Links About Drinks

• There is a lot of great writing about booze on Substack these days, and the platform’s minders seem to know it. This week Substack split out a separate sub-category and bestseller leaderboard for Wine & Spirits. This newsletter now sits in the number one spot. Thanks to all the subscribers, readers, home bar geeks, and cocktail enthusiasts who have made this newsletter a success for nearly six (!) years. (And be sure to check out all the other sharp drinks writing on the new leaderboard.)

• Does Tony, the new Anthony Bourdain biopic, make the case for dive bars, as this Wine Enthusiast essay suggests? I’m not sure I’d say that’s the movie’s main lesson. But I liked the film and recommend it even if you’re not a Bourdain superfan. It’s about the jagged aimlessness of youth, writerly ambition, and the pleasures of beachside New England summers. Not surprisingly, given its subject, it is also a good food film. In particular, it captures the tactile satisfaction of making something with your hands, of learning to manipulate the physical world in aesthetically pleasing ways. That’s obviously part of the pleasure of making cocktails too: When you start, there is nothing, or at least nothing but raw material. And then there is something, hopefully something tasty, pleasant, and beautiful that you can share with a friend.

• The New York Times on living in what should probably be called the Late Spritz Era: “Tirelessly promoted by spirits companies, premium-priced aperitifs are more popular in the United States than they’ve ever been, with sales that grew by about 18 percent a year, by volume, from 2018 to 2023. Spritzes have gone so mainstream that you can get a Strawberry Spritz or a Peach Bellini Spritz at the Cheesecake Factory.” I’m not much of a spritz drinker, but one of my all-time favorite newsletter cocktails is a funny riff on the drink, the Aperol Schlitz, which is basically an Aperol sour topped with basic lager. (Sadly, Schlitz is no longer in production, but you can use Yuengling instead.) I make this all the time for people, sometimes without telling them what it is, and they are always surprised at how much they like it, especially when they find out what’s in it. The Aperol Schlitz, in turn, bears a surprising resemblance to…

• The Spaghett, a mix of beer and Aperol that also recently received the Gray Lady treatment. All of these drinks exist in a sort of complicated family relationship, with various offspring and second marriages and long-lost brothers and cousins far-removed. Which is true for a lot of popular drinks, especially if they persist over time, like this month’s focus, the Zombie…

Zombie Guys With Zombie Rigs

We’ve spent the last month looking at Zombies. Along with the Mai Tai, it’s one of the tiki tradition’s two most important drinks. Invented in 1934, it’s still in circulation today as an object of cult devotion and borderline obsession.

The Zombie is a great drink. But it has a problem. It’s rather complex and unwieldy to make.

In some ways, this is also its strength, quite literally in the case of the whopping four ounces of rum it spreads across three different bottles. But determining which three bottles of rum to use requires some choices and, depending on where you’re located, may also involve a bit of hunting to track down.

Beyond the rum, you have to gather another half dozen or so ingredients, depending on how you count. There’s falernum, a spicy liqueur that you can and should buy, and grenadine, which you can buy but shouldn’t. There’s a bit of absinthe, plus Angostura aromatic bitters, which hopefully you, as a Cocktail Guy (gender neutral), already stock. There’s fresh lime juice that you’ll need to squeeze yourself.

And then there’s the Don’s Mix, a long-secret combo of grapefruit juice and cinnamon syrup that you should probably make yourself and keep as two separate ingredients.1

The Zombie, at least in its original incarnation, is a project drink, a commitment, an all-evening affair. It is the sort of drink you build a bar around, and perhaps a lifestyle. It’s the sort of cocktail that calls for an entire dedicated space.

This sort of drink attracts a specific Type of Guy (gender neutral).

Like the Fernet Guy, the Zombie Guy is a well-known stock character. The Zombie Guy is the sort of technically minded fella who enjoys maintaining something he semi-seriously refers to as “my Zombie rig.”

He probably has an awesome home theater that takes at least 30 minutes to turn on, and even longer to tell you about it.2

But what if you want to make Zombies, yet don’t want to go full Zombie Mode? What if you want the drink without the lifestyle buy-in? What if you just want to press play on a Bluetooth speaker? What if you are the sort of mostly normie, well-adjusted cocktail aficionado who shudders when you hear the slightly-too-excited words “wanna see my rig?”

Fortunately, there are people who have attempted to solve this problem, including some of the foremost tiki authorities of our age.

Both Jeff “Beachbum” Berry and Martin Cate of Smuggler’s Cove have developed simplified, shortened Zombie recipes that are somewhat less ingredient intensive, and yes, perhaps somewhat less complex as well, but no less perfectly balanced.

So for our final installment in this series, we are going to look at three different simplified, easier-to-execute Zombies.

The first two come from well-known tiki pros who have spent their lives and careers mastering the drink. One of them strips a few elements and changes the form. The other manages to follow the five-ingredient rule while retaining the core character of the Zombie.

