PBR, suitable for children and dogs
It's Repeal Day today, the day on which we commemorate the end of Prohibition in America, the darkest period this country has ever known, including all wars and the 1980s. In honor of that here's an oldie but goodie called How to Drink Like an Adult which I wrote for Street Carnage last year, but I probably should have just called an A to Z guide of drinking-related things I thought of jokes for.
I haven’t got the demographics for this site in front of me, but I’m pretty sure it falls well within the coveted “too poor and young to drink anything but piss-water beer” bracket. Who knows, maybe occasionally you splurge on a vodka cranberry when you’re feeling fancy? It’s also pretty likely that a lot of you still think drinking is a sport you can win, take pride in how fucking wasted you got last night, bro, and generally drink like retards.
Alcohol is a lot more than a tool for pissing the bed and tricking girls into giving you a squeezer, though. So guess what? It’s time you grew up and started drinking like adults — by which I mean sad and alone, but also with a more sophisticated palate.
ANISE
You’ll recognize the sharp licorice flavor of this stuff from the jager-bombs you dropped in college. It’s actually a pretty versatile and subtle mixing ingredient used in a wide spectrum of drinking cultures, from the French absinthe and pastis, Italian sambuca and the South American anis. If you can appreciate the bracing flavor, try drinking one after dinner as a digestif (that means it helps you shit better) — but its best use is in cocktails like a Sazerac, made with rye whiskey, bitters and sugar, where the glass is rinsed lightly with the anise liqueur. (Hehe.)
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BITTERS
This is pretty much the essential ingredient for any well-stocked bar. It’s made from plants, herbs, barks and other growing shit steeped in alcohol. Bitters are very high in alcohol and very strong in flavor, so most cocktail recipes only call for a few dashes. The most popular brand –- actually the most popular bar item in the world –- is called Angostura bitters, made in Trinidad and Tobago. So what do they taste like? Bitter, durr. There are also other types, like Peychaud’s and orange bitters, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. You’ll find bitters used in pretty much every good classic cocktail, but go ahead and start with a Manhattan (whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters) or an Old Fashioned (whiskey, bitters, sugar and soda muddled with orange and cherry). Also, if your tummy hurts, throw some bitters into ginger ale and you’ll be sorted out in no time.
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CHARTREUSE
Like a lot of the liqueurs you’ll start to learn about once you get over to the other side of the cocktail looking glass, the recipe for chartreuse was developed by some ancient French monks in the mountains who didn’t have shit to do all day besides get wasted, mostly because they hadn’t invented pedophilia yet. Green chartreuse is the original and it’s flavored with like 130 herbs and plants, which gives it a sweet but almost medicinal grass taste. A lot of these liqueurs taste like medicine, actually, which is something you’re gonna have to get used to. The green stuff is used in awesome cocktails like The Last Word (gin, chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, lime juice). The yellow is slightly less powerful in taste, but a little sweeter and it turns up in an Alaska (gin, yellow chartreuse, orange bitters).
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DAIQUIRI
You could try calling Ernest Hemingway a pussy for drinking daiquiris, but dude did kill a lion.
You could try calling Ernest Hemingway a pussy for drinking daiquiris, but dude did kill a lion.
You’ve probably had one of these — except the frozen, sugary bullshit kind you get at most bad bars is like the auto-tuned, pop R&B version of the cocktail (it fucking blows, but that’s what they’re offering, so you take it). The real deal is known as the Hemingway Daiquiri (made with white rum, fresh limes and grapefruit, maraschino liqueur over shaved ice) because he used to suck these things down in Cuba by the dozen. Say what you will about Hemingway, but if there’s one thing that dude knew how to do, besides shoot things in the face, it was get hammered.
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EGGS
Sounds gross at first, but once you’ve had a cocktail like a Pisco Sour (Pisco, a Peruvian grape brandy, with egg whites, citrus juice, sugar and bitters), you’ll be whistling a different tune. A tune about eggs probably, which is weird. Using eggs in drinks has been going on long before cocktails were even invented. What it does in drinks like this is build up a foamy head when shaken heavily and bring all the other disparate flavors together into a silky smooth texture. Also: Don’t be such a pussy. You’ll put all kinds of chemicals and paint chips up your nose and in your lungs, and you’re gonna balk at drinking a chicken fetus with your booze?
