One thing this country has always enjoyed is a good drink. Whether it was rum on the Atlantic, bourbon at the races or that Bloody Mary at Sunday Brunch, alcohol is the American Drink.

July 2nd 2010

Nobody taught me how to drink

by seoulbrother

75 notes

My dad was the first person I remember having a drink. In high school, I figured out how to get stupid drunk. In college, we learned to make a game out of it. Nobody, though, taught me how to drink. In fact, nobody can teach you how to drink. You just kind of figure it out as you go, having fun and collecting great stories along the way. That was the backbone of an idea that, with a lot of help, became American Drink.

The first cocktail I attempted was more drank than drink: Gin and juice, just like the Snoop Doggy Dog jam. Snoop never gave a recipe so we’d mix equal portions of gin and juice in one of those gas station-scented water bottles and sip it through the bendy straw. You know, like a mother-fucking gangsta.

Sometimes we’d use orange juice, Kool-Aid, purple stuff, whatever. At that potency, it didn’t take much to catch a buzz. The drank and spittle coagulated in the creases of the straw as we played Quarters. It was awful, of course, but this what playas drank and I was a playa1.

A year later, I was a soldier in Haiti. Luckily, I wasn’t garrisoned with the main contingent in Port-au-Prince. I lived in Gonaïves on the roof of a former drug lord’s house, above 18 high-speed, low-drag, active duty snake-eaters, and they hated us. We were fake soldiers. Too “Hollywood.” Soft.

So my team of four Army Reservists kept to ourselves and made great friends with the locals. We wore civilian clothes, lived off the economy and even picked up the language by hanging out with them every chance we could. Part of my job was to learn everything about the local culture in order to better assess and address their needs; real “hearts and minds” kind of stuff that I took to heart.

One evening, our local friends invited us to their family home for dinner— a real honor considering that most Haitians ate one meal for every five that we consumed.

Yveline was 12, maybe 13, and wanted to make her first meal, for us. Her mother, Alice, served us our first alcoholic beverage in about four months: A punch made with fresh passion fruit, orange, key lime juices and four-year-old Barbancourt Rhum2. The taste is still in my mouth— tart floral juices perfectly balanced by the dry charcoal flavor of barrel-aged rum.

Good thing, too. Yveline’s chicken was luke-warm and undercooked. We could have been asshole Americans by either refusing to eat it or asking her to cook it longer. Instead we bucked up and washed it down with a LOT of punch.

The next two days, we were wrecked by booze and bad chicken, but that night we laughed, sang and danced until we couldn’t.

I returned to the States a few months later with three bottles of 15-year-old, Estate Reserve Barbancourt and no idea what to do with it. I mixed it with Coke like some kind of yacht club asshole or tried to recreate that magical punch. Both were failures and it wasn’t until I started to sip it neat that I finally got it; This spirit wanted to fly free as a muscle-shirted eagle.

I either drank everything straight or had Old Fashioneds, like a real man, until I met my Sweetness. When we started courting, we experimented by making all kinds of drinks, from standard cocktails and magical elixirs to outright failures. See, there’s a joy in new love that makes you brave. You’re willing to try anything a couple times until you get it right or chuck it all together.

We learned that:
* Most drinks created with pre-made mixers were too sweet.
* Scotch is hard to mix, so don’t.
* Balance of sweet, sour and spirit is everything.

We travelled everywhere together looking for small, secret places in big cities, crawling their cocktail menus for certain code words:

Warnings

  • Our own pre-made mix = sweet garbage
  • Blue [anything] = electric garbage
  • [Something]-tini = we’re in the wrong bar

Green Light

  • Fresh [citrus] juice = Warm
  • Muddled = Warmer
  • Homemade = HOT

Sure, there are exceptions but not many. We found that if the drink description resembled an expertly crafted Twitter post more than a list of ingredients, someone cared and the bartender is paying attention.

No, my dad didn’t teach me to drink, but I watched him have fun. I did learn that.



  1. WEST*SIDE! ↩

  2. Pronounced |bär•bə•kôr|. Haitians call this Twa Zetwal (three star). Barbancourt Rhum is marked with stars based on the quality and age. There’s three star which is aged four years, senk(5) etwal comes in at 8 years. There’s also a rum they call Youn Etwal which is moonshine of unknown proof (high) and not produced by the Barbancourt distillery. At least that’s what they tell me. ↩

Posted at 2:02pm and tagged with: Introductions, Albert,.