The third and final recipe represents my own attempt at a simplified spec. Although all three versions are quite tasty, one advantage of my recipe is that it can be made with two bottles of rum that I hope you already have, because they are part of the minimalist three- or five-bottle tiki bar (don’t call it a rig!) I recommended oh-so-many years ago.

Zombie RPG

Before we get to the recipes, I want to discuss the core elements of a Zombie.

If you’re going to make a minimalist version of a complicated cocktail, you need to determine its priority components. This is especially difficult with a drink like the Zombie, which has taken so many forms over the years; there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of variations in circulation today. Even its own creator made multiple versions.

I’ve tried a lot of them. Over the course of preparing this series this year, I’ve probably made and tasted about two dozen Zombies (some of which were repeats of the same recipe, or very slight variations).

I also made at least a half dozen versions last summer, which is when I realized I would need an entire month to write about the drink.

Over the last year or so, I’ve also consumed Zombies at Service Bar in Washington, DC, and Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn. (They differed, but both were excellent.) And in previous years I’ve had them at other bars around the country, places like the Roosevelt Room in Austin, Texas. Many of these were rooted in the 1934 original Don the Beachcomber spec one way or another, though even within that framework there were departures. I tried a number of ripoffs, replicas, and copycats as well.

I’ve had so many Zombies, I might as well be a Zombie myself.

At this point, I feel like I have a reasonably good sample, and a pretty strong sense of what the core Zombie flavor profile is.

And as far as I’m concerned, every Zombie needs at least four elements:

• rum,

• lime juice,

• grapefruit juice,

• and cinnamon syrup.

Put those ingredients together in a glass, and you’ll have something like a Zombie.

In Donn Beach’s original, those last two components, grapefruit and cinnamon syrup, were incorporated as a single secret ingredient known as Don’s Mix (or, occasionally, Donn’s Mix).

Contemporary recipes, including all three we will look at today, tend to break Don’s Mix into two separate parts. But if you’re a tiki purist on your own Zombie adventure, you can whip up a batch of the secret combo. Follow your bliss.

Donn Beach’s original famously called for a three-rum blend: Puerto Rican rum, dark Jamaican rum, and 151 Demerara rum.

Today, even simplified versions of the drink tend to employ at least two rums. Typically, one of those rums is a 151-proof bruiser, most often a 151 Demerara rum. But as we will see in this week’s recipes, that can vary too.

Notably, one of the better Zombie recipes I’ve tried called for a single bottle of Hamilton Beachbum Berry Zombie Rum, although that’s a bit of a cheat, since it’s a blend of eight different rum distillates. But who’s counting?

Meanwhile, the least important elements are pretty obviously the Pernod/absinthe and, even more so, the grenadine. As I noted last week, Donn Beach tinkered with his drinks obsessively, and his 1956 Zombie recipe calls for just a quarter teaspoon of grenadine. You can barely taste the stuff. The scant proportion is practically an admission that the grenadine doesn’t matter.

And then, somewhere in the middle of the priority list, there are the spice layers: Angostura Aromatic bitters and falernum. These elements add an exotic, wintry complexity to the drink; I rather like them. But as we will see, they are not strictly necessary to capture the Zombie experience.

My point is that even a simplified Zombie offers you, the humble home bartender, a lot of decisions and options. The Zombie is the Burger King burger of tropical tipples: Have it your way.

This week’s trio of Zombie recipes shows the different paths a contemporary, streamlined Zombie can take. Each one makes different choices about which ingredients to include or exclude, which rums to use, and even how to prepare the drink. All three drinks thus represent a possible endpoint on what might as well be a very, very complicated “how to make a Zombie” flowchart.

A Zombie is a sort of role-playing game in cocktail form, with different builds and classes, and different possible endings depending on the story choices you make. Yet even though two players might experience the game in very different ways, they are still exploring the same world, with the same basic rules and aesthetic character.

So let’s poke around Zombie world and see what quests we can find.

Up With Zombies

Read more

Links About Drinks

• Not many people saw One Night Only, the recent sci-fi rom-com with a premise that’s basically The Purge but for sex. And based on the tenor of the reviews, even fewer seemed to like it. But I saw it! And, like my fellow movie-pod cohosts, I mostly enjoyed it. Part of what I enjoyed was simply that it felt like it was set in a real place, rather than a windowless warehouse with a bunch of LED screens. The movie was shot in New York, using actual locations from the city, like Dante, an excellent aperitivo bar and cafe that has garnered attention for its dedicated Negroni menu. I’ve been to Dante a few times, so it was nice to see it on film. But of course it can be complicated to turn an actual working bar into a film set. Punch has a look at what’s involved.

• A new poll from Gallup shows a fairly large swing away from beer and toward spirits. Preferences for spirits are up 12 points since 2016, while beer is down seven.

• “Today, great options for cocktails abound across Europe, and yet you’ll still find questions about the difficulty of finding a good Martini…” Vinepair on why it’s still so difficult to find a good Martini on the continent. I suspect this is less true in the United Kingdom, where they seem to take Martinis very seriously.

