Re-Embracing the Cocktail

I've been on record as saying that I generally disapprove of the cocktail as anything but a concept. If I'm going to drink, I generally go for spirits that haven't been augmented beyond recognition. Maybe it's just because I'm an inveterate lush, but nothing agrees with me more these days than straight liquor. I'll admit that most of my casual drinking habits still surround whatever comes out of the bottle unmolested by fruit juice, specialty liqueur or other esoteric ingredients. That doesn't mean I'm ready to take up the mantel of the purist. I've come to appreciate the cocktail as a novelty, something one drinks on special occasions or on nights dedicated to such tarted-up concoctions. I still have rules, though.

Rule #1: A Cocktail is Not a Drink

This rule requires some qualification. Yes, a cocktail is a drink in the same sense that a milkshake, a slurpee or a float is a drink, in that it is at least semi-liquid and consumed orally. A cocktail is not, however, the same as a glass of bourbon or a shot of vodka. A cocktail is an invention of flavor that only makes a quick stop at intoxication the way families driving cross-country make stops at the World's Biggest Ball of Yarn. Drunkenness is incidental to cocktails, but it's not the point. If you drink cocktails with the purpose of getting drunk you'll spend more evenings than any respectable adult ought to hunched over a porcelain bowl cursing whatever entity you believe created you. Cocktails are for fun and for experiencing unusual flavors. For instance, a cocktail may be designed to mimic the flavor of a key lime pie, right down to the crust. This is acceptable, if only because it's a pleasant distraction from the harsh, honest flavor of straight liquor.

 

Rule #2: If You Don't Like It Outside a Cocktail, Don't Drink It In a Cocktail

I despise cinnamon-flavored alcohol. So, I don't care if you can make me a drink that tastes just like a freshly baked apple pie, it still involves cinnamon-flavored alcohol so I'm avoiding it. This is just common sense. It doesn't matter how intriguing a combination of cocktail ingredients are. You wouldn't eat a green bean casserole if you don't like green beans on their own, so don't drink some gin-based cocktail if you don't like gin just because it's supposed to taste like a garden salad.

 

Rule #3: Cocktails Don't Pair Well With Anything

Cocktails are necessarily designed to have strong, complex flavors. Nothing you can chew is going to complement your cleverly-named cocktail. Alcohol pairing with food should be reserved for beer, wine or straight liquor because none of those things are attempting to dominate your palate. Whatever you eat with your cocktail, either the food or the drink is going to dominate the combined flavor. Let the cocktail shine for what it is. Some bartender carefully constructed this drink to have a very specific flavor. You're not doing it any favors by asking it to mingle with something arbitrarily.

 

Rule #4: Don't Order Something You Can Mix at Home

I've come to the conclusion that no bartender can make me a martini better than the one I make for myself and nobody is going to make a White Russian with the exact proportions that please me. If you must drink a cocktail, go to a bar that specializes in them and order something you'll never have the desire to mix at home. These drinks usually have odd, obscure names and use esoteric ingredients like a specific kind of bitters or a variety of vermouth only made by one lonely monk in Switzerland. Give that monk his moment in the sun and treat yourself to a flavor you'll likely never capture on your own.

Shot Roulette

I'm more likely to turn my nose up to a drinking game than indulge in it. Most drinking games are at best an excuse to do something you were going to do anyway and at worst an ill-advised collection of bad ideas that will almost certainly result in porcelain worship. Really, the majority of drinking games are just logical conclusions of bad drinking behavior. Take beer pong, for instance. It's a game that takes the inherently vile experience of chugging cheap pilsner and makes it somehow more disgusting by adding a dirty table, a wet ping pong ball and the hands of drunk strangers. People ought not to drink cheap pilsner anyway, but beer pong just makes it worse. Movie drinking games are only marginally less stupid. Sure, taking a shot every time Character X says Catchphrase Y will get you drunk pretty fast, but this seems like a classic case of the whole diminishing the parts. This game both distracts from the movie by reducing it to the search for a single component of it, as well as distracting from the (potential) pleasures of drinking. If you want to do shots, then just do shots. The game seems both unnecessary and less fun than it ought to be. But there is one drinking game I'm willing to endorse: Shot Roulette.

