a soda gun—both because the bottled stuff is fizzier and because the flavor is not tainted with the other six liquids that emanate out of the soda gun’s single orifice. Tonic is both bitter (quinine) and sweet (sugar)—making the gin and tonic, despite its uneven reputation, a fairly classic cocktail.
Love is a give-and-take business. When you are in a serious relationship—on the road to mortgages, joint tax returns, and spawn—there is going to be some stuff you will, one day, want to take away from each other. It’s okay to expect a little friction along the way. Anyway, who can respect a partner who doesn’t have some misgivings about surrendering their freedom? The best way to plan for those dicey days when sacrifices are requested and resistance is expected is to build up a whole lot of good will as early as possible in the relationship.
We hope this doesn’t come off sounding regressive. We are conscious that there will be readers who feel that our perspective is dated. But nothing tells a man that you are on his side like a cheery willingness to suffer through an afternoon of high-definition sports television and unwashed pals.
Repetitive jokes, cases of beer, muddy shoes, and pointless arguments about statistics: the whole bit. Just tell yourself that it’s all worth it—even after you find those chicken bones one of his friends will inevitably lose behind the couch. You are putting money in the bank. One day, when you are lost in a maze of Wal-Mart aisles dedicated exclusively to those stupid toys that dangle from baby car seat handles, or when you are debating how an upright mixer could possibly be worth over $400, you will have the memory of this painful afternoon to summon on your behalf.
So what to drink? Well, the boys will be drinking beer, there’s no doubt about that. You can always join in. But since you’re throwing away your day, you might as well impress the hell out of his friends, and nothing impresses like a woman who knows how to mix a cocktail. Plus, if you are drinking your own cocktails, that means more beer for them.
He may not know it, his friends may not know it, but we know it: your boyfriend made a deal with the devil today. Isn’t it fitting, then, to drink El Diablo?
El Diablo
1½ OZ REPOSADO TEQUILA (4.5 CL)
½ OZ CRÈME DE CASSIS (CHAMBBORD IN A PINCH) (1.5 CL)
½ OZ LIME JUICE (1.5 CL)
GINGER BEER
Shake and strain into a collins glass and top up with ginger beer.
El Diablo is from a breed of modern classics based on tequila. Tequila isn’t found in many traditional recipes—it wasn’t on the nineteenth-century barman’s shelf—but its spicy and vegetal qualities render a totally unique and surprisingly easy-to-drink concoction. A balanced tequila recipe, like this one, will put to rest the memory of those ulcer-inducing bar shots you had last New Year’s. A reposado tequila should be used to round out the spicy punch of the ginger beer, and together they will stand up admirably to those spicy chicken wings you will be digging into all afternoon.
To make a strong visual impression, try dripping the crème de cassis slowly down a spiraled barspoon handle into the base of the glass. If you are incredibly bored and in desperate need of distraction, use a citrus press to squeeze out the lime juice. Then place the inverted lime shell on top of the drink as a float, with an extra splash of crème de cassis inside. This will keep you entertained—and will send everyone else in the room home wondering how their friend lucked out with a woman who knows how to float shots on top of her cocktails.
TEQUILA
Tequila is distilled from fermented agave nectar. Contrary to popular belief, agave isn’t a cactus—it’s actually related to the lily—but it is grown in the desert. In order from light to dark, tequila can be: plata or blanco (silver, or white, bottled within sixty days of distillation), reposado (aged between two months and a year in oak), añejo (aged more than a year), or extra añejo (aged more than three years). El Diablo is an example of a cocktail that calls specifically for the medium-bodied reposado. The margarita is traditionally made with white tequila.
What’s the point of it all?
It’s a fair question that has been asked for millennia by the stressed-out, the hapless, the idle, and the philosophic. And in a world in which Jimmy Fallon gets his own late-night show while we toil away at our day jobs, it’s never been a more poignant question. We don’t have all the answers in life and we certainly can’t explain what Jimmy Fallon ever did to deserve fame and fortune. But we do know something about the connection between existential crisis and barbecue.
While scientists believe that seasonal affective disorder is caused by reduced exposure to sunlight, we suspect it has something to do with reduced exposure to cooking with fire. Sizzling prime cuts, sausage, chicken thighs, zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, and kale on a hot grill at dusk bring happiness to humankind—plain and simple. Ribs slow-cooking through a long afternoon pour forth a smoke shamanistic in power. Barbecue’s magic, like that of drinking, is of equal force whether you are all alone or at the party of a lifetime.
RUM
Rum is distilled from sugarcane juice and/or molasses—basically the sludge left over after you extract crystallized sugar. This spirit has played an outsized role in New World history. The Boston Tea Party was about more than just tea (would people really risk their lives for tea?), and rum unfortunately played a critical role in the economics of the slave trade as well. Recently, rum has received much love not only from pre-Prohibition cocktail lovers but also from the ever-growing army of tiki enthusiasts.
The very dark, rich rums frequently come from former English colonies like Jamaica or Barbados (e.g., Gosling’s, which is specifically called for in a Dark ’n’ Stormy) and are molasses-based. Most of the rum consumed in the world comes from Puerto Rico—a former Spanish colony—and can either be silver, amber, or dark, with depth of flavor and body typically (but not always) moving in tandem with color. Pay attention to the body of the rum you are using when adjusting ratios.
There is also a kind of rum called rhum agricole, distilled in the former French colony Martinique and, under the moniker cachaça, in Brazil. Much like the genitalia of the morbidly obese, rhum agricole is hard to find but fun to play with. It (the rum, not the genitalia) is made exclusively from fresh sugarcane juice rather than molasses and is light-bodied, refined, yet unmistakably rich.
Speaking of drink, when it comes to barbecuing, we won’t deny it: you can never go wrong with beer. But any event involving lawns, bare feet, music, and food can only be enhanced by a good summer cocktail.
Mai Tai Roa-Ae
2 OZ AGED RUM (6 CL)
1 OZ LIME JUICE (3 CL)
¾ OZ TRIPLE SEC (2.5 CL)
¼ OZ ORGEAT OR ALMOND SYRUP (4–6 DASHES)
For extra credit and/or possible snickering from your guests, serve in vintage ’50s-era tiki mask porcelain cups.
So what is the point of it all? Barbecues and tiki cocktails are actually not the answer. But they will definitely keep you from asking the question. And if that’s not happiness, it’s as close as any philosophers, monks, or late-night TV watchers since time immemorial have ever managed to get.
Nothing is better suited to summer’s enchantments than this appealing version of the mai tai, to be enjoyed by the flickering light of wicker torches. Despite its exotic name, the mai tai is essentially a sour. Here we recommend a 2:1:1 ratio, with a two-part pour of spirit (rum, of course) paired with one part each of sweet (here, a mix of orange liqueur and almond syrup) and sour (lime).
As to the orgeat (pronounced “orh-jha”), do not be intimidated. A sweet syrup made from almonds, sugar, and rose or orange water, it is commonly used in Italian pastries and is readily available at specialty food stores. Straightforward almond syrup (sometimes sold under the name “orzata”), which is widely available and which you can even make on your own, will also do just fine. Or you can enjoy a perfectly respectable alternative without any almond flavoring at all, pouring in a full ounce of triple sec to maintain an even balance of sweet to sour.
Daiquiri
OZ WHITE RUM (6 CL)
¾ OZ LIME JUICE (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ SIMPLE SYRUP (2.5 CL)
Shake vigorously and serve strained or rolled in a cocktail glass.
If even tracking down a bottle of Cointreau is too much for you to handle on a lazy summer day, keep things even simpler with a classic daiquiri.
The daiquiri is a fair-weather classic, a blessing upon porches, beaches, and backyards of every kind. While simple to prepare, it is a hallmark of the cocktailing craft. Like its beach pal the margarita, the daiquiri should be served thoroughly chilled, so don’t be afraid to shake it an extra dozen times or so. With all respect to Jimmy Buffet, we aren’t huge fans of putting booze in the blender, which is messy and hard to do without ruining the drink. But you can get just as far by “rolling” your daiquiri or margarita—pouring all of the ingredients into the glass unstrained.
One of the challenges of making a great daiquiri is finding quality white rum—one with some body to show off. (This is an interesting parallel to the margarita, which similarly shines when made with good white tequila.) Weaker-bodied rum—and unfortunately this includes some of the most widely available brands—simply falls apart and is totally overwhelmed in a daiquiri. If you can find a white rhum agricole, it’s perfect for the job.