  Cocktails With Suderman is the home bartender’s guide, with tips, tricks, techniques, theories, anecdotes, opinions, and recipes. An annual subscription is just $55, the price of a few drinks at a good cocktail bar.

Of Tiki and Trademark

From the outset, there were a lot of Zombie Copycats. Some were good drinks on their own, but many were poor imitations, since the drink’s creator, tiki godfather Donn Beach, kept the recipe secret, even from his own bartenders.

But you have to wonder: What, exactly, was Donn Beach protecting?

It was clear he had a popular drink. For a sense of how quickly and how thoroughly the Zombie took America by storm, consider that there was a bar called Zombie at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Beach had only invented the drink in 1934, making it a star attraction at his Don the Beachcomber outpost in Hollywood.

But within just a few years, the Zombie had spread to the East Coast. And it was sufficiently popular and well-known that it could serve as the name for a Midway bar at one of the biggest attractions on the planet. How many drinks have that kind of cultural currency? That shelf life? There is an argument to be made that the Zombie was the most popular drink of its era.

The World’s Fair Zombie bar was owned by a fellow named Monte Proser, a fixture in the New York nightlife scene. He later ran the Copacabana, as well as another bar that would cement his entrepreneurial interest in the Zombie: a tiki joint called Beachcomber. Yes, just like Donn Beach’s standard-setting Polynesian bar across the country.

Proser’s Beachcomber opened in 1939 and it, too, specialized in Zombies. Like Donn Beach’s Polynesian getaway, Proser’s Beachcomber put strict limits on how many a customer could purchase in one visit. Like Beach, Proser understood the allure of making a drink sound dangerous. The limit turned it into a challenge. And Beach’s most famous marketing gimmick worked for Proser, too. In a three-week period in 1940, his bar sold 25,000 Zombies, according to a citation quoting a New York Herald Tribune report from the time. Proser eventually opened Beachcomber locations in Boston, Miami Beach, and other locations, turning the Beachcomber into a chain.

Beach wasn’t happy with Proser’s copycat bar. The tiki maestro was famously secretive about his recipes, numbering bottles and creating coded mixes, like Don’s Mix, a key ingredient in his original 1934 Zombie formula, so that even his own bartenders didn’t always know what they were pouring. But while he couldn’t copyright the recipe, since collections of ingredients and simple instructions are generally considered facts that cannot be intellectual property, he could protect the name of his bar via trademark.

Beach sued Proser over Proser’s Beachcomber. The details are somewhat fuzzy, and I’m not aware of any specific record of the legal filing, but the best information I know of comes from this Tiki Central reconstruction of the legal battle between Beach and Proser.

Tellingly, it starts with Beach calling East Coast newspaper gossip columnists to complain about Proser ripping off his ideas; ever the marketer, Beach knew that he was waging a battle for minds as well as court judgments. And for those who don’t remember the age before mobile phones and internet videoconferencing, this was back when long-distance calls were extraordinarily expensive.1 Beach was serious about defending his work.

What’s known is that by 1942, Beach had won the suit. The New York outpost of Proser’s Beachcomber shut down, although Proser continued to liberally borrow Beach’s ideas in various enterprises along the East Coast, as Jeff “Beachbum” Berry writes, thousands of miles from Beach and his lawyers. The world was bigger then, and just as long-distance calls were more costly, so, one imagines, was long-distance law.

It’s a fascinating episode given the profusion of Zombie copycats, the dozens if not hundreds of Zombie-inspired cocktails that still carry the name today, often with little to no relationship to the original, several of which we looked at last week. Today, there’s an entire Greek Island of Zombie riffs, at least one of which apparently uses jam, which is definitely not on the list of original, authentic, Beach-approved ingredients.

But it’s especially intriguing given that Donn Beach himself appears to have made multiple versions of his most famous creation, tinkering with the formula for decades after releasing the original out into the world. When he took Proser to court, it wasn’t really the specific recipe he was trying to protect. It was the concept, the aura, the hedonic Beachcomber lifestyle.

And, well, okay, probably the specific bar name too.

But it tells you something about the difficult-to-pin-down, ever-changing nature of one of the most famous tiki drinks of all time: The Zombie was a vibe, not a recipe. Like a hit song, everyone wanted to make a remix. Including the drink’s own creator.

So this week, as our month of Zombies continues, I want to look at a pair of Zombie iterations that, as best as anyone can tell, come from Donn Beach himself.

Both of these drinks date to the 1950s, and while both depart from the original specifications (a bit lighter and juicier in one case and somewhat differently tuned in the other) they are both exceptional examples of the form. They are (probably) Donn Beach drinks. And they taste like it.

Notably, both have somewhat less rum than the 1934 original. They are not exactly low-ABV. But if you’re looking for relatively less boozy, yet still authentic, Zombies, these are both worth checking out.