So, the biggest problem with Shot Roulette is that it requires some extra equipment and a fairly extensive bar to do it right. Perhaps this is why I approve of the game. It's not some stupid, on-the-fly drinking game that college kids play because they don't know better, it's a drinking game for people who have the will and know-how to actually enjoy alcohol. Here's what you'll need:

  • A roulette wheel
  • 18 shot glasses
  • A bar with at least 18 different kinds of spirit
  • At least three participants
  • 18 pieces of Scrap paper

On your 18 pieces of scrap paper, write two of the numbers on the roulette wheel of the same color. Assign each participant an equal number of glasses then set them loose on the bar. You can set extra rules, such as "red numbered glasses are for liqueur, black numbered glasses are for liquor", but that's up to your discretion as host. The aim here is to get a wide variety of different shots on the board. Play consists of going around the room in whatever order you choose, giving each player one spin per turn. Wherever the roulette ball lands, that's the numbered glass the player has to drink.

Naturally, as the game progresses it'll be more likely that the ball lands on the number of an empty glass. You could just let that count as a free pass, but you could just round the number up to the nearest full glass if you're feeling particularly thirsty or malicious. As for the 0 or 00, I recommend calling one or both a "spinners choice", allowing the player to pour a shot of his or her choosing from the bar.

Shot Roulette isn't a game you win or lose, it's just a way to bring some variety and adventure to a party. I'm a bigger fan of a good-natured version of Shot Roulette than the mean-spirited cruelty of concocting shots that are actively unpleasant (tequila topped with cinnamon, 151 with hot sauce, etc). If the point of the game is to get drunk, which let's face it is exactly what drinking games are for, then a proper rendition of Shot Roulette does the job with the added potential of discovering some new flavors.

The Truth About Absinthe

People love telling myths about alcohol. I don't know what it is about the stuff, but it's the subject of more tall tales than perhaps any other substance on the planet. Every long-time bartender has some entirely fictional story about how the Margarita was invented by a lovelorn Mexican poet who named it after the woman he could never have, or how Jack Daniels whiskey is the result of an epic Civil War era odyssey that nearly ended in the destruction of the original recipe for bourbon. It's easy to get dragged into these stories, perhaps because we want to believe there's something special about the things we drink. I suppose that's why the lies concocted about absinthe in the late 19th century persist into the modern day. What was once a smear campaign designed to scare people away from The Green Fairy transformed into the granddaddy of all psychedelic legends. It's almost too bad that none of it is true.

So, what is absinthe exactly? Well, it's an anise-flavored herbal spirit that originated in Switzerland some time in the past two or three hundred years. It gets its name from the main herbal component of its recipe, the Artemisia absinthium, a species of the wormwood plant that has been used for various ends such as stomach medicine, a scent agent in pesticides and, of course, flavoring in alcoholic beverages. The idea that absinthe is a hallucinogenic comes from the convenience of an easy to pronounce but sinister-sounding chemical called Thujone.

Thujone is a chemical that appears in a variety of commonly consumed plants, including several members of the mint family. Modern medical tests have concluded that a dangerous dose of thujone measures around 50-60 mg (though no extensive human testing has been performed) while high but non-lethal doses resulted in some spasms and convulsions. Sounds pretty beastly, right? Yeah, it's not. Even the so-called "high wormwood" batches that were considered top-shelf back in the drink's glory days only reached an average of 25 mg of thujone per bottle and the same toxicology tests showed that the presence of ethanol (that's drinking alcohol for those who are playing catch-up) could make a dose as high as 100 mg non-lethal. So, it seems that everything truly suspect about thujone is effectively neutralized by the fact that absinthe is an alcoholic beverage.

Then why do so many people believe that absinthe is some insane, Victorian-era LSD? Two words: Temperance Movement. Absinthe was popular with the members of the counterculture, especially in France in the 1890's. As a symbol of the bohemian lifestyle, absinthe was an easy target for the political entities who wanted to ban alcohol outright. The teetotalers concocted a wide variety of lies about absinthe in what ended up being one of the most successful negative PR campaigns in history. Just like Reefer Madness convinced an entire subsection of Americans that marijuana will turn people into baby-killing psychopaths, the absinthe lies created a legend about a fairly innocuous drink that made it illegal both before and after the Prohibition movement won big in America.