Technology has extinguished so many cultural phenomena. Example: the blind date. Why would you ever trust your friends to set you up with a stranger when you can go online and do the matchmaking yourself? The Polaroid: in its own day, this charismatic powerhouse could make or break a party with the images that it caught and spat out in minutes, but who would bother wafting all those chemicals in the air when you can capture the same image on your phone and have it posted on a social networking site for millions to see within an instant?
Much relief, then, that the culture of Dungeons and Dragons continues to thrive well into the new century. Looking ahead from, say, 1992, all the indicators pointed to demise: the same would-be wizards and shifters who whiled away their prime years in dark, 1970s-renovated basements rolling eight-sided dice by candlelight against a backdrop of Pink Floyd cassettes and muted Monty Python videos were the ones who were also drawn, mothlike, to the computer screen. Would mastering C++ and sniffing out porn on AOL leave any time for the old fantasy role-play? Doubt pervaded like a mist curling through the forest primeval.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief now. A saving throw came from the advent of online gaming, which turned out to be an endless resource for role-play gaming possibilities. Now, it seems that half the world is working their way through a vicious campaign, engaged in mortal combat with a goliath—either on World of Warcraft or in some other, more purist version of the ultimate pastime of geekdom.
Best of all, gaming can be conducted without any distracting argument about which Floyd album is the best. The seedy couch and candles of the late twentieth century have been replaced with the desktop computer and the ergo-chair, so you can listen to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn on iTunes without any groans from the Dungeon Master. He’s presiding over the game from Idaho, blasting The Dark Side of the Moon in a basement of his very own.
Bobby Burns
2 OZ BLENDED OR SINGLE MALT SCOTCH WHISKY (6 CL)
¾ OZ SWEET VERMOUTH (2.5 CL)
½ OZ BÉNÉDICTINE OR DRAMBUIE (OR LESS, TO TASTE) (1.5 CL)
LONG DASH ANGOSTURA OR PEYCHAUD’S BITTERS
Stir potion by candlelight, recite secret incantation, and strain into a cocktail glass or chalice.
Garnish with cured cherry (with Angostura) or lemon peel (with Peychaud’s).
The Bobby Burns is an old, overlooked Manhattan derivative that, like a good game of role-play, can unfold in a seemingly unlimited number of ways. Single malt or blended Scotch? Bénédictine or Drambuie? Angostura or Peychaud’s? We won’t presume to choose for you. Be guided instead by whatever was stocked in your parent’s basement bar circa 1982, and what may well still be collecting dust there today.
The Bobby Burns. No one knows for sure who he was, but he even sounds like someone who may have been hanging out in your basement a few decades ago. Doesn’t sound like the D&D type, though. More likely the kind of guy with a killer baseball card collection.
STRIKING UP CONVERSATION WITH STRANGERS
If drinking establishments were good for nothing else, their ability to foster spirited conversation between perfect strangers would redeem them. There is magic to a place where people of all stripes are welcome to enter and share a genuine piece of themselves with strangers. Consider the etymology of “pub”: slang for public house, as in “any house open to the public.” Is it going too far to say that freedom and democracy owe their existence to such places? Possibly. But if a book hasn’t yet been written on the role of pubs in the ferment of the American and French revolutions, you can expect one soon.
It must also be said that drinking establishments have played a goodly role in the ferment of black eyes, vomit, illegitimate children, genital warts, loose teeth, car accidents, prostitution, personal bankruptcy, bad singing, liver disease, driver’s license suspensions, divorce, urine-splattered toilets, and other thought-provoking phenomena glorified in these pages. There are advantages and drawbacks to them all. But there is a genuine affinity that is inspired by the joints where people meet to drink, and there is no downside to this—empathy is of unmitigated value.
So do us this favor: the next time you find yourself sitting next to a stranger at a bar or a pub, bring honor to the tradition that makes these places special. Don’t give a thought to this person’s age, their appearance, their gender, or how many drinks you would need to consume before having sex with them in the bathroom. Don’t pause to consider whether this might be the kind of insane person who will talk your ear off for the next hour about the left-wing conspiracy to illegalize lawn care. Conspiracy theories are part of the charm, interwoven into the fabric of drinking culture. Recall that the Declaration of Independence is little more than a well-written conspiracy manifesto, and it was inspired under similar circumstances.
So celebrate your surroundings. Kick one back for posterity. Engage with the stranger. Listen with care to their dimwitted theories. Make sweet love in the bathroom. Drink up.
Tom Collins
2 OZ GIN (6 CL)
1 OZ SIMPLE SYRUP (3 CL)
¾ OZ LEMON JUICE (2.5 CL)
CLUB SODA
Shake and strain into a collins glass over fresh ice. Top up with chilled club soda.
Garnish with lemon wedge.
The Tom Collins is a chummy sort of drink that made its way from England to the United States sometime before the Civil War, when American folk were too stressed out about secession to invent their own cocktails. A member of the fizz and sour families, the collins has always been a thoroughly popular, accessible choice, and it’s no wonder: sparkling lemonade and gin? What’s not to like?
The original collins called for older kinds of gin that are just now starting to make a comeback: old tom (sweet, full-bodied) and Genever (closer to an unaged whiskey). So any kind of gin—from London dry to an old tom like Hayman’s or a Genever like Bols—is worth trying.
In a long life of drinking, you will from time to time start out an evening with the merriest intentions, and then, for reasons beyond anyone’s control, get a touch rough. It starts, of course, with you kicking back a few too many rounds. You carry yourself away with a heated family discussion over, say, who inherited your aunt Marla’s sense of humor. Then you lash out at your loved ones in a senseless barrage of foul language and bile. If you close out the night by calling your sister a slut and your oldest friend “shallow and pathetic” while urinating on your own lawn, well, some evenings just have to end that way. And it’s perfectly acceptable behavior, because your intentions were all for the best.
Our moral compass informs us that being a nasty drunk is fine if it’s an accident. Misbehavior, contrary to what they tell you in high school health class, isn’t actually anyone’s fault if it’s caused by substance abuse. However:
What we do not condone is setting out for the evening with the express intention of working yourself into a hateful lather. Perhaps one of the oldest traditions in the book—in fact, it makes an appearance or two in the Good Book—drinking for battle isn’t right, and you shouldn’t do it. Alcohol should only be used as a crutch to spread love, good cheer, and sex juice—never hate.
The intentional bad drunk gives a bad name to booze when he or she crosses the line, and that is something we simply cannot forgive. We hope we haven’t attracted the kind of reader who finds this sort of behavior deliciously appealing in any way. Because listen clearly: there is nothing, nothing, nothing remotely entertaining about a good, vicious, dirty drunken brawl.
That being said, if nothing will stand between you and the dark art of the Mean Drunk, may we suggest a cocktail?
Tipperary Cocktail
1½ OZ IRISH WHISKEY (4.5 CL)
1 OZ GREEN CHARTREUSE (3 CL)
1 OZ SWEET VERMOUTH (3 CL)
Stir and strain into a cocktail glass.
As originally set forth in the authoritative 1930 classic The Savoy Cocktail Book by Harry Craddock, the Tipperary was a good deal sweeter than the recipe we recommend. Any way you serve it, though, it’s a powerful drink. Chartreuse is 100 proof, and then there’s the Irish whiskey, which has fueled more barroom fights than any alcoholic beverage since the spiked yak milk the Huns guzzled when they weren’t out on the prowl. It doesn’t take too many Tipperarys to find yourself fall-down, spit-at-your-friends drunk. In Craddock’s bar at the Savoy Hotel in London, if you so much as ordered the Tipperary, they would put a 250-pound tough guy from the East End right behind your chair, standing by prepared to bounce you in the unlikely event of a flare-up. The Tipperary is a mean one, but a good one. Just don’t tell anyone that you heard about it from us.
OLD WORLD WHISK(E)Y
Scotch whisky is predominantly made from malted (or sprouted) barley; Irish whiskey is made from corn or barley (either malted or not). These fine specimens rarely show up in the world of cocktailing. Single malt Scotch’s peaty flavors tend to dominate (though note that a blended Scotch mixes a blander grain whisky with the malted kind), and anyway neither was much available in the United States when cocktailing came into its own in the nineteenth century. All that being said, Scotch and Irish are worth trying out in mixed drinks when you feel like living dangerously. The Rob Roy specifically calls for Scotch and the Tipperary calls for Irish.