Zombie Barbecue?

The first of these variations dates to 1950. It’s lighter than the 1934 original, and juicier, with some lemon juice that makes it a bit suspect.

Was this really a Donn Beach creation? Probably. Most likely. If you had to bet. But we don’t know for sure.

What we do know is that it’s delicious.

Read more

Links About Drinks

• We all know about the Chartreuse shortage. Several years ago, the monks who make the high-proof, herbal booze decided to limit production, resulting in shortages and high prices in some states. In Philadelphia, bartenders have apparently responded by hoarding the stuff, and in some cases by making their own. If you’re struggling to find Chartreuse, you can blend a close-enough substitute on your own at home, and it’s even less expensive, per ounce, than the real stuff. But I’ve started to see bottles back on shelves, especially in the greater Boston area, sometimes for quite reasonable prices. The make-your-own strategy might not be necessary much longer. (Relatedly: Bloomberg reports that Chartreuse is now a sort of liquid luxury good in Paris.)

• Earlier this summer, while preparing for a Slate piece on the American Founding and cocktails, I read Cocked and Boozy, Brooke Barbier’s new history of America’s origins through the lens of booze. Barbier argues that America’s origins can’t really be understood without understanding the country’s relationship with alcohol. Booze of all kinds, but especially rum, was a central player in the drama of the American creation. This week, at his newsletter, drinks writer Henry Jeffreys makes a similar argument about the entirety of human civilization. Some of his arguments about alcohol’s effects on socialization will be familiar to readers of this newsletter; cocktails can help solve the party crisis. But I was especially taken with his linkage of art and literature to alcohol. If current drinking trends continue, I expect we will see more arguments along these lines.

• At the same time, you can go a bit overboard with this sort of thing. In a social media video, for example, Esquire Editor-In-Chief Michael J. Sebastian makes the case that hangovers are objectively good for you. I wouldn’t go that far. On the other hand, this month’s cocktail, the Zombie, might not exist without it. According to legend, the drink was created for a hungover businessman who later said it made him feel like “the living dead.” And the drink’s infamous two-per-customer limit, while not unreasonable given that it originally contained four ounces of rum, was a sort of winking test of one’s boozy mettle. Speaking of Zombies…

The Legend of Zombie Island

I have heard tell of a mysterious Greek isle that I have come to think of as Zombie Island.

That’s not its official name, of course, and, rather sadly, I’ve never even been there myself. But one of my closest friends spends a couple months there each year. In his telling, nearly every bar and many restaurants serve something called a Zombie. And every single one of them is different.

Sometimes the differences are subtle. Sometimes they are not. But the Zombies of Zombie Island are, to some degree or another, house signatures, custom creations born not, in most cases, from studying tiki history and adapting Donn Beach’s original recipe, but from the idea of the Zombie, the icon, the legend.

Most of these Zombies are based in rum and fruit juice and sweetener of some sort. But other than that, they share very little of the original drink’s specific DNA. Rather it’s more of a cultural affinity. They are ideological fellow travelers, co-religionists practicing the Way of the Zombie.

So a Zombie from Zombie Island might contain passion fruit, or pineapple, or papaya juice. Bitters and falernum, the key spice notes in Donn Beach’s original recipe, may or may not appear.

Even stranger things might be incorporated as well. I’ve seen a photo of a menu from one of the island’s bars that lists a Zombie…with “jam.”

There is, to be clear, no jam in a Donn Beach Zombie.

The rum is up for debate too. Beach’s original was built on a three-rum blend of gold Puerto Rican rum, dark Jamaican rum, and 151 Demerara rum. A Zombie on Zombie Island, in contrast, might have light rum, or dark rum, or some combination; it might have some sort of 151-proof rum, which might or might not be incorporated as a float. At some Zombie Island bars, the rum might be free poured rather than measured, along with the juice, so there’s no way to really know exactly how much rum is in any given drink or how potent it is. It might be four ounces, like Donn Beach’s original Zombie, or it might be less. It might even be more.

At least this is what I hear. It’s a legend. I haven’t been there. I don’t even know the real name of the island. It’s all Greek to me.

But as legends go, it’s plausible enough. The Zombies of Zombie Island are echoes of echoes, stories told about mysterious shadows on the wall, local evolutionary tributaries that have departed from the main line. In this way, they resemble so many Zombies throughout history, even those contemporary to, and in competition with, Donn Beach himself.

Last week, we looked at Donn Beach’s original Zombie recipe, some of the questions that recipe raises, and the specific question of which bottles of rum one might choose to fill it out.

If you’re new to the drink, that’s where you should start. Beach’s version is now widely accepted as the canonical version of the Zombie, arguably the best version, or close, and certainly the recipe and conceptual breakthrough from which all others flow.

And long before my friend started telling tales of Zombie Island, there were many, many others. So this week we are going to look at that drink’s early imitators.

We will examine recipes for three different drinks that bill themselves as Zombies, all of which date to the 1930s or 1940s, and all of which depart markedly from Donn’s original formula.