These days you can get a bottle of absinthe with relative ease. Many Europeans countries lifted their bans in the 1990's and America followed suit just a few years ago. There's still a lot of theater surrounding absinthe. A lot of companies are marketing mostly unnecessary accessories like so-called "absinthe glasses" and the iconic perforated sugar spoon. Today's absinthe should still probably be consumed in a diluted form, but that's just because a lot of varieties still come in ridiculously high ABV proportions. If you've got a taste for the stuff, make sure to check your bottle first before you pour water into a weak, 70 proof glass of Green Fairy. And don't expect any visuals. You're not drinking any drug you won't find in a glass of vodka.

Why We Drink: An Investment in the Present

Played in its most simple incarnation, the game of roulette has some of the best odds in any given casino. In the American version of the game, which has 36 numbered slots and 2 zero slots (the 0 and 00 as opposed to the European single 0 layout), a player who only bets on red, black, odds or evens has a 47% of winning. Even if the payout is ridiculously small, it beats losing money. During my first trip to Las Vegas, I kept those odds in mind. I've never gotten much thrill out of gambling, so the prospect of winning small and easy appealed to me much more than the thought of taking home the jackpot on a long shot. While my travel companion settled down for what I would classify as an inconsiderately lengthy tenure at the poker table, I decided to try my hand at the little wheel. Seated at a $5 table, I put the minimum on black and promptly lost. The laws of probability on my side, I tried the same thing again and watched history repeat itself. That's when the calm voice of reason in my brain stood up, cleared its throat and produced a rather well-drawn graph of a recent individual cost/benefit analysis concerning the relative merits of staying at the roulette table or adjourning to casino lounge for a drink, both of which would have cost roughly the same amount of money. Five minutes later, I had a glass of scotch in my hand and no regrets.

This scenario plays out, in one form or another, countless times every single day. A human being, possessed of the ability to reason, chooses immediate, limited pleasure or potentially limitless benefit in exchange for long-term effort. Neither choice is inherently superior to the other. Deciding which one is more worthwhile is purely context-based. People invest their money hoping to profit despite the significant chance of going broke. They have children hoping to foster love and pride despite the chance their children may be the source of great agony or disappointment. The joy of the positive outcome is great and the pain of the negative is crushing.

Alcohol is almost never a long-term investment and when it is it's never going to turn out well. Alcoholics are the only people who are making a big decision when they choose whether or not to drink. For everyone else, it's purely immediate and brief. Drinks are finite and discreet, their effects likewise. Alcohol is an investment in right now. That's why we drink it. Like a candy bar, a one-night stand or a song, the drink is an indulgence and a way to put one's self in the moment. There's nothing imaginary involved with an ethanol high. It is a concrete sensation. The same can't be said for long-term prospects. A man doesn't gamble because he's certain he'll profit. He doesn't conceive a child because he knows being a father will make him happier. He just hopes, he uses his imagination to envision a future benefit that may never come to be.

Perhaps this is why alcohol has always been a part of ceremonies. We drink during religious rituals and we toast special occasions because alcohol anchors us to the present. Maybe it's due to the depressive nature of ethanol or maybe it's the sharp, distinct flavor. Whatever it is, the drink is a chemical of seconds and minutes, a way to take our brains out the future.

The Lush Chronicles: Ruminations on Cinco de Mayo

I believe in tequila. That's bigger than just liking the taste or appreciating the unique features of the drink. There's something downright spiritual about the finest application of the agave plant. As much as I respect the honest camaraderie of whiskey and trust the conversational chemistry of vodka, as much as I love the romantic devotion of good wine and the unpretentious company of beer, tequila is the only drink that has ever felt downright religious to me. That's why I don't feel particularly broken up about my current lack of tequila on Cinco de Mayo, it's unofficial saint's day. Today, I don't need tequila, I don't feel compelled to consume it. I've had enough days when the certainty of tequila was necessary that I've stopped looking at it as a party libation or a pain delivery device. Tequila is sacred stuff and just like everything else holy in this world, it has been besmirched and co-opted for nefarious ends.