Particularly if you are playing with Scotch, you will want to adjust your use of other ingredients to balance out it’s peaty, overbearing character. Peychaud’s may work well in a Rob Roy, since it’s sweeter and milder than Angostura (Angostura and Scotch: too many roosters in the henhouse), and a particularly mouthy single malt may require a heavier dose of sweet vermouth for balance.
HE’S PROBABLY NOT ANSWERING HIS PHONE BECAUSE…
Something happens when some guys drop into a bar for a drink. Not all guys, and certainly there are plenty of women like this, too. But for a certain type of person, entering a drinking establishment is a bit like the seedy version of enlightenment: the past, the future, everything outside of his immediate vicinity melts away, leaving only the dimly lit, jukebox-accompanied present. Credit card debts pay themselves off. Dinner plans are erased from memory. Jobs, promises, and obligations—basically all the heavy stuff that’s piled on a guy since his late twenties—lift up about halfway through the first pint of beer and simply vanish. Bars, taverns, and pubs: experiential Botox, since time immemorial.
All this is a kind way of saying that when your significant other tells you he is going to meet a friend for “just a drink” and should be on his way to meet you in half an hour, and there’s no word of him in an hour, two hours, four hours, and his phone keeps ringing unanswered, he isn’t purposely trying to avoid you. He may be doing exactly what you hope he isn’t doing, or he may be doing something that extends beyond your power of imagination, or he may be just sitting at the bar working through his sixth drink. Whatever he’s doing, though, know this: it isn’t a betrayal. You have to exist to be betrayed, and by the time he was waving down the bartender for a second round, you had long ceased to exist.
Zen Buddhists strive for years to enter a state of mind in which they cease to be. You got there without even trying: your significant other did all the work, sitting there at the bar, drinking you into nonexistence. Congratulations! Rather than stress about what he’s capable of getting into now that you are non-being, we recommend you enjoy a cocktail at home, and enter into a nirvana all your own.
Last Word
¾ OZ DRY GIN (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ GREEN CHARTREUSE (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ MARASCHINO LIQUEUR (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ LIME JUICE (2.5 CL)
Shake vigorously and strain into a cocktail glass.
There aren’t many drinks composed of equal measures of each ingredient, but the Last Word is one of them. True to form, it possesses a little bit of everything: sweet, dry, earthy, and herbaceous. If made with precision, the Last Word is way too easy to drink and, with three ingredients composed of at least 80 proof, provides a time-tested path to temporary nirvana. The Last Word is of mysterious lineage and isn’t mentioned in most cocktail books, but, to all of our great fortune, was recently rescued from obscurity by the saintly cocktail revivalists who take an interest in rediscovering such relics. Meant to be enjoyed thoroughly chilled, the Last Word (like that special someone who seems to have checked out for the evening) deserves a good hard shake.
CALLING IN SICK, LISTENING TO STORYCORPS, AND CRYING ALL THOSE BITTERSWEET TEARS
Steve Inskeep, NPR Morning Edition:
On Fridays we bring you moments from StoryCorps. StoryCorps is the oral history project that’s traveling the country, collecting the stories of everyday people.
It’s a Friday morning. As you shuffle back and forth between bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, sheets of cold rain slap against the windows. You are getting ready for work with an impressive dedication to moving as slowly as possible, reluctant to make a choice on what boring variation on the corporate casual theme to wear today. Today, you fear, the commute just might kill off what’s left of your soul. In this weather, heavy traffic seems heavier, stuffy trains seem stuffier. Meanwhile the comforts of your home beckon: a relatively clean bathrobe, a fresh pot of coffee, warm radiators, and the low rambling of public radio piping out of the alarm clock. Suddenly you hear a soft guitar and Steve Inskeep’s introduction to StoryCorps: the voices of our times. This week those intimate mobile booths have roved to…
DeWitt, Michigan, to hear from 93-year-old Donald Copeland and his granddaughter, Eve Bradley, about fighting terminal illness in midlife, meeting Eve’s grandmother during the Great Fire of 1898, and working as a sharecropper in a West Virginia coal mine.
None of it has any bearing on your life. Are any of these people even telling the truth? But man, you could listen to this stuff all day.
In fact maybe you should listen to this stuff all day. As Steve Inskeep will remind you, they keep recordings stockpiled in the thousands on www.StoryCorps.org and, just in case you happen to find yourself in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. If you have learned a single thing from listening to so many heartwarming StoryCorps episodes over the years, it’s that you have only this one life to live, and it’s a mighty short ride. So don’t you owe it to yourself to live today just for you? Call in sick. Stay in your cleanish bathrobe. Fix up a comfort drink, tune in to three or four hours of StoryCorps and cry yourself silly.
Hot Apple Toddy
1 LARGE PEEL OF LEMON
2 OZ CALVADOS OR APPLE BRANDY (6 CL)
1 TEASPOON MAPLE SYRUP OR HONEY
1 DASH PEYCHAUD’S BITTERS (OPTIONAL)
3–4 OZ HOT WATER OR TEA (9–12 CL) (NEAR BOILING)
1 STICK CINNAMOM
Muddle the peel of lemon in a mug or tumbler.
Pour brandy, syrup, bitters, hot water or tea into glass.
Stir with cinnamon stick.
Sip, and reach for a tissue.
Distilled and enjoyed in America since the seventeenth century, apple brandy deserves an episode of StoryCorps all its own. In the early days, it was consumed in massive quantities. There wasn’t much else besides apples to distill in the British colonies back then. At the request of General George Washington, one distillery, Laird & Company, helped fuel the American Revolution by keeping the troops warm and full-bellied on its famous apple distillate. Laird & Company is still at it today, rendering some of the finest apple brandies and applejacks on the market.
Some form of the hot toddy has been around forever, and it is pretty much the only reason human civilization survived those first few millennia of pre-central-heating, pre-global-warming winters. It is very much the original comfort drink, and perfect for holing up for a day in your bathrobe with a box of tissues—with or without StoryCorps. While here we recommend apple brandy, other kinds of brandy or whisky can also be used in a hot toddy. For a worthwhile and traditional twist, try using black or ginger tea rather than hot water as a base.
You know what’s nice?
It’s nice to get blackout, train-wreck, curb-retching, wakeup-in-where-the-fuck-am-I drunk. Not all the time. Not even frequently. Maybe less than once a year. But it is a pleasant little treat to dole out to yourself when you have earned it, when the opportunity arises—that is to say, on those rare occasions when your self-respect and composure are useless to you in any event.
If you think “self-respect and composure” are part of your birthright, you are wrong. You had none when you were in high school. And now it’s time to reunite with first loves, bitter rivals, and that creepy kid in English class—the one who always wore the same Garfield shirt, day after day, and who said three words (in Klingon) the entire year, and who everyone thought would go postal, but is now a fabulously wealthy real estate mogul—and what the hell have you done with your life in the meantime?
That is to say, since you are on your way to your high school reunion, self-respect and composure aren’t in very high supply tonight. Why bother trying to make a good impression on anyone? Why remain sober enough to engage in a meaningful conversation? You spent a sizeable chunk of your life with these people, and you can’t remember having made a positive impression or engaging in a meaningful conversation with any of them—except your oldest, closest friends. And while they are here, too, you don’t need to meet at a tired hotel sandwiched between an Applebee’s and an adult video store to share a heart-to-heart with them.
As to the rest of these people? Give them something to talk about for the next ten years. Hit shamelessly on your weather-beaten high school sweetheart, whose spouse is glaring at you from across the table. Cry on your old arch-enemy’s shoulder about the unbearable sadness of lost youth. Dance the conga with whoever gained the most weight. Make a spectacle of yourself. It’s fun when there are no consequences—which, coincidentally, hasn’t been the case since you were in high school.
Rusty Nail
2½ OZ BLENDED SCOTCH WHISKY (7.5 CL)
½ OZ DRAMBUIE (1.5 CL)
1 DASH ORANGE BITTERS (UNORTHODOX AND TOTALLY OPTIONAL)
Serve in an old-fashioned glass over ice, gently stirred.
Drinking Scotch at a high school reunion is tempting, but tricky. Scotch has a way of casting a warm glow on the past, smoothing out the rough edges and allowing you to connect with your surroundings. And it has a way of getting you roaring drunk, if that’s what the night calls for. But Scotch, when ordered a certain way, can also work as a fairly reliable indicator of who’s the pompous douche in the room. The Rusty Nail provides the perfect solution: an appealing and modest drink that won’t raise any eyebrows and that balances the full-throated heft of Scotch with a unique honey-based sweetness.