The first two on our journey are best understood as historical curiosities that help one understand what a Zombie is, as well as what it isn’t.

A third variation departs from Beach’s formula in many ways, but makes for a truly tasty tipple that’s juicier, milder, and perhaps more accessible than Beach’s spicy, complex, almost fiendishly intense cocktail. If you just want to make the best recipe from this collection, skip to the very end.

The fact that there were multiple Zombie copycats in circulation a decade after the drink’s creation tells you just how far and wide the Zombie had spread. The significant variations in the recipes, meanwhile, tell you just how little agreement there was about what the drink actually was.

From its earliest days, this was a drink with legends, lore, and a cult-like following. But as often happens, despite their devotion, the cultists couldn’t quite agree on what, exactly, they believed.

ZombieCats?

One of the most amusing things about these Zombie Copycats (ZombieCats?) is that they were often proffered by people who were more than a little bit skeptical of the drink and the wild-eyed mythology that had risen up around it.

Specifically, people like David Embury.

Longtime readers of this newsletter know that David Embury is this newsletter’s spiritual inspiration. Embury was a tax lawyer by trade, but he greatly enjoyed cocktails as well. So as he traveled, he obtained recipes from bars and restaurants, eventually collecting them all in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, one of mid-century America’s most important cocktail books.

Embury’s book was an attempt to systematize and translate the era’s cocktails for home bartenders; he was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable amateur writing for other home bar enthusiasts. He wanted to help improve the quality of at-home cocktails. His goal was to move beyond mere recipes; he wanted to teach people how to think about drinks, and how to make them well.

So it is quite funny to read his entry on the Zombie and see that it is more of an extended argument with its existence.

In his entry on the drink, he grumbled about its multi-rum construction. (“The multiplicity of various rums and other ingredients is an offense against the first principles of drink mixing.”) He griped about the inclusion of 151 rum. (“Adds nothing to the flavor of the drink.”) He complained about the use of mysterious secret ingredients. (“All this mystery, of course, is calculated to inspire curiosity and thus advertise the drink.”)

And he threw up his hands in despair at Donn’s legendary two-per-customer limit, seeing it for the cynical marketing trick that it was. The Zombie, Embury famously declared, was “undoubtedly the most overadvertised, overemphasized, overexalted, and foolishly feared drink whose claims to glory ever assaulted the eyes and ears of the gullible American public.” In so many ways, Embury had the Zombie pinned down.

He also lamented that the drink’s construction was notoriously unstable: “Twenty different bars serving this drink will probably put out eighteen to twenty different versions of it.”

Still, he allowed that the drink was “not bad at all.” He then offered a recipe that he admitted was an approximation.

But that recipe raises almost as many questions as it answers.

Read more

Links About Drinks

• When I recently visited the new Vegas cocktail lounge from the Death & Co. team, Close Company, it was conspicuously 90s themed. This obviously appealed directly to me as an extremely elderly Elder Millennial. This sort of generational targeting of somewhat older, middle aged consumers appears to be an increasingly common strategy for bars. The Wall Street Journal reports that as younger consumers shy away from bars, Gen Xers still “want to party, and they want to do it on their own terms. Watering holes are programming their calendars accordingly, with nostalgia theme nights and parties that end way before midnight.” As a former night owl who has suddenly and quite unexpectedly become an early bird in my mid-40s, but still likes bars…I feel seen.

• Relatedly, Ginia Bellafante of The New York Times takes a look at what’s lost when the masses cut back on drinking. There are some familiar themes here, particularly about the social cost of a less boozy world. Alcohol is civilization’s oldest and most reliable social lubricant. Drinking isn’t required to enjoy the company of others, but a world with less drinking is almost definitionally a world with less sociality. That’s the world we are increasingly living in. Cocktails can help solve the party crisis. Bellafante reports from Louisville, Kentucky, probably the American city that stands to lose most from declines in drinking. I spent several years of my life about an hour away, near Lexington, and I return to the area every few years. The last time I was in Louisville, it was clear that the city had wholly committed to bourbon tourism. From the airport through downtown and even out into the surrounding farmland, the entire area had been remade as a sort of bourbon Disneyland; it was, as they say, the place’s entire personality. So as whiskey declines, the city isn’t just losing jobs, but charitable giving, social connection, and a larger sense of purpose. The story ends by citing a recent academic paper arguing that most alcohol research has a “problem with pleasure.” Those looking to address that problem should perhaps consider this week’s drink, which offers no shortage in that department…

The Living Dead

From the very beginning, the Zombie was a mystery.

Not even Trader Vic knew what was in the drink. In one of his books, the tiki pioneer gives grudging credit to his rival, Don the Beachcomber, for creating the drink, and acknowledges its popularity. Vic admits that he doesn’t know the true formula. He then offers his own spec for “Zombies” in the form of a massive punch-sized version, noting that he presents a single-serve recipe elsewhere.