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FRENCH 75
Since this old classic cocktail has a champagne base (along with lemon juice, sugar and gin) it’s got the sort of festive, pretend-we’re-rich-and-fabulous flair that girls who watched too much Sex and the City might feel accessorizes well with their handbag. But unlike drinking regular shitty sparkling wine, it’s combined with good old manly gin, so, you know, dude power, man-bro.
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GINGER BEER
Jesus loves it!
Jesus loves it!
Drinking exclusively vodka is silly at this point, since it’s basically flavorless burn water, but if you have to dress it up like a junky at a parole hearing, adding a strong spicy ginger beer to the mix will do. That’s called a Moscow Mule and it’s pretty much the cocktail that invented the idea of vodka in America in the first place during the ’40s. Before that it was considered a weird foreign novelty. Weird right? Even better is a Dark and Stormy, which uses a dark, spiced rum with ginger beer, or a Mamie Taylor, whose spirit base is scotch.
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HARVEY WALLBANGER
Yes, it has a goofy name, but you have to keep in mind that the people who invented all of these cocktails were shit-faced at the time, so what do you expect? This ’50s and ’60s era cocktail, like a lot of its contemporaries, got a bad name somewhere along the line. Maybe because nobody knew what the hell they were doing when they were making them at home back then. It’s made with vodka, Galliano and orange juice. Galliano is a sweet herbal liqueur made in Italy, which is actually kind of gross, so forget I mentioned this one actually. Try a Hanky Panky instead, which is made with gin, sweet vermouth and Fernet Branca, a cocktail invented around the beginning of the 20th century at the legendary Savoy Hotel bar in London, famous for giving nerdy bartenders giant boners for 100 years running.
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INFUSIONS
Depending on what city you live in, infusions are either still pervasive at your better bars or have fallen by the wayside as yesterday’s news. There’s still a lot to appreciate here though, because there is literally endless variety to the types of flavors you can come up with. The idea is simple: Take a spirit (usually vodka) and stick something else in it, like fruit, or vegetables, or even bacon (that was a thing for a minute), then let it sit for a while. Once you strain out the chunky bits, you’re left with an entirely new product. Fresh fruits with distinct flavors, like blueberry or strawberry, can dress up a vodka or tequila. Hot peppers are a popular option as well, especially when you’re working with a Bloody Mary recipe. Try throwing some pepperoncinis or habaneros into gin or vodka and mixing that with tomato juice and horseradish. You won’t shit right for a few days, but the flavor is worth it. Gin is basically vodka infused with juniper berries and some other botanicals, by the way.
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JACK ROSE
A Jack Rose
A Jack Rose
At Boston’s Eastern Standard, one of the best cocktail bars in the country and one that I get (steal) a lot of my ideas from, they sell this Prohibition-era cocktail by the gallon. The reason for that is, unlike a lot of other, lazier bars, they use real pomegranate grenadine in the recipe, as opposed to that fluorescent crap we give to kids to shut them up for twenty goddamn minutes during dinner. Rounding out the cocktail is citrus juice and applejack, a brandy made with apples that a fella by the name of George Washington used to swill by the bucket load. Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises drank these babies too. Then again, one of those dudes had no teeth and the other had no balls, so….
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KAMIKAZE
Much like skinny jeans and coke, this “shooter” (and shots in general actually) is one of those things you’re just going to have to say goodbye to once you hit the bad side of 30 (sorry, everyone I know). Not because it’s necessarily a bad drink on its face (vodka, orange liqueur and lime juice), but the ham-fisted way most shitty bartenders make them (with Rose’s lime juice, guh) manages to fuck it up anyway. It’s just that when you order one of these at a bar what it says about you is that you are a boring automaton who can’t think for his or herself, you work in a desperate cubicle all day pushing numbers around a spreadsheet and this is your one big night out at the bar at Pizzeria Uno.
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LILLET
Like everything else in the drinking world, this apertif wine was invented in France in the late 1800s. French dudes may be total douches, but how wasted would you be right now if it weren’t for them? Non-wasted. Lillet is made from mixing wine from Bordeaux with grapefruit and orange peels. It used to be more bitter when it was made with quinine and James Bond was drinking it in his favorite martini called a Vesper, a drink he named after a piece of ass so you know it’s good. (A vesper is made with both vodka and gin in addition to Lillet.) Now it’s sweeter and fruitier. You can drink it alone on the rocks with an orange peel or mix it with a Corpse Reviver #2 (gin, Cointreau, Lillet, lemon juice, absinthe).