I've already written volumes about my distaste for absurd concoctions like the Margarita as well as my belief that tequila shouldn't be taken in shots, so I won't repeat myself in that regard. Instead, I'll talk about the spiritual urgency of those days devoted to tequila. And yes, tequila does deserve an all-day affair. It's the only way to feel the full depth of the drink. One glass at the beginning of the night or as a pair with a meal may be the way most measures of tequila are consumed and I'm not necessarily above that behavior, but I've also said Hebrew prayers in passing rather than standing for an entire sabbath service. Any self-respecting lush will tell you that real tequila days start in the morning.

This isn't to say that one should drink tequila before noon. That's the kind of thing a drunk would do and we're not concerned with careless, irreligious drinkers like that. No, tequila days start in the morning because that's the closest we ever get to our dreams. A real tequila day is one in which you wake up and know that you must drink today, that some silent issue running free in your subconscious needs to be addressed today. Some people exorcise those issues on long runs or by wailing on a guitar, but that's not who we are, readers. The lush knows that daily inhibitions and routines keep us from really thinking. That's why we grab hold of our slow depressant and ride it until the work's done.

Tequila is ideal for the slow, steady drinking day. It won't tell you to stop like vodka will and it won't punish you for lingering like whiskey will. And gin? Gin's a bastard who doesn't give a damn about your feelings. Love gin, but don't trust it for a single second. Tequila is here for you today, one ounce every half hour with a meal and/or a mild beer in between. Nurse your tequila and never lose sight of your bottle. Don't have another drink when you start to feel sick but don't call it quits until you're thoroughly saturated. Let that warm4, golden spirit seep into your bones and for your own sake, never stop thinking. Remember, today you're drinking tequila because you've got some business to take care of in your sopping soul. Don't waste this drunk on jokes and parties.

You may only have a handful of tequila days in your entire life, but that's about par for the course when it comes to profound experiences. When some dream of today's anxieties or yesterday's lost loves comes to haunt, take the day if you can and have some twelve hours of devotion. The patron spirit of the abused and misunderstood will give your thoughts the right kind of fuel to fight until the knots are all worked out.

The Lush Chronicles: Process of Elimination

Back in the particularly panicky period of American history when some of the most absurd people in the nation convinced Congress to ratify the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, the majority of the alcohol consumed in our silly country was produced in less than optimal conditions. Bathtubs in some guy's basement, homemade stills in mob-run warehouses, barrels in the backwoods where nothing but moonshine ever flowed before. Needless to say, the products of these operations were pretty unpalatable, thus the cocktail was finally embraced wholeheartedly by the drinking American public. I suppose most of us never lost the taste for alcohol mixed with anything that would make it taste like anything other than poison.

Today, cocktails are trendy. They're status symbols you can drink and as such they tend to cost as much as a meal. This has always struck me as more than a bit silly. I always say that when you pay for a cocktail, you're just paying for the damn glass. The most valuable component of a cocktail is the alcohol in it, but the whole point of a cocktail is to combine alcohol with things that are explicitly not alcohol. Unless you're talking about incredibly stupid suicide-style drinks like the Four Horsemen, you're probably drinking some combination of alcohol, fruit juice and food coloring. This is like paying more for a ring made out of wood with gold plating than you'd pay for a solid gold ring.

But the cost of cocktails isn't what draws most of my ire. Cocktails are tourist drinks, alcoholic beverages for people who don't actually like alcohol. Tarting up your vodka with Apple Pucker is a bit insulting. "Oh, but I don't like vodka." Yeah? Then go pop half a Xanax and drink some apple juice, you'll get the same effect. Speaking for every bartender who ever had to clean up a bathroom because somebody had one too many Purple Nurples, if you can't handle your booze as nature intended, maybe you ought to choose a different intoxicant.

It's telling that cocktails are more popular with the younger set of drinkers than they are with folks who have been enjoying the sauce for long enough to know better. At one point that guy you know who drinks nothing but gin and tonic might have screwed around with Irish Car Bombs and Alabama Slammers, but through his body's own process of elimination he got punished into accepting the gentle simplicity of a more grown-up drink. He doesn't drink G&T like mother's milk because he loves it, but because everything else has long become connected to some painful experience in his younger days.