“There has been much argument about the origination of the Zombie,” Vic writes, “but credit should be given where credit is due. Don the Beachcomber, of Hollywood, Chicago, and anywhere in the South Pacific, is the originator of this famous drink. Only he can give you the original recipe, but I can give you my version.”

Vic’s version is a fine drink in its own right, but it’s only a loose imitation of what turned out to be the real recipe for Don the Beachcomber’s most famous creation. Don was famously secretive, sometimes hiding his recipes even from his own employees, although history shows that some managed to uncover the truth. Beach even fought for his drinks in court. (More on that in a future edition.)

By the 1960s and 1970s, the dark ages of tiki, the recipe had become a total grab bag, unrecognizable even from drink to drink at the same bar. Tropical bartenders might serve you a Zombie when asked, but what you’d receive had no relationship to any history or recipe; typically you’d get some semi-random combination of rums and fruit juices, plus a float of 151. Ask for two Zombies in a row at the same beach bar, and you might get two totally different drinks. The Zombie wasn’t a specific drink with a specific flavor or character; it was just a lot of rum, or rums, with a random assortment of juices and sugar to mix things up.

The original recipe for the Zombie wouldn’t become public knowledge until it was published by Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the great savior of modern tiki. Berry, acting as a sort of tiki-recipe detective, uncovered the original 1934 recipe in a private notebook kept by a Don the Beachcomber bartender. At last the truth was out. The world finally knew what Trader Vic didn’t: what a Zombie really was.

Mostly. Sort of. Kinda.

Today, you can find Beach’s original Zombie recipe in any number of books and tiki guides, or even with a simple Google search. But it’s far from the only drink that goes by that name. There are other Zombies, spanning decades, and they have their fans and partisans. David J. Montgomery’s book Zombie Horde collects dozens of recipes for the drink, and even that book doesn’t list them all.

These alternative specifications come from multiple bars and bartenders across many decades. Some later recipes are even credited to Donn Beach himself, often with the note that he was always tinkering with his own drinks. As you sip any of these, you might find yourself thinking, it’s a good drink…but is it really a Zombie?

That’s always the question with this cocktail. For as popular as the Zombie is, and as well-known as the original recipe has become, the precise details of its preparation are always up for debate. The original spec calls for three types of rum, all of which can be argued, as well as falernum, bitters, grenadine, absinthe or Pernod/Pastis, and lime juice.

And then there is a special-to-Don the Beachcomber ingredient known as Don’s Mix. 1 Today, thanks to Berry’s detective work, we know that Don’s Mix was a combo of grapefruit juice and cinnamon syrup. Case closed, right? Not so fast.

The discovery of that single secret just produced more questions: What type of grapefruit? Should it be fresh-squeezed or store-bought? How should one make the cinnamon syrup? And should the ingredient be pre-combined for a single pour, as in the secret ingredient employed in original Beachcomber bars, or separated into two bottles?

The Zombie is no longer a mystery in the way it was before Berry unearthed the original recipe. But every single ingredient is up for grabs in some way. Okay, maybe every ingredient except the lime juice. Pretty much everyone agrees that you should use fresh-squeezed lime juice. One ingredient down, many more to go.

So throughout the month of August, we are going to examine the Zombie and its myriad mysteries. After all, the brutal heat of late summer does make August something of a zombie month.

Over the course of this series, we will look at different Zombie recipes throughout history, and different ways to make the drink’s signature ingredients. We will consider which Zombies are the best, and how many ingredients one really needs to make the drink. We will probably discuss tributaries and iterations of the Zombie, some of which don’t carry the Zombie name but arguably have more to do with the Zombie than some drinks branded with the scarlet Z.

We might not get to every Zombie-related recipe, ingredient, or historical controversy; this is a newsletter, not a full-fledged Zombie encyclopedia. But we will cover a broad swath of the questions surrounding the drink. There will be at least one, and sometimes several, Zombie or Zombie-related recipes in every edition.

I won’t promise to solve all Zombie-related mysteries, because history, especially bar history, is rarely easy to pin down. But we are going to explore the territory, and consider the possibilities.

And this week, we will start with the most important of them all, at least to modern tiki enthusiasts: the rum.

Rum for Cover

If you know one thing about the Zombie, it’s that it has a lot of rum. Four ounces, to be precise, at least in what is understood to be its purist, original form, including a full ounce of 151 proof rum. This is a big, boozy drink, and that booziness is part of its legend.

The drink’s creation story goes like this: One day a man walked into Donn Beach’s newly opened bar. The man was hungover, and he had a business trip that he needed to perk up for. So Beach whipped up something new and special on the spot, a sort of hangover cure that was intended to work by re-inebriating the consumer.

Weeks later, the man came back, and when he was asked to report on how the drink worked, he said it made him feel like the “living dead.”

Is this story true? There is some reason to doubt it; even a bartender as skilled as Beach doesn’t usually pour an exquisitely balanced nine-ingredient drink on the spot, perfect on the first draft.