No matter how basic the bar where your reunion is being held, you can always count on a bottle of Drambuie to be sitting on the shelf. Very likely the crust on its rim has been forming and thickening since you were in the ninth grade. Because of Drambuie’s omnipresence, the Rusty Nail can be a standby for every time you find yourself in a bar with little going for it besides a thick layer of dust. And the great thing about this very simple drink is that there is a perfectly balanced Rusty Nail for everyone: how much Drambuie to pour should be dictated solely by your own tolerance for sweetness; the recipe given here is just a starting point. And once you find the ratio that works for you, you will have discovered a drink that, unlike your high school sweetheart, will never grow old.
All of us who live in parts east (your authors included) and drop in to California for a few days share the same two thoughts: (1) these people are ridiculous, and (2) maybe I should join them. The issue goes a lot deeper than meaningless conversation and cosmetic surgery, which, while more common out west, are still so amply stocked in New Jersey that they pour across the tunnels and bridges of the Hudson River into Manhattan, and then spill over into Brooklyn, across Long Island, and straight down against the Gulf Stream to Miami. Rather, for the out-of-towner grimacing through a Hollywood nightclub, or observing a mile of San Franciscans lined up for a hug from an Indian guru, the mystery we can’t get out of our heads is the complete lack of shame on display. Everyone on the West Coast seems totally comfortable in the firm embrace of the absurd.
In contrast, the further east you call home, the more likely you are to find yourself embarrassed, all the time, about pretty much everything. Maybe it’s the relative proximity to England, which invented and continues to refine the art of embarrassment (as well as the presumably unrelated craft of making gin). Or maybe it’s a Darwinian phenomenon, where the obliviously sunny have always ventured westward, leaving a path of worry in their wake. Whatever the reason, Northeasterners are constantly blushing and looking askance: embarrassed by ourselves (deep down, who doesn’t crave a big hug from the Indian guru?) but more frequently, as a vicarious phenomenon, by what other people are doing. Call it a saintly tendency to take the world’s sins of foolishness onto our own shoulders.
The universal sense of embarrassment is rarely acknowledged outright in its Northeastern homeland. Rather, it’s proudly painted up as a kind of stoicism. So as an outsider walks all tough and steady into a Hollywood nightclub, the obvious drink order—that is to say, the one that furthers her conceit of being all tough and steady—is the whisky drink.
Meanwhile, the Californian visiting New York is no doubt buoyed by the lack of vision and opportunity she sees around her. The bloated work hours and copious pounds of pale excess flesh make her more grateful for her West Coast roots. And ordering her favorite, abusively sweetened vodka-tini reminds her that a return ticket to LAX is tucked away neatly in her oversized handbag. Soon enough she will be leaving the narrow minds and sallow complexions of the East Coast behind her. But then, in California success is always just around the corner, just out of reach—and in time this, too, grates on the soul. Perhaps our California friend is relieved to visit a place where, beyond Wall Street at least, there are few illusions about the difficulty of achieving lasting success.
It’s easy to play into all of these mind games when you are out of town and sitting at the bar—easy to order something that will reconfirm your sense of self. But here is our advice to all of our readers, from sea to sea and from Corpus Christi to Detroit: the next time you are in a bar on the opposite side of the country, check your prejudices and conceits at the door. Consider yourself lucky to be out of town for the night, set down in a world apart from your own, where you might be afforded some perspective on your life. This is the opportunity to order a drink that transcends all of the definitions that you impose on yourself, and the clichés that you sometimes allow to define the world around you. Here’s one for the whole damn country.
Americano
1½ OZ CAMPARI (4.5 CL)
1½ OZ SWEET VERMOUTH (4.5 CL)
CLUB SODA
Build in a highball glass filled with ice, and top up with club soda.
Garnish with orange slice.
Bittersweet and refreshing, this highball was invented in Milan, Italy, as a dedicated platform for Campari. First served in the late nineteenth century as the “Milano-Torino,” the drink became enormously popular with American booze-tourists during Prohibition. It may seem surprising that people who were willing to travel halfway across the world just for the pleasure of enjoying a drink out in the open would be content with a choice that is not much stiffer than a glass of wine. Perhaps these booze-desperate Americans’ knees had weakened, or perhaps they were just enamored of the sophistication of sipping such a delicious and quintessentially Mediterranean aperitif while seated at the street cafés of northern Italy. Campari and sweet vermouth are both Italian through and through, but Italians, perhaps bemused by the Americans’ fascination, redubbed the drink the “Americano.”
With a history like that, the Americano truly can be said to belong to everywhere and nowhere. Once you are accustomed to Campari’s bitterness, the Americano is easy to drink and, thanks to its low alcohol content, easier to order a second or third time. With ingredients that can be found in just about any bar, the Americano is rarely out of place.
DINNER SERVED IN WHITE PAPER BOXES
Chinese takeout: the ultimate comfort food. Perhaps it’s the explosion of sodium, the dense mass of noodles, or just that familiar block of dry white rice, but there is something profoundly satisfying about Chinese takeout. It’s a firm way of telling the world: (1) you don’t need to see anyone or go anywhere tonight, (2) you have nothing to prove as to your culinary prowess, and (3) you are not at risk of—or you laugh in the face for—high blood pressure.
As you dig into your noodles and enter the hunker-down zone of a splintered chopstick pleasure coma, you feel a nagging sensation coming from below. Nothing to be alarmed about; it isn’t coming from your stomach. It’s your underwear. They feel…swampy. Swampy like maybe you haven’t changed them in three days. And then it hits you: you haven’t done anything in three days. Your teeth are rotting off your gums. Your laundry pile is attracting flies. Even as your body begins to glow with pleasure from the buckets of monosodium glutamate that were dumped into your food, you are hit with a crisis of confidence. You are hit with the realization that when people bandy about that term “loser,” they’re describing—basically?—you.
Enter the cocktail, to restore some class and ambition to the evening. To give you a sense of purpose and perhaps even achievement. To save you from the mediocrity that has been chasing you down. If you are thinking to lecture the authors that solid cheap beer is the answer for takeout food, you may consider that we have already gotten that memo and worked through that six-pack. But only a cocktail can elevate a takeout meal into something classier, and for really a minimal amount of effort, considering that your meal has been prepared and brought to your door by someone else. Even more important, the right cocktail can stand up as well as anything to the spice and massive flavor range that frequently comes in those white paper boxes.
Aviation
2 OZ GIN (6 CL)
¾ OZ MARASCHINO LIQUEUR (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ LEMON JUICE (2.5 CL)
Shake and strain into a cocktail glass.
Garnish with lemon peel.
Let’s hope your meal arrives with aviation-like speed—but if it doesn’t, enjoying an Aviation is as good a way to while away the wait as it is a match for the meal. Bittersweet and, thanks to the inclusion of cherry pit in its fermenting process, strongly nutty, maraschino liqueur is very much its own thing. (If it were being unlawfully marketed toward minors, a catchier name for it might be “Cherry Almond Funk.”) It is a useful cocktail ingredient—and suitable for a drink paired with almost any kind of Asian food—because it will stand up beautifully to a wide range of flavors without overwhelming them.
The Aviation was traditionally prepared with a dash of crème de violette, which gave the drink a sky-blue color—hence the name. This violet liqueur disappeared from the shelves for many years and is only now coming back. If you do find some and decide to use it in the Aviation, use a bit less maraschino.
To make up for the side dish that you ordered and paid for but was not included in your delivery—and now the restaurant isn’t answering the goddamn phone, and you are really getting unreasonably upset about it, but you really wanted that one side dish—here’s an extra recipe to cool you down:
Japanese Cocktail
2 OZ COGNAC (6 CL)
¼ OZ ORGEAT OR ALMOND SYRUP (4–6 DASHES)
2 DASHES BITTERS (ANGOSTURA OR, IF AVAILABLE, FEE’S OLD FASHION)
2 LEMON PEELS
Stir with ice—one peel included—and strain into a cocktail glass.
Garnish with remaining peel.
While Japan has a worthy cocktail tradition all its own, the Japanese Cocktail is about as Japanese as that California roll that came with your order. First stirred up circa 1885 by a Yankee naval sailor, it has enough body and a hint of sweetness to stand up to whatever ethnic food you are willing to throw its way (aside from Japanese cuisine, ironically, which a Japanese Cocktail would overwhelm). Just as critically, once you get your hands on a bottle of orgeat or almond syrup, this is a simple cocktail to make. Which is ideal, given that you really are (cocktail or no cocktail) a pathetically lazy failure of a human being.