MANHATTANS
Remember the first transcendent band you ever heard? Whether it was the Velvet Underground or the Pixies or Radiohead or whatever horseshit the kids like now, it ended up changing the way you look at music in general, right? When it comes to drinking, the same rules apply. For me it was this most classic of classic cocktails, the Manhattan, made with whiskey (traditionally rye, but I prefer a sweeter bourbon), sweet vermouth and bitters. Like a lot of the real old recipes, no one really knows exactly where this one came from, but this history stuff is starting to get boring, so who cares? This is the stuff badasses like Jack Kerouac and your grandad drank when they weren’t busy saving the world from Communism and fucking your grandmother.
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NEGRONI
First of all: That’s racist. Secondly, this cocktail is sort of a tough sell if you aren’t used to the bitter taste of Campari, which tastes like your balls if your balls were oranges and not balls. Italians love that sort of thing though (balls, I mean). In a Negroni you mix Campari with sweet vermouth to balance out some of the bite, gin to get you fucked up and an orange peel for color. Then you sit there drinking it all afternoon on your stoop, bitching about how you can’t find a good cannoli around here anymore and how the neighborhood is “changing.”
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ORANGE BLOSSOM WATER
This floral liquid is popular in various Mediterranean cooking cultures, but it’s also been re-popularized in cocktail recipes of late. You probably aren’t familiar with it, but it’s extraordinarily fragrant, and sort of smells like the top of your thighs and knees after a night at the strip club. Because it’s got such a powerful smell, it can change the way we taste the things we’re drinking or eating. Use this shit sparingly though, otherwise cocktails like the Ramos Gin Fizz (gin, lemon and lime juice, egg white, sugar, cream, orange water and soda water) end up tasting like a mouthful of potpourri. Stripper taint and toilet stench-masking agent aside, it’s good stuff.
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PIMM’S
This is another liqueur that started out as medicine in the 19th century, which shows you how fucked up people were back then: Their idea of curing illness was getting you drunk. Doesn’t sound so bad come to think of it. There are a few different types of this quintessentially English fruit cup, but the one you want to know about is No. 1. It’s based on gin and has a spicy citrus flavor, which makes it perfect for mixing with lemonade or ginger ale and loaded up with fresh cucumber, which makes for a refreshing alternative to some bullshit hard lemonade style bottled piss. Accessorizes well with an old fashioned wooden tennis racket and deep-rooted class insecurities.
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QUININE
Yeah, I don’t even know what quinine is. Some science thing. But it’s a major ingredient in tonic water, which was originally used to fight malaria or something? Anyway, stop drinking gin and tonics and vodka tonics because that stuff is nasty. Forcing in Q entries for these things is lame. Next.
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RUM
Up until a couple years ago, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing when it came to ordering drinks either. I’d get, like, a Malibu rum and pineapple and suck those things down like a 10-year-old with a juice box at recess. When you build up bad drinking habits like that it’s hard to get over your ingrained aversion to a certain type of alcohol. Like if you puked the first time you drank tequila, you never drink it again. Rum is another misunderstood spirit, since most people automatically think of white rum, which comes mostly from Puerto Rico and is what you normally get when you order a mixed drink made with rum. But there are many other types of rum you need to check out from places like Panama, Barbados, Belize, Guatemala and wherever else the French, Spanish and English governments forced black people to work at getting them plastered. Spiced rums you’ve probably had, but the name brand ones are cheap ass white rums just juiced up with artificial coloring to make them look older than they are. Good rums are aged and take on the characteristics of the oak barrel that they are aged in. Some of them are aged in bourbon barrels and they get the sort of complexity you might associate with a Scotch. Do not mix a good rum like that with coke. Pretend coke doesn’t exist actually. Good rule of thumb on a couple levels, come to think of it.
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SCOTCH
Everyone likes whiskey, but, woops, not really, because mass market swill like Jim Beam and Jack Daniels and whoever else has a huge marketing budget doesn’t count. Less well known amongst people under the age of 100 is Scotch. This might sound obvious, but Scotch is whiskey that comes from Scotland. There are a few different kinds, like single malt and blended, but don’t worry about that for now. The important thing is you need to try a few different Scotches and find the one that works for you. Maybe you want something really smokey, like Laphroaig, or Macallan 12 with dark caramel and butterscotch flavors. Don’t mix Scotch with anything except a few cubes of ice or a splash of water, unless you want to throw your money away. If you insist, you can try a Rob Roy, which is a Scotch Manhattan, or a Rusty Nail, which is Scotch and Drambuie, a golden honey liqueur.