June 21st 2010

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a bartender…”

by sloganeerist

I think I was 10. Maybe 12. There was this suburban country club my family belonged to. It wasn’t swanky, but it was nice enough, especially if you were the sort of kid who burned through hobbies like a junkie through smack balloons. There was a fishing lake, hiking trails, a pool, tennis courts, a weight room, an Asteroids machine, basketball goals, and a few pool tables, among countless other summer distractions. And at the far end of the main building⎯away from the frolicking hordes of sun-cooked, unsupervised preteens⎯there was a bar filled with parents.

It was an amazing bar. All dim and smoky and forbidden. The perfect blend of low lighting, dark wood, polished brass, leather and glass. I know all this because at one end, the area behind the bar itself took an abrupt 90-degree turn and shot through a pair of saloon doors into the gameroom, where it became a snack counter. From that vantage point, if a kid were to lean far enough over the counter, tilting his head just so and supporting his weight with the bottom of his ribcage, he could see into that bar. He couldn’t see everything, but he could see, you know, stuff. Bottles. All shapes and sizes and colors of bottles. He could see endlessly billowing smoke, the flicker of a 60-inch TV, and the northernmost third of a shuffleboard table salted in sawdust.

A kid could hear stuff, too. Like music. Not the kind the lifeguards played by the pool either. More like the kind playing in your dad’s car when he picked you up on weekends. And there was laughing. Lots of it. There was even some yelling. Sometimes it was angry yelling, but usually it was followed by more laughing. Basically, leaning over that snack counter, a kid could make out just enough to know that he wanted to see more.

That’s where I met Dan. Dan was the weeknight barman. He had a beard and looked exactly like Dan Fogelberg. Seriously. Exactly like Dan Fogelberg. Even I thought the resemblance was weird, and I didn’t know who Dan Fogelberg was.

On weeknights, there usually weren’t enough people around to justify staffing both a bartender and a snack bar attendant, so Dan pulled double-duty. He’d line up a round of Bombay tonics, Dewar’s rocks, and Bartles & Jaymes coolers on the parent side, and then he’d swing around the corner to the gameroom side to hang with us kids. About 95% of the time, “us kids” meant me.

He’d ask me about school, sports, my favorite albums. He’d listen to me lament Tigers basketball losses, or ruminate on how both bands were great, but that The Police were ultimately superior to Def Leppard, and The Cars were better than either of them. I told him about that time in kindergarten when I accidentally punched a girl in the face while fooling around, and about that other time when I fell into a hotel swimming pool at Disney World and was within mere seconds of death when I saw my dad’s arm come through the gin-clear water to yank me out.

Then a sing-songy voice would call Dan’s name and he’d disappear around the corner again, long enough to flip the caps off a few more Budweisers.

He showed me bar tricks. Not sucker tricks. The cool sciencey ones. Like the one where you balance a fork and a spoon on the outside of a pint glass using a toothpick, and then you set the toothpick on fire, and it burns to the edge of the glass and goes out. And then, it doesn’t fall off.

Years later I would spend one awesome/terrible decade behind bars of my own, hastily layering Russian Quaaludes and four-bottling1 Long Island Teas for unappreciative college kids. All the time, I was eager to get back to the other end of the bar so I could hear the rest of a Vietnam story or rejoin the Greatest Switch Hitters of All-Time discussion with men twice my age. In those 10 years, I made an incalculable number of drinks, even experimented with a few of my own. But what I loved about bartending wasn’t the drink-making aspect. It was the conversation.

As an adult, over half of what I know and believe is a result of that decade I spent studying the poetry of human dialogue. When I was ten, I thought Dan The Weeknight Bartender was hanging out with me. In fact, it was the other way around. At the very least, he needed me as much as I needed him. He distracted me from my boredom, and I distracted him from the 20 drunk assholes in his bar.

Occasionally I’ll still show Dan’s bar trick to anybody interested enough to let me. I still don’t understand the physics of it. Maybe you can explain it to me. Remind me to show it to you sometime.

  1. Four-bottling: With your left hand, reach into the well and simultaneously grab the triple sec and tequila bottles around their necks. With your right hand, do the same with the gin and vodka bottles. Lift all four bottles and pour into the same tall glass full of ice. You are Tom Fucking Cruise. ↩

Posted at 10:47am and tagged with: Introductions, JT,.

June 14th 2010

What am I doing here?

by irreverend

August 1995

I’m sitting on the floor of a thatch hut in the middle of a Malaysian jungle, when the tribal chief hands me a small cup of yellowish liquid. I don’t know what it is, but I’m pretty sure there will be intestinal consequences if I drink it. The friend who brought me there shoots me a look that says the consequences of refusing it will be worse. So I drink.