But however it happened, the Zombie—Donn Beach’s most famous and enduring creation and one of tiki’s signature cocktails—was born. This was long before George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead or the zombie-horror pop universe we know today. Indeed, it was arguably the birth of the zombie as an American cultural totem, for the drink quickly spread beyond Beach’s barstools.

Part of its appeal was its strength, and the danger that signaled. Beach famously limited customers to two per sitting, printing that limit on the menu, since it was so strong. The explicit limit gave the drink the allure of the forbidden, like when a parent prohibits a child from watching an R-rated movie. People wanted to try it just to see what the fuss was all about.

And thus the drink was copied, often badly, these copies spread throughout the country. Along with the Mai Tai, the Zombie become one of the touchstones of tiki culture, a sort of founding document. If you want evidence that the Zombie still lives large today, consider that there are not one but two different brands making Zombie-specific glassware, from both Berry and Libbey. The Zombie is a brand, an IP, a franchise—practically a lifestyle—unto itself.

Age of Rumpires

The drink’s mammoth, boozy intensity remains part of its contemporary appeal, and it will indeed wreck you if you attempt to drink more than a couple of them. But “it has a hell of a lot of rum” is also the worst reason to try a Zombie. There are easier ways to kill brain cells with ethanol, if that’s really your aim. To make a proper Zombie, you’ll need a bottle of 151 rum on hand; you could just drink it straight. (I don’t recommend this.)

No, the real reason to try a Zombie is that it’s a complex masterpiece, a true “rhum rhapsody,” as Beach famously called his creations, with three distinct styles of rum blended into an elegant liquid symphony.

But knowing the style of rum doesn’t tell you exactly which rum to use. There are many different ways to interpret that glorious three-rum blend, including at least one single bottle that does it all. And not all of those interpretations require a full four ounces to do their work.

So let’s look at the original 1934 Don the Beachcomber recipe, talk about some of the questions even a fairly strict historical recipe raises, and then discuss different ways to interpret the rum calls, including a single bottle option that only requires two ounces of rum, and a “blend your own” version that lets you make some choices (within limits) from what you have on your shelf.

What’s In Your Heaaaad?

Beach’s 1934 spec calls for nine ingredients, possibly 10 if you think of the Don’s mix (cinnamon syrup + grapefruit) as two separate ingredients:

Read more

Links About Drinks

• Kara Newman on our Martini optimization moment: “In a moment where everything seems to be relentlessly optimized, from hacks to maximize workplace productivity to Oura Ring to track fitness and tweak sleep quality (sorry, “sleepmaxxing”) to so-called “looksmaxxing,” it’s no wonder this approach has also been applied to making drinks. And the ever-customizable Martini is front and center in this movement, with entire bars dedicated to its refinement.” This is a significant part of what’s drawn me to the Martini over the years: There are better versions and worse versions, certainly, but there’s not One True Spec to rule them all. Even before you get to variations like the Arsenic and Old Lace or the Tuxedo No. 2, the standard gin+dry vermouth+maybe orange bitters formula offers endless customization just in terms of ratios and specific gin-vermouth pairings. I’ve had successful versions at 2:1, 1:1, 3:1, 5:2, and more. Folks, I’m telling you…the Martini…it’s a pretty good drink.

• While we are on the topic of Martinis: For his newsletter, Robert Simonson got Rutgers classics professor Lowell Edmunds, author of Martini, Straight Up, to write about the current state of the Martini.

• At the same time, one insight from this new report on gin in the U.K. is that apart from the Martini (and the Negroni), interest in gin itself, especially niche craft gin, is on the wane, thanks in part to a surfeit of new small brands on the market. How many gins do you really need? I like options, so I often keep about a dozen around, sometimes more if I’m experimenting, but that’s obviously somewhat excessive. Even I, of the dozen-bottle-gin-rack, have argued home bartenders can easily get away with just a single, highly versatile bottle of gin.

• Are we drinking Champagne wrong? In Air Mail, Jay McInerney makes the case: “To my mind, champagne is more or less an everyday beverage, the perfect aperitif. Its acidity and natural carbonation wake up the palate, and while I commend the martini as a starter, especially if it’s served in the classic, stemmed glass, it dulls rather than enlivens the taste buds. James Bond may be best known for his martinis, but in the Ian Fleming novels that introduced him to the world, he was just as likely to order champagne—usually Dom Pérignon.” My question is: Are we really even drinking Champagne? Speaking of bubbly drinks…

Rumshoe Detectives

Over the past several weeks, we have looked at a series of tiki drinks that work from the same baseline idea—a hefty pour of rum or rums, plus lime and a combo of sweeteners that includes honey, falernum, and sometimes passion fruit.

They’re big, boozy drinks with stacked layers of spice and tropical flavor, the sort of warm weather, poolside indulgences made for the heat of deep summer.