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TWISTS
Lemon twists and orange peels and all of the other fruit they stick on the edge of the glass for a garnish aren’t just like cute little scarves for your cocktail — unless you’re in a bad bar, in which case dude just sticks some dried out lime corpse on the rim like a fruit hat and calls it a day. The point here is to incorporate the oil of the fruit into the recipe, to subtly change the flavor or to bring out the flavor of one of the ingredients. If you’re making a lemon twist for your martini, cut that thing over the mouth of the glass itself so the juice spritzes all over everything. Sometimes you’ll see a hero bartender setting an orange peel on fire over the drink. That’s partly for show, but also works on the same essential oils idea.
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UP
As in straight-up. That’s how you want to start drinking most of your cocktails. A lot of the ones I’ve mentioned here are meant to be on the rocks, and that’s fine, but in order to best taste the spirits you’re drinking, you don’t want to overload them with ice because then you’ll just end up watering them down. Honestly, do whatever you want though, I don’t really care. I’m starting to run out of steam with this pedantic tone I adopted here.
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VERMOUTH
Both sweet vermouth (aka Italian) and dry vermouth (aka French) are wines fortified with aromatics herbs and spices. Obviously, sweet vermouth is sweet. Dry vermouth is dry. Depending on your taste, you’ll want to add either accordingly to your martinis and Manahattans and the like.
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WHISKEY SOUR
You might think you’ve had one of these before but unless it was made with egg, it was a fake. A sour is a type of cocktail made with a base spirit, citrus juice, egg whites and a sweet ingredient, like an orange liqueur or grenadine. Somewhere along the line people just started skipping the egg component, which is like deciding we’re gonna make pizza without cheese from now on. A whiskey sour adds bitters to the mix, which is fun to squirt out of the bottle onto the foamy egg froth like a liquid canvas. Get me, I’m Jackson Pollock over here. No? Maybe that’s just me.
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XO
XO is a type of designation you’ll see on spirits like Cognac, which, unless you’re my dad or trying to sell me a hot mix-tape out of the trunk of your car, you probably aren’t drinking. Others include VS which means “very special” and VSOP which means “very superior old pale.” No one can say for sure what XO stands for, but it’s probably “x-tra old,” because it refers to the oldest minimum age the Cognac in question is aged for, around six years.
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YORSH
I’ve never even tried this one, but it starts with Y so here goes: A yorsh is a Russian beer cocktail that consists of beer mixed with… you guessed it: vodka! Those drunk Slavs can find an excuse to mix vodka with anything. It brings up a good point though, which is the popularity of beer cocktails lately. You’ve most likely had other variations of this, like a Black Velvet made with Guinness and champagne or an Irish Car Bomb, which is made of fucking gross. Shandies, on the other hand, are like a seasonal, refreshing douche for your taste buds. Mixing a light beer with lemonade or ginger ale is amazing. Spanish dudes call it a Michelada, which is beer mixed with citrus juice, peppers, spices and tomato juice. Beery Mary, dudes. The French version of this, and probably the best one of the bunch, is called a demi-peche and uses beer and peach syrup. It tastes like an angel’s vagina after she came out of the shower.
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ZOMBIE
This rum-based cocktail was invented in the ’30s at Hollywood bar, Don the Beachcomber. It’s a good example of the tiki cocktail fad that lasted for decades and is finally making a comeback. Others include Planter’s Punch, the Mai Tai and the Singapore Sling. For years these drinks were looked down upon as being bygone relics of a sillier time, but most people don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, so screw them. Back to the Zombie though: It was so-called because there is so much booze in this thing (7.5 ounces) that you’d turn into a flesh-eating monster after drinking two of them, which — wait a minute, when were zombies invented? That sounds off. Also, like a zombie, you can light this cocktail on fire and everyone is gonna be cool with that. Wherever it came from, a mix of white rum, dark rum, golden rum, 151 rum, apricot brandy, pineapple juice, papaya juice and grenadine is serious business even if drinking it makes you feel like you should be partying in a Hawaiian shirt at a Sammy Haggar tailgate.
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3 comments:
Apparently there are way too many letters in the alphabet.
TLDRing the shit out of this bitch on the reg.
Nice list, I'm partial to laudanum.
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