It’s not bad, as moonshines go. It was probably made from the root of some native tuber and fermented in the gut of a dead forest critter, but it only burns a little going down and there’s no aftertaste at all.

I’m not (yet) in the habit of collecting jungle hooch, but this stuff makes me feel like the Amerigo Vespucci of booze. I’m overcome with a compulsion to acquire a specimen and share it with the world.

I ask my friend if I can buy some to take home. She translates, and the chief grins. He pours a few ounces into a plastic bag, knots the top, and refuses to accept any payment.

Miraculously, the bag survives the canoe trip back to civilization, where I transfer its contents to a sturdier container that somehow makes it through U.S. Customs, no questions asked. I can’t wait to share it with my roommates.

Back at home, I pour a shot for each of us. We toast the chief, we clink, we swallow … and we agree that it’s the most disgusting stuff we’ve ever tasted.

Since that trip, part of the fun of traveling to faraway places has been lugging home unwieldy bottles of liquid souvenirs. Unfortunately, the drinks tend to fall into two categories:

  • God-awful when removed from their native habitat.
  • Pretty good to great, in which case they’re probably sold at Cost Plus.

Sometimes there’s a third kind, a delicious local liquor that has not yet been exported. The quest for that beverage is epic.

I don’t travel much these days (parenting a toddler means adventures of a different sort), but my liquor cabinet is full of mementos from my globetrotting days. I don’t drink much, either. But when I do, I drink for the joy of discovering new and usual flavors.

My goal at American Drink is to embark on some mixological expeditions to neglected corners of the bar, to push us away from the familiar and the comfortable in hopes of finding something different and amazing.

No passport required.

Posted at 7:29pm and tagged with: Introductions, Kim,.

June 7th 2010

Welcome to me.

by insooutso

33 notes

I hosted a foreign exchange student in high school. It was junior year, the height of hormones, and we were all excited to receive our guests on account of Lane Meyer and Monique Junot; they would all look like her, right? Anyway, we were anxious to inoculate our Dresdeners with all things Amerikanische that we decided to throw a party. We rounded up all of the fake identification we could muster and took off for the store, returning with a Suzuki Samurai’s-worth of Natural Ice and Boone’s Farm. We gleefully skipped up the steps with our booty, oblivious to the fact that our guests were sitting on the corner of the porch, bored out of their $300 Levi’s.

It went something like this:

“Here, have a drink!”
“Nein, Danke. I treenk maerteenees.”

Bettina was 15-years old.

If you don’t know me by now, you should know that I have been bartending for a little over a decade. It is not my only means of survival, but it has been my most educational - you get to see the best people at their worst and the worst people at their best. I’ve seen state representatives persuaded by lobbyists and I’ve toasted election-day results, I’ve seen wedding rings volleyed back and forth and one-knee proposals, I’ve celebrated births and I’ve drank in remembrance; the lessons I have learned have been immeasurable. But this moment in time, this one moment where I clashed cultures and cocked my head at a spry young fifteen-year girl old who casually, but politely, said, “I drink martinis” impacted the way I thought about drinking more than any Friday night behind the pine.

  • We should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!  - Cassio, in Othello.


Chilling some lime vodka and topping it off with some Crunk or some Drank or some Rockstar might taste like Care Bear marrow, but at the end of the night, what do you have? A fifteen-year old sugar boner and delusional expectations about Europeans going topless at their beaches and pools so they will do the same in your parents’ hot tub, right? Look beyond the sugar veneers and the camoflavor to see your drink for what it’s worth. Learn how to approach the bar and order with confidence. Seek out the past and make an old-timey cocktail like dear old dad.

Me? I am going to happily raise our son with a glass of wine at the dinner table, simply because I want him to have a palette and a sense of responsibility. Moreover, I want him to know how to operate 12 ounces before he (God help us) is old enough to operate 2000 pounds. I want him to drink for sensation, not sport, like my priggish foreign exchange student. I’m not saying the Europeans have perfected drinking or that the bulk of Americans are doing it wrong, but I see the good and the bad almost nightly. Here’s to hoping that we, on the other side of the pond, can do it better than we are right now.

That being said, it looks like I’m writing on a Tumblr with some pretty fine people. I don’t know how I ended up here, but I’m honored that I was asked to contribute. I hope we can clank a real glass in the near future.

So drink, not bombs; drive, not drunk.

Do you like that? It’s my catchphrase. I thought I needed a catchphrase. Give me a break, I’m new at this.

Posted at 12:45pm and tagged with: Introductions, James,.