If the office is a jungle, the Irish pub around the corner is its nourishing, deadly Amazon River. There is no surer way to foster your personal ties with the monkeys you work with than sharing a casual after-work drink. Irish beer, Irish whiskey, and mediocre martinis of every color and creed are billed to the expense account, and the Thursday night good times roll. Come Friday morning, the light smiles and playful teasing continue on a quieter scale, hopping from cubicle to cubicle like exotic frogs smuggled back home in a suitcase.
Like the Amazon, though, the after-work pub is more insidiously powerful than it may first appear, and a stalking ground for every manner of low-lying reptile. Beneath the camaraderie, tensions persist, leading you to drink more aggressively than you should. Many a sturdy drinker has been pulled under by the strong current of excess in this trickiest of situations. Things best left unsaid are said too loudly; things best left undone are done with vigor (hopefully with at least an effort at concealment, in the bathroom). If the night goes the way those nights often go, those Friday morning pleasantries can mask more than a little residual shame.
That Irish pub around the corner is filled to the rafters with howlers and crocodiles, leaping and calling with reckless gossip and loose talk; watchful, predatory, and ready to pounce. And with every round, the chaos thickens, darkens, encroaches. Phantom currents pull harder. Fatality and opportunity each become breathtakingly casual possibilities.
To stay alive, we recommend frequent trips to the bathroom (alone). Check out your reflection, take stock of the situation, restore your composure. It’s a long night ahead, and come morning, you’ll have a job to hang on to.
Irish Aspirin
1 SHOT IRISH WHISKEY
1 SHOT ORANGE JUICE
Consume in rapid succession.
Mixed drinks have never been the Irish pub’s strength. In fact, it’s almost suspect when an Irish pub does serve anything decent other than a good pint of beer. So we recommend you play it safe as nighttime descends on the river, and stick with a Guinness. When the crowd starts ordering shots—and there will be shots—Irish Aspirin is a safe and tasty way to keep afloat, providing ample nutrition and hydration to prevent a call-in-sick hangover tomorrow morning. Good Irish whiskey followed by orange juice: it may not be as nutritious as that Guinness you are nursing, but it’s damn near close.
If, but only if, you are feeling adventurous, ask the barkeep if he has any pickle juice nearby. A shot of Irish whiskey followed by a shot of pickle (rather than orange) juice is called a pickleback. If the barkeep gives you a hearty smile, it’s because he recognizes in you a kindred spirit: the pungent, invigorating pickleback is what keeps certain New York bartenders on their feet night after night.
BOOZE AND PILLS ON THE RED-EYE
Dear reader, if you are a first-class passenger, this episode is not written for you. We offer you our congratulations. Now, enjoy your soft, pointless life of indolence and turn the page.
For the rest of you:
Life is full of indignities large and small, if you are only willing to look for them. Example: your fellow readers, the ones who just turned to the next page. You have seen these people before. They were the ones who whisked by you on a separate line at check-in. You saw them as you were prodded cattlelike onto the plane; they were already nestled into overstuffed leather seats with legroom so excessive it could serve no purpose other than to take space away from the rest of the passenger cabin. Peering down with contempt at their trash mags, you think, no Wall Street Journal for them—already made their millions, these ones have. (Of course, the same trash mags are crumpled in your carry-on, but never mind. You didn’t spend money on your reading material. You stole it from the dentist’s office.) You shuffle by an entire row of first class dedicated to a set of four-year-old twins and their nanny. No higher taxes for the rich, you muse. We mustn’t choke them.
Past the striving bourgeoisie of the business class (poor fools, tossing away their hard-earned thousands for a mere yard of seat width), you are now surrounded by the teeming squalor of economy or, as the British used to unflinchingly call it, the “lower class.” Welcome home. Wait! you long to cry out. There’s been a terrible mistake! I’m not supposed to be here! Much like a sullen teenager who is convinced that she was switched at birth, you are constitutionally incapable of coming to terms with the mediocrity that surrounds you at the back of the plane. The humiliation burns as if for the first time, as if you had never flown anything but first class. Strapped into your seat at an acute angle—ninety-degree seating apparently went the way of the meal cart—the next so-many hours of your life stretch before you as separate, quantifiable units of agony.
Fortunately, this is a redemption story.
It’s a passion play: The Passion of the Pills.
As you contort every which way to pull your shoes off your feet, you thank the Lord for the minor injury that you suffered six months ago. More specifically, you thank the Lord for the prescription painkillers the injury earned you. Your orange-bottled savior will deliver you to your destination like a babe-in-arms and will fly in on the wings of a room-temp alcoholic beverage, served by a surly flight attendant who was recently demoted from first class for her willful lack of charm.
Madras
2 OZ VODKA (6 CL)
1½ OZ CRANBERRY COCKTAIL (4.5 CL)
1½ OZ ORANGE JUICE (4.5 CL)
Serve curtly, in plastic cup on ice.
Made with ingredients stocked on even the sparest of beverage carts, the Madras is well-suited for air travel. Vodka, with its relatively few congeners (the complex organic molecules that often lead to the more punishing hangovers), is a good starting point. A good three ounces of vitamin-rich, hydrating fruit juice will also help ensure that when the plane touches ground, you will awake feeling refreshed and relatively untrammeled by the effects of airline humiliation and substance withdrawal.
Your friend is twenty minutes late. Always twenty minutes late. Even when you try to take the twenty minutes into account and show up late yourself, your friend receives some sort of psychic signal to that effect, ups the ante, and shows up twenty minutes after that. As you sit at the bar, staring dumbly into your drink and wishing you were friends with better quality people, someone walks in and sits at the empty seat next to you (you? why you?). You feel his presence before you turn your head to make the positive ID. It is not your friend. It’s _______?! In this bar? This is where he comes to drink?
Your eyes dart to the window for a quick paparazzi check. None. It’s just you and this celebrity and whatever it is that he’s radiating—and you want it. You want to be closer to it, to bathe in it, and you suddenly realize that you are every bit as pathetic as anyone you have ever judged for being star-obsessed. You won’t succumb, though, will you? He probably comes here to unwind precisely because this bar draws customers who are too cool to make a fuss. Acknowledging him now would be like surrendering your cool credentials. You would never be welcome back here again. This is a test: a challenge to your self-respect and nonchalance.
But who doesn’t acknowledge the person sitting next to them at a bar? It’s rude. People come to bars for collegiality. In your nervousness, you gulp down the last of your drink and now find yourself sitting at a bar with an empty glass—and no excuse to be there except to violate a celebrity’s privacy.
Fortunately, your next drink order, which you need to put in immediately, will provide an icebreaker. Your mother has always complimented (backhandedly) your voice as your “best asset” here is the chance for it to be noticed. Perhaps he’s just as self-conscious and unsure of what to do as you are. Maybe you should even buy a round? But then wouldn’t that be strange, given the distribution of wealth and power here? Surely he would think you were hitting on him. Maybe you should hit on him…What should you order? What is he drinking? Why is he here anyway? Why isn’t he acknowledging you? Why aren’t you good at this? What do people who live in Los Angeles do? Maybe you should move to the West Coast…
Minutes pass, and your psychosis-induced paralysis continues. The window during which you can casually say hello to someone who sits next to you is rapidly closing, and your late friend’s twenty-minute mark is fast approaching, and who knows how your friend will react if you haven’t already set some sort of natural rapport with the celebrity? Just as you get the bartender’s attention to place your order, your famous neighbor downs the rest of his drink, gets up, and leaves, taking his radiance and any hope you harbored of fame and fortune with him. Damn.
Mary Pickford
2 OZ WHITE RUM (6 CL)
1 OZ PINEAPPLE JUICE (3 CL)
½ OZ MARASCHINO LIQUEUR (1.5 CL)
1 DASH GRENADINE
Shake and serve in a cocktail glass.
A fitting accompaniment to your ruminations about what could have been if only, the Mary Pickford is strongly reminiscent of Hollywood’s Golden Age, when naughty jaunts to Havana for the fabulously decadent resulted in a bevy of pineapple drinks, many named for the megastars of the silent film era. And Ms. Pickford was as big a star as there was; for critical claim and popular adulation, only Charlie Chaplin could claim to be her equal. While the actress’s popularity faded when sound was introduced into films, the cocktail named in her honor has aged beautifully. Agricole-style rums are perfectly suited for the Mary Pickford, but any white rum of decent quality will do.
