June 2010

Re-Embracing the Cocktail

legacy/cocktail.gif

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.

Shot Roulette

legacy/shotroulette.jpg

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.

The Truth About Absinthe

legacy/Absinthe-glass.jpg

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.