I should qualify my rant by explaining that when I say "cocktail" I mean those neon-colored concoctions that have pervaded our culture as of late. I can't in good conscience advise against them in all situations, but they shouldn't be treated like anything but novelties and dessert treats. I enjoy a White Russian every now and then, but there's no earthly reason to drink more than one, maybe two, in a night. It's full of sugar and cream. You wouldn't eat three ice cream cones in one sitting and you sure as hell wouldn't pound vodka at the same time. Why? Because it's a guarantee to get sick. The same goes for anything that tastes like a Jolly Rancher.

I've even lost respect for my beloved Martini. It's still a beautiful construction, but with each passing sip I've come to wonder why I'm not just drinking chilled vodka or gin. It's so much easier to train one's body to tolerate straight liquor than ask it to deal with a bunch of intense ingredients at the same time. If the Martini can't be the unimpeachable king of cocktails, is there really any mixed drink beyond reproach?

The Lush Chronicles: Why We Drink- Honesty

Last year at the GQ Awards, singer Lily Allen had an on-stage, on-camera row with Sir Elton John brought on by her quite literally shameless public drunkenness. Allen even went so far as to bring an entire bottle of champagne to the podium with her, refilling her glass at least once before the award went out. Does anyone remember what the award was or who won it? Hell no. Everyone just remembers that Lily Allen wore her intoxication on her shiny, sleeveless dress and had a few choice words for a knight in Her Majesty's fabulously musical service. There was something beautiful about that moment. It was two sides of the lush coin showing at once, even colliding. Who you see as the hero in that instant is as good a personality test as the long form Myers-Briggs.

The uninformed would mistake Sir Elton as the stand-in for all sober, respectable people. This is incorrect on two fronts. First, there's no such thing as a sober, respectable celebrity. Even without chemicals, being famous is an altered state of consciousness. More importantly, Elton John is not your straight-edge friend who puts up with your drunken stupidity. No, the good knight is actually the friend who partied way harder than everyone else way back when and now he's doing his best to stay clean. I don't know enough about the guy to tell whether or not he's the superior bullshitting type of recovering addict who thinks he's got the key to healthy living just because he kicked a habit that got out of control, but I do know that his indignation at the GQ Awards was more complex than just being paired with a sloshed 20-something at a serious moment.

Being sober is problematic. Former addicts know this better than anyone. Being clean means having no excuse for impolite behavior, among other kinds of social faux pas. Nobody wants to be in Elton's position, but more folks than will readily admit it love those rare opportunities to play Lily's part. The first thing alcohol does to the human brain is dull those areas of highest function, what Sigmund Freud called the Superego, those learned emotions associated with how we think others perceive us. The Romans knew this, which is where we get the phrase In Vino Veritas: In Wine There Is Truth.

As with everything made easier by intoxication, honesty certainly doesn't require chemical courage. Of course, showers aren't required if one wants to get clean, strictly speaking. Having a quick, easy way to accomplish a state of being has always been our species' preference. We drink so we can both feel uninhibited enough to say what we really want to say and so we have plausible deniability later when we're sober. People use drunkenness as a Get Out of Honesty Free card. "Never mind what I said last night. I was completely wasted."

I don't buy that and neither should anyone with a lick of sense. Drunk people are terrible liars too numb to feel the cuts of their own stupidity. It's sober folks you've got to watch out for. What's less trustworthy than a person who knows exactly what they're saying? The lush lifestyle is one at least partially motivated by an abhorrence of the disingenuous.

The Lush Chronicles: Why We Drink- Family

Cliches ought not to be taken for granted. After all, they became cliche by being common enough for everyone to recognize them. Unless you're one of those hopelessly corny idealists, the first thing that pops into your mind when thinking of family gatherings is excessive self-medication with unholy amounts of holy libations. Why do we drink until intoxicated when we're around our extended families? I don't think it's as simple as dysfunctional behavior. There are layers to this ritual.

How we feel about our families has everything to do with how well we know them. Sure, there are a scant few among the whole of modern society who are well-acquainted with a large segment of their cousins, but the truth is that most of us see these people for what they really are: strangers with an uncomfortable amount of access to our lives.

Imagine for a moment that some random person off the street who doesn't know you from Adam all of a sudden had a lifetime of minor memories about you and your immediate family. This stranger now has access to your past, a vulnerable place for everyone who ever walked the earth. Now if you could just convince yourself to feel obligated to this stranger, if only where minor courtesies are concerned, you'll be just one step away from creating a new extended family member.