We all want to make the world a better place. A passion for altruism can run especially hot after a few drinks, and it seems somehow wasteful to let the public-spirited urge pass unheeded. But what can you do while intoxicated in order to be a force for good? Working in soup kitchens is a drag when you’re drunk—everyone else’s liquor breath starts putting negative ideas in your head. So if you really want to be of use, we recommend focusing your attentions on energizing the economy. Stimulus plans and tax cuts come and go, but consumption is what the modern world is built on, it’s what will power the future, and it’s damn entertaining after knocking back a few drinks. The half-sodden conversations and steamy dark corners that frequently accompany boozing will inevitably lead to regrettable indiscretions. But only your credit card will know the damage you have wrought when you dedicate your drinking hours to shopping rather than socializing. And it’s equally engaging whether you are clicking contentedly away at your home computer or whether you are carousing recklessly down the avenue from bar to boutique.
Best of all, waking up next to that new pair of shoes is sure to bring a smile to your face—unlike waking up next to Mr. or Ms. Who-the-hell-is-this-and-why-is-she-drooling-on-my-pillowcase?
Vodka Martini
2¾ OZ VODKA (8 CL)
¾ OZ DRY VERMOUTH (2.5 CL)
Stir and strain into a cocktail glass.
Garnish with lemon twist or spear of olives.
The ultimate symbol of conspicuous consumption, the vodka martini became the “it” drink during the 1980s and ’90s, and though it lacks some of the flavor sophistication that has since become more popular, it’s undeniably enjoyable. Potato vodkas from Russia or Poland (our Cold War rivals who, when we were fawning for their vodka, were similarly covetous of our denim) tend to have enough body to take center stage, particularly when supported by a more-than-nominal measure of vermouth.
If you are worried about the damage you may end up doing to your credit card after nearly three ounces of vodka, or if you feel cheated because we already discussed the martini earlier in the book, here is a worthy alternative:
Black Russian
1¾ OZ VODKA (5.5 CL)
¾ OZ COFFEE LIQUEUR (2.5 CL)
Serve in an old-fashioned glass over ice.
Invented in Western Europe in the thick of the Cold War, the Black Russian must have had an intriguingly menacing ring to it when it first hit the scene. It couldn’t be easier to prepare, and it’s definitely tasty. If you are shopping online, the coffee flavoring will allow you to feel almost virtuous, as if you were doing real work at your computer instead of tossing away your money on the trappings of capitalism. Stalin, surely, will turn in his grave.
ENDLESS ARGUMENTS OVER EASILY ASCERTAINABLE FACTS
Here is a pastime that really has been killed by technology. Woe to the days when three or four friends could work through a case of beer arguing about the Orioles’ roster in 1997. Was Magical Mystery Tour released as an EP or an LP in the United States in ’67 or ’68, and what new singles were added to the B-side? Until the turn of the twenty-first century, the only way to know for sure was to work through an entire bottle of Jim Beam and yell about it. Now some wiseass spoils the fun by whipping out his iPhone and pulling up a Wikipedia entry: late ’67, LP. Even prolonged disputes carried out on turf closer to home are now extinct. Is your ex-boyfriend dating the heiress to the Tootsie Roll fortune, or isn’t he? Answer, from Facebook: yes, but she looks like a real sourpuss, and possibly virginal.
We will not join the rest of the world in celebrating this information revolution. Why get to the right answer by consulting a credible authority when you can stick stubbornly to the wrong one and punch a friend in the face for good measure? Dear reader, this book is a tribute to the joy of sharing quality time with the people you care about over the perfect drink—even if that means belittling them. So for old time’s sake, pretend for the moment that your flight is ready for takeoff. Power down your handheld devices, lift up your trays, and unplug your laptops. Cut off all access points to the factual record. The only way to test the strength of your friendships is to nearly ruin them by bickering as if there is no right answer: as if you live in a vacuum and the only path toward redemption involves repeating the same points over and over at progressively louder decibels, insulting each other’s intelligence, and rejecting the possibility of your own fallibility.
Old-Fashioned
2 OZ BOURBON OR RYE WHISKEY (6 CL)
½ OZ SIMPLE SYRUP (1.5 CL)
LONG DASH ANGOSTURA BITTERS
LONG DASH ORANGE BITTERS (OPTIONAL)
LEMON PEEL
ORANGE PEEL
Stir and strain into an old-fashioned glass over fresh ice, or neat.
Twist both peels over glass.
Or is it…
Old-Fashioned
2 OZ BOURBON OR RYE WHISKEY (6 CL)
1 TEASPOON OR CUBE SUGAR
3–5 LONG DASHES ANGOSTURA BITTERS
1 THICK ORANGE WHEEL
Muddle sugar, bitters, and orange. Then add bourbon or rye whiskey.
Stir and pour unstrained into an old-fashioned glass over fresh ice.
Garnish with cured cherry.
Every bit as traditional as its name suggests, the old-fashioned deserves massive amounts of respect for its deep American roots and long-standing popularity. The Postal Service owes it a stamp. It should be designated as a national park. Rich in flavor and appealingly sweet, the old-fashioned is a monument unto itself.
Equally monumental are the debates about how the old-fashioned should be prepared. The use of rye or bourbon is up for debate; rye is historically accurate but bourbon works fantastically and has become, over the years, far more common. And that’s just the beginning. Muddled fruit or no garnish at all? Sugar or simple syrup? How much bitters, and what kind? Our feeling is that the answer depends partly on the depth and sweetness of the spirit you use (a sweeter bourbon will take more bitters) and largely on your own preference. But if you are looking for a debate that the authorities at Wikipedia and Google can’t settle in thirty seconds, you couldn’t do much better than this.
So sip, buzz, and gripe. The old-fashioned, like pointless brawls and whiskey itself, is an American tradition.
After a nice solid bender—one that endures for, say, a long weekend, or a decade—a mild hangover can become an interesting perch from which to view the world. By day, everyone you know, including yourself, becomes distasteful to you. Not just run-of-the-mill unlikable but really thought-provokingly hateful. You develop a mutual antipathy even—and perhaps especially—toward insentient objects like door frames and bathroom fixtures, and the sun’s slow path across the sky brings you as much joy as would a fingernail dragged down a chalkboard. Out of all this misery, an original worldview, the germ for a personal manifesto, Marxlike in breadth, emerges.
Liquor may be hurting your body, but your body is definitely fighting back. A low-level groan of desperation and loathing simmers as a by-product of your system’s proletarian rebellion against the decadent, urban elite located wherever it is in your cranium that your so-called judgment resides. However irritably, though, you do manage to function. Trains continue to run. The conduct of ordinary business proceeds fitfully, and by night, with the first drink, the military junta reestablishes authority. Aches and grudges melt away, as opiates are distributed equitably among the restless masses. Alas, the rebellion is silenced but unquenched. In the morning, discord finds its voice anew.
One night, the military junta uses too much force, so to speak: you really drink far too much. As a consequence, morning finds your temples throbbing and your inner ear reeling. You understand, unmistakably, that this time is different. The proletarians are raging, shaking the very gates of government. As you stagger to the bathroom for a particularly athletic, gruesome struggle with the porcelain, you realize that today there will be no conducting of ordinary business. Electricity, water, mass transit, the Postal Service, everything will be brought to a standstill as the angry masses take to the streets. It won’t be pretty.
Trying to assert some order on a system that has vaulted itself into rebellion, you dry-swallow a handful of painkillers, but they bounce ineffectually off the barricades like rubber bullets. Parliament dissolves in a haze of finger-pointing and cowardice. The military junta stands by, coolly prepared for all contingencies.
Lying flat on your back on the bathroom tile, sweating, in deep pain, you are blessed with an improbable moment of clarity: there will be no alcohol this evening, or tomorrow, or the next day. This bender has gone far enough. System-wide reforms are needed, and will be implemented, by the governing elite. You will be staying in, curled up, reading a book—any book but How to Booze—watching a movie, cold turkey. The military junta will be disbanded until further notice. For now, your one goal is to survive until evening without sawing off your head on account of a desperate impulse to distance yourself from the pain vortex. Above all, though, the immediate crisis—how, exactly, are you planning to heave yourself off the bathroom floor and ensure you don’t end up here again in fifteen minutes?—must be resolved. And so the military junta must be deployed, one last time.
Corpse Reviver No. 2
¾ OZ DRY GIN (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ LILLET BLANC (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ LEMON JUICE (2.5 CL)
¾ OZ TRIPLE SEC (2.5 CL)
1 DASH ABSINTHE
Shake and strain into a cocktail glass.
Garnish with lemon peel.
There are two hangover remedies that are proven to work: hydration, because your body needs it; and alcohol, because your body wants it. Various cocktails known as “Eye Openers” or “Revivers” served as big-time hangover cures in the cocktail heyday of the nineteenth century. The Corpse Reviver No. 2, in particular, is making a huge comeback. It’s one of the oldest members of the sour family, revolutionary in its day for the use of citrus and sweet liqueur. Thanks to its balance and essentially modern approach to ingredients, the Corpse Reviver No. 2 has stood the test of time better than many other drinks of its era and purpose. It’s both light and complex, and for a flavorful, really interesting drink, it goes down as easily as anything we can think of. Most important, we speak from painfully personal experience when we declare this drink worthy of its name.
There are no standing invitations to heaven. You have to earn your way onto the VIP list, and even then your name will only be penciled in. Lightly. Any subsequent slipup and it’s as if you were never favored at all. Is dedicating your life to greasing your way upstairs a wise allocation of your earthly resources? Many people think so. Others live for the moment and to hell with the consequences, which sounds romantic, but has the carpe diem crowd honestly considered the details of fiery punishment? Eternal damnation sounds really, really unpleasant if you bother to think about it.
If you are undecided, you need to spend some quality time with the sacred texts of Western civilization. It’s time to truly consider the risks and rewards on each side of the equation. Take a week off from all earthbound obligations, and check into a Motel 6. Bring a bottle of disinfectant, and a cocktail shaker.
Left side of the bed, nightstand, second drawer down: (1) the Yellow Pages, heavily creased at “E,” as in “Escort,” and (2) an uncut copy of the Gideon Bible. Douse the entire drawer with disinfectant, gingerly reach out for the Lord’s word, leave the Yellow Pages where they are (this is not the week for that), and set to work.
The Bible is rambling and frequently off-topic. If you approach it with cover-to-cover ambition, and you are drinking at the same time, you may not make it past the juicy bit about Lot’s naughty daughters before reaching for the Yellow Pages. Better to take a more focused approach. See the following passages for moral instruction:
These are not easy rules to follow. Bestiality, dirty fighting, incest: is it worth giving it all up for a shot at eternal paradise? The New Testament has much to say about the alternatives; if the apostles are to be taken at their word, Jesus spoke about hell more than anything else.
As you weigh your options, you realize that you have lived your week at the Motel 6 like a monk in the ancient tradition: flipping through ancient texts, living off gruel, and drinking yourself into a coma. You have had a pretty good time at it, and except for the forty-five dollars you spent watching three minutes of pay-per-view adult programming, you haven’t sinned once. Maybe getting into heaven isn’t so hard after all. Now if only you can manage to check out of here without opening up those Yellow Pages…
Angel Face
1 OZ RYE WHISKEY (OR, MORE TRADITIONALLY, DRY GIN) (3 CL)
1 OZ CALVADOS OR APPLE BRANDY (3 CL)
1 OZ APRICOT BRANDY (3 CL)
Shake and strain into a cocktail glass.
Perhaps things would have turned out better if Eve hadn’t served up the forbidden fruit. But the world of cocktails would be significantly less interesting without the contributions of apple brandy. Here is an “equal parts” cocktail with two fruit-based brandies. The formula renders a fruit-forward but surprisingly dry cocktail well-named and nicely balanced for accompanying a good old-fashioned Bible study. The Angel Face is traditionally made with gin, but Bible Belt rye is at least as blessed a choice.
BRANDY
Brandy is distilled from fermented fruit juice—any fruit juice. Given those wide parameters, it’s hardly surprising that brandy covers a massive range in flavor and quality. For all that, most drink recipes that include brandy call specifically for either cognac or apple brandy.
Cognac is distilled from wine grown in a particular region of southwestern France. Cognac is always oak-aged for at least two years before bottling, but for cocktails we recommend V.S.O.P. (Vain and Superior Old Prick),* which is aged for at least four years. The cheaper stuff is V.S.,† the very fancy kind is X.O.
Apple brandy is a fantastic ingredient that comes up somewhat less frequently. Calvados is a French style of apple brandy from the Normandy region and follows quality grades similar to those for cognac. Laird’s, an American brand, also makes a terrific apple brandy (for more, see part 2).
COCKTAILS WITH PEOPLE YOU DESPISE
Life is too short to spend with the people you don’t like. But life is also too short for folding laundry, anxiety, sobriety, urban sprawl, entry-level jobs, fighting parking tickets, almost everything on television, electric stovetops, flight delays, fast food, bad wine, safe sex, radio advertisements, weak coffee, skim milk, herbal remedies, private school tuition, staying indoors on perfect days, and career development. Life is too short for about 93 percent of what we do with our waking hours, but we do it all anyway. Why? Because we need to get places, earn money, avoid infection. Because we are afraid of living our lives more fully. Because we need something to regret when we are dying.
If it’s regret you’re looking for, regret is what you will find at pretentious cocktail parties, tedious professional events, and get-togethers with the rotten side of your family. Drinking with people you can’t stand doesn’t just waste time: it’s a waste of calories, your liver, and good alcohol. But, like commuting and submitting to infuriating airport security procedures, it must be done.
A good way to think about drinking with the despicable is that it’s preferable to the alternative of not drinking with them. Like almost everything in life, this is an activity that goes down easier with a cocktail. There is also a definite bright side: with your inhibitions lowered, you may find yourself saying the unsayable, and, in the process, burning bridges you’ve always wanted to burn. Which is great, because it means you may never find yourself wasting an evening with these people again.
Pink Gin
3 OZ MEDIUM-BODIED GIN (9 CL)
5 LONG DASHES ANGOSTURA BITTERS
Shake and strain into a cocktail glass.
What is it about gin? What is it about bitters? Mixed with more hospitable ingredients, each of them can be the life of the party—in fact, they may even be the two most important products on the shelf. But when gin or bitters are tried on their own, each can come across as, well—aloof. A bit difficult. Something analogous to how you are probably coming across tonight. Just ordering a glass of gin and bitters sends a message to your drinking companions, and it isn’t an overly friendly one.
But don’t be fooled: something exciting happens when these two charismatic but intimidating ingredients interact. The pink gin is substantially tougher than its name reveals—Angostura was used as a daily ration in the British Royal Navy to stave off malnutrition, and gin was the incentive for the crew to take it—but you will likely acquire a taste for it over time. Its subtle and very complex flavors lend themselves to sipping it slowly during an agonizing conversation—but when the time is right for an escape, it’s easy to bottom-up before you cut loose from the crowd.
We recommend that you use Plymouth gin if possible. It’s what the Royal Navy used—in fact they even had their own stuff made to order, with about 10 percent more alcohol content than the standard variety—and its medium body is well-suited for this cocktail.
A child is born under a night sky luminous with stars, and is visited by three well-wishing kings. A tribe of Hebrews gets ornery with the local Greek imperialists. Miracles of lights and holy spirits abound.
A couple of thousand years pass, and you are drinking hard out of a plastic cup on your boss’s living room couch. The human resources director has his hand on the small of your boss’s back, who keeps glancing up, curiously delighted, at a piece of mistletoe stapled to her kitchen ceiling. The nervous paralegal—the one who sings lullabies when he thinks he’s alone in the hallway, has a penchant for trench coats, and (it is rumored darkly at the watercooler) just last month obtained a permit to carry a concealed weapon—is stealing ornaments from the Christmas tree. The office secretary is retching in the bathroom, summoning all of her willpower to aim into the porcelain without any side splatter, while two interns agitate impatiently nearby with an eight ball one of them won in a heated game of dreidel. You are considering cooking up some mischief yourself, ideally with this certain somebody you recognize from the elevator but whom you just met for the first time right now—currently wearing a surprisingly fetching reindeer sweater and sitting right next to you on the couch.
Question: how did it come to this? Admittedly, short days and long nights can bring a person down. Drinking heavily and going wild is a perfectly reasonable remedy to seasonal affective disorder. But why do baby Jesus and Judas Maccabaeus have to be dragged into it? Why did your Secret Santa gift you a super-sized sex toy and a pack of D batteries? Strippers in red felt? Christmas-themed porn? For the love of God, why?