The last component is, of course, the quasi-myth of blood relation. The continued identification of extended family members is little more than a safeguard against inbreeding. If it weren't for the threat of accidentally producing a child whose eyes are way too close together, we probably wouldn't give a damn about our cousins. Yet we still encourage one another to gather together with these people every so often as if to say, "we are part of something".

But we're not. We live in different parts of the world, work in different industries and have completely different lifestyles. We didn't grow up together and we don't know anything relevant about one another aside from where we exist on a family tree. This surreal circumstance of imaginary connections, non-consensual intimacy and the pressures of obligation is nerve-wracking.

Of course, we can't act like being around a bunch of unusually knowledgeable strangers is troubling. Alcohol removes inhibitions, relaxes muscles and shuts down higher brain functions. It can be consumed discreetly and even secretly, its portions controlled down to the sip. It's the ideal mood-altering substance for short-term social anxiety. We drink around our families for many of the same reasons we consider bars good places to interact with potential sex partners. Alcohol makes us stop caring about the inherent awkwardness of experiencing intimacy with strangers.

As with any instance of using substances like alcohol to treat a problem, I'm not suggesting that self-medicating with drink around family is a good thing. At best, it's a patch-up for a bigger issue that ought to be addressed with more difficult but ultimately healthier methods. Maybe that means making a better effort to know our cousins, but more realistically it means convincing ourselves that we aren't really obligated to people just because we share a significant chunk of the same DNA code. Hell, all people are cousins if you go back far enough, though the same thing could be said for all life on Earth. Sometimes it's better to be a stranger, especially if that means the cork comes out in celebration rather than as a prescription.

The Lush Chronicles: Alcohol and College

As some of you might have noticed, I didn't get a chance to live blog my St. Patrick's Day experience, but believe me when I say that it wasn't for a lack of trying. I had the damndest time getting drunk on St. Pat's, and though I'll have to consult a Catholic about this, I'm pretty sure that has got to be some kind of cardinal sin. My original plan involving a bottle of Irish whiskey took a back seat to the insistence of friends. No, it wasn't another intervention. I think that may be scheduled for a three-day block in mid June. Rather, my friends on various plots along the average sobriety spectrum insisted that I join them out in the world for what was promised to be a respectable night out of relaxing self-harm. It didn't go so well as that, though.

The first mistake we made... well, not we. Personally, I never thought it was a good idea to go to a faux Irish pub located smack dab in the middle of a college campus. See, people go to bars for a variety of reasons. Some go to be social (fried food bar and grills), some go to try to get laid (meat markets), some try to be trendy (so loud I can't hear myself slur bars) and some go for a cheap fix (dives). Me, I guess I'm just not very creative. I go to movie theaters to watch films, I go to restaurants to eat and I go to bars to consume alcohol. That in mind, college campuses are the worst places on Earth outside of Utah and Saudi Arabia to get soused.

Case in point, that sorry excuse for a licensed establishment I foolishly agreed to go to on St. Patrick's Day. Was I happy about the exorbitant cover charge? No, but I figured it might be worth it and I didn't want to be a prick to my well-meaning friends. Was I insulted by the seven dollar plastic cup of whiskey someone assumed was reasonable? Damn straight I was. But hey, it was St. Pat's. Supply, demand and sin tax are what they are. All these things, while unreasonable, are all part of the game. Watered-down beer, however, is not. In fact, in most states diluting liquor is illegal and can get an establishment's license taken away.

I should have seen that last one coming, though. College kids (and they are kids) are mostly new to drinking so they don't know what to expect. Like virginal boys who imagine that breasts feel like water balloons or bags of sand, college kids have no idea that a proper pint of stout should taste like nothing less than heavy wheat bread soaked in coffee, not a flat Miller High Life. What else can one expect from an establishment that caters to a demographic that thinks there's nothing more hardcore than sipping coconut rum in the middle of a history lecture?

Despite the contrary reputation, college is the worst time in one's life to get proper tight. As pissed off as I was to have spent my St. Patrick's Day paying through the nose for legally questionable suds, I've got it easy. The poor kids who live in that part of town have to take a bus just to get a decent drink. I can walk fifty feet out my front door or just open up a cabinet in my kitchen. Hang in there, collegiate lushes. There is a light and it doesn't go out until 2:00 AM.

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