Answer: Because we want it that way. This is a post-precious world. Holiday schlock is cringe-worthy, but we can’t live without the Sinatra tunes, the stop-motion animated specials, and the lit-up trees, so we embrace the traditions but can’t help winking all the way through. Hence the deliciously tawdry holiday party. Hence Yuletide porn.
Holiday parties remind us of our innocence, of Santa and babies in a snowy desert pasture, and of terrific music that we can’t stop replaying year after year but that the world is now too jaded to compose anew. Also, they remind us of Company Workplace Policy Memo 4, which, strictly interpreted, forbids the sexual advance you are about to make on your new friend in the reindeer sweater.
Presbyterian
2 OZ BLENDED OR STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY (6 CL)
2 OZ CLUB SODA (6 CL)
2 OZ GINGER ALE (6 CL)
Build in a highball glass over ice.
Stir until well mixed and garnish with lemon wedge.
The Presbyterian is an understated but festive highball that can be cobbled together from the sparest of cupboards. Classic and straightforward, over the years the Presbyterian somehow got lost—strange, because it’s nothing more complex than a whiskey and ginger ale, cut with club soda to dampen down the sweetness. Ginger and rye are both seasonal flavors, rendering the Presbyterian a suitable candidate for a holiday party. It isn’t hard to find a home bar stocked with Seagram’s whisky, ginger ale, and soda, and it goes just fine in a plastic cup. But if you are interested in classing the Presbyterian up—and this drink is up to the task—we recommend a straight rye or a quality North American blend, mixed with as fine a ginger ale as you can get your hands on. As with many a drink, the Presbyterian will hold up just fine to a dash of Angostura bitters.
Doing New Year’s Right
Major cities are designed to ensure that your New Year’s celebrations will end in shambles. Metropolitan infrastructure can deal (barely) with everyone commuting at the same time, but it is totally overwhelmed when everyone decides to party at the same time. Too many idiots take to the streets. Too much vomit finds its way onto the backseats of taxicabs. At bars and clubs you are just a face among thousands, doomed to celebrate the big moment in anonymity while your friend fights her way back from the restroom. Private celebrations take place in overheated apartments where there aren’t enough places to sit and no one knows what to do at ten minutes before the midnight hour besides flip on the TV and watch a fading pop star trying to revive his career with a three-minute performance in Times Square.
Then the ball drops. Everyone is relieved that the entire metropolis didn’t just burst into flames due to an attack from Lord-Knows-Who. Then what? Turn off the TV and keep standing around in your socks with sweat pouring off your collar? As you fight for one of those vomit-splattered taxis on the curb, you vow that next year you will stay home and watch When Harry Met Sally—by yourself or with a loved one, it hardly matters.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can enjoy New Year’s. But you need to get out of town to do it. You and fourteen friends and friends of friends need to get far, far away, down a dirt road, into a cabin with only three beds. No TV, or one with very poor reception. A decent music system. A fireplace and a ton of chopped wood. A guitar, if you’re feeling hippy-dippyish. Ten loaves of Wonder bread and a bottle of everything, plus fifteen bottles of champagne. And a short wave radio, so you can confirm that the world isn’t coming to an end before you head back to town.
Imperial Grand
1 OZ COGNAC (3 CL)
1 OZ GRAND MARNIER (3 CL)
1 OZ BLOOD-ORANGE JUICE (3 CL)
1 DASH ORANGE BITTERS
BRUT CHAMPAGNE
Shake ingredients and strain into a flute or coupe.
Top up with Brut champagne.
An original by Mr. Altier, the Imperial Grand is easy to build. On a cabin-wild night like New Year’s Eve, you are best off mixing a massive tank of equal parts cognac, Grand Marnier, and juice in the afternoon—or in the morning, or at whatever other time of day you might find yourself less than completely soused. Come party time, you will have little to do but dash some bitters into your flute, shake up your equal-parts concoction, and top up with champagne. It’s a routine you should be able to manage until that winter blood-orange sun rises over the snowy backwoods horizon.
If we may say so ourselves, this is a celebratory, fairly sophisticated champagne cocktail—perfect for New Year’s, in or out of town. There’s nothing better than blood-orange juice for all-night partying sustenance, the bubbly speaks for itself, and the Grand Marnier’s barrel-aged body provides a wonderful base for the champagne to hold onto.
The cocktail has a higher calling. Its name is Friday night, and its purpose is to transform you from a beast of burden into a human being.
For many centuries, it was fashionable to make bone-crushingly dour pronouncements about the human condition. Example: “Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointe,” Sir William Temple (1628–1699). Sounds like a party.
Jean-Paul Sartre was always full of jolly pep talk. “Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.”
No one puts that kind of statement up on their social networking site as a daily proclamation. People might gripe about being tired, or that they missed the most recent episode of their favorite reality show. But in this day and age each of us is a brand unto ourselves, and unless you are working toward a doctorate in philosophy, existential whining is poor branding strategy. It’s a shame—we would gladly friend Sartre to get updates like “Hell is other people.” Short and sweet; very tweetable. A welcome change from “Just back from g-doc—only a heat rash! OMG I was freaked for a minute there!”
So unless you are old, French, and glued to a café seat in Paris, your ability to call life like it is has been muted. When to channel your inner Sartre? Friday nights are no time to brood. But as the stress lifts off your back, your body exhales, and you mentally prepare for a few days of leisure, there is a moment in there—a little pause in the cycle—when you are forced to acknowledge the futility of the whole bit, work and play alike. Life’s absurdity stares you down like a barbed joke.
The next moment, the storm passes and it is time to unwind. Pointless as life is, there’s nothing for it but to drink, say foolish things, and engage in regrettable conduct—and that’s what weekends are for. The Great Friday Night Unwinding may involve you kicking up your feet at home. Or it may entail a brutally expensive carousal on the town. However you spend those first hours of freedom, a cocktail may not be absolutely necessary, but it definitely helps.
So here is the Tootsie Pop question: how many rounds will it take to unwind you? Answer: try how many sips. The beauty of a Friday night cocktail is that at the moment you even begin contemplating it, you’re halfway there. By the time an inch is drawn from your glass, you have already been transported and transformed. What you do after that is very much your business, your weekend, and your life.
Sazerac
2 OZ RYE WHISKEY OR COGNAC (6 CL)
½ OZ RICH SIMPLE SYRUP OR SUGAR CUBE (1.5 CL)
5 DASHES PEYCHAUD’S BITTERS
1 TEASPOON ABSINTHE
LEMON PEEL
Rinse absinthe inside of chilled a old-fashioned glass thoroughly to create an even layer, and discard excess.
In a mixing glass, muddle sugar and a few drops of water (if you aren’t using simple syrup), then add remaining ingredients and ice and strain into the old-fashioned glass.
Twist lemon peel over glass and discard.
The quintessential cocktail of the Big Easy, the Sazerac is a perfect facilitator for letting go of your troubles. The way rye’s spicy notes interplay with the herbal and floral qualities of the absinthe and Peychaud’s is what cocktailing is all about—it’s nothing less than scintillating. The Sazerac can best be understood as Louisiana’s funky answer to the old-fashioned, relying on Peychaud’s rather than Angostura. Invented around 1830 by local apothecary Antoine Peychaud to promote his proprietary bitters, the Sazerac has been closely associated with New Orleans’s drinking culture ever since. As with the old-fashioned, every barkeep makes the Sazerac his or her own way and there is endless room for experimentation. For instance, replacing rye with cognac is a historically accurate but unconventional modification that is worth trying. This is one of the rare drinks to be served in an old-fashioned glass without any ice: that’s why it’s important (as it really is for any drink that’s served up) that the glass be prechilled.
After a long day, the Sazerac can be deeply rewarding. And if a drink forever cherished in the Big Easy won’t unwind you, no drink will.
BITTERS, PART 3
Peychaud’s is an exciting product that hails from New Orleans and tends to do fabulous things for any cocktail calling for rye, Scotch, or cognac. Like Angostura, Peychaud’s contains gentian root but it is considerably more floral and less intensely bitter. Its largest claim to fame is what it does to the iconic Sazerac—a cocktail that was for many years crippled by the unavailability of absinthe but is now gaining a near fanatical fan base with absinthe’s return to the market. Peychaud’s can usually be used instead of Angostura, but make no mistake: it will render a drastically different cocktail.
Like Angostura, Peychaud’s is frequently worth experimenting with even when not called for in a recipe. Try it in a Bitter French—a variation of the French 75 sometimes served at Death & Co. in New York.