This week we are going to look at one more variation on the same idea. But this one is less intense, with a smaller portion of rum and a lightly bubbly top. It’s a milder, gentler form of tiki, a tiki drink with the volume turned down.

This drink dates back to 1937, and it’s an original part of the Don the Beachcomber canon, a rip-roaring tropical adventure drink from tiki’s foundational era.

Like most tiki tipples, the mix consists of rum, lime, sweetener, and spice. That’s the Planter’s Punch formula, and the key to all tiki drinks, really. Tiki is just the Planter’s Punch model repeated over and over again, like the verse-chorus-bridge structure of pop songs.

Those structures shift of course, with the evolution of consumer taste and the arrival of new technology; modern pop tends emphasize shorter songs that get to catchy hooks before the 30-second mark in order to boost streaming plays; they’re the mini cocktails of music. But even still, the format remains fundamentally the same.

The same is true with tiki.

You can make the formula incredibly complex and elaborate, as in last week’s 11-ingredient monster, or comparatively minimalist, as in its four-ingredient counterpart. Tiki doesn’t necessarily require complexity, but it often invites it.

Rumber One With a Bullet

This week’s drink sits somewhere between those two on the complexity scale, with seven ingredients.

Read more

Links About Drinks

• We are leaving the Margarita and entering the Martini and Old Fashioned era, according to new data published in BevNet, which shows that Martinis are up and Margaritas are down. Look, I’m a fan of Margaritas. How could I not be? Margaritas are amazing. But the drinks that consume my mindshare these days are Martinis, Old Fashioneds, and Negronis. (An entire month of Negronis is coming soon.) It’s nice to see I’m not the only one.

• Speaking of Martinis, Punch makes the argument for the Arsenic & Old Lace, a Martini with absinthe and crème de violette. I wrote about that drink back in 2022, and have been making them more often over the past year. This is a drink that deserves a comeback!

• I’ve never made, or had, a Dirty Spritz, perhaps because I’m not on TikTok. I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

• Inside Hook takes us inside a day at Death & Co.’s original New York location. If you’ve worked in a service industry job, you won’t be too surprised by anything here: Prep starts around noon, the bar opens in the evening, last call is around 12:45 in the morning, and it takes an hour or so to close everything down. Years ago, I worked at a seafood restaurant in Florida that was open for lunch and also served drinks late into the night; during the summer tourist season, the place had staff working nearly round the clock. What struck me about the Death & Co. schedule, however, was how much it resembled my own current routine for when I have people over for drinks. It’s obviously not quite as intensive, but I tend to start late morning with syrups, then I spend an hour or so squeezing fresh juice in the afternoon, and in the final hour before people arrive I create a sort of “cockpit” layout where I can easily reach all the bottles and ingredients, with bottles mostly grouped together by drink.

• This summer marks the 10-year anniversary of Planteray (formerly Plantation) O.F.T.D., a high-proof blended rum that was developed by a cohort of well-known spirits experts and has become beloved by tiki heads. Matt “Rum Wonk” Pietrek marks the occasion with the story of how it all came together. I’ve sometimes neglected this bottle, but one of this week’s drinks gave me an opportunity to use it, albeit in a perhaps unorthodox way…

Rum-pelstiltskin?

Last week, we looked at an old tiki standard that seemed to ask the question: Is three ounces of rum too much?

This week we will look at a related cocktail that ups the ante: it has three and a half ounces of rum, including a hefty pour of 151 rum. I’m telling you, folks, tiki drinks don’t kid around.

We are also going to look at another drink that takes last week’s formula and simplifies it slightly, reducing the ingredient count and calling for just a single bottle of rum. This streamlined variation has only—only!—three ounces of rum, but you should consider using something higher proof, which is to say: This one isn’t kidding around either.

Taken together, what these drinks demonstrate are two different approaches to mid-century tiki iterations.

Both start with a Don the Beachcomber original and then take the core recipe in either a maximalist or minimalist direction.

If you want a casual shorthand, you can think of these approaches as either MOAR TIKI or LESSZZ TIKI. You’re either tiki-maxxing, with more rum, more juice, and more sweetener, in an 11-ingredient tiki behemoth—or I suppose, tiki minning, with less of all those things, in a drink that does its work with just four ingredients.

More or less—moar or lesszz?—both versions are quite tasty.

The Rite Stuff

Let’s start with the minimalist approach.

It’s pretty and simple. It looks like this:

Last week’s drink didn’t quite follow our five-ingredient rule. But this one does, with an ingredient to spare. And it gets there by way of a very simple, very obvious trick: It combines two rums into one. It also cuts some of the syrup, making for a cleaner, more direct drink with more conventionally balanced proportions: ¾ ounce of lime to ¾ ounce of sweetener (a combo of passion fruit syrup and falernum). This is a rare tiki drink that does its work with just four ingredients.

Tiki maniacs sometimes like to say that what one rum can do, two can do better. This drink makes the opposite argument. It’s also a good starter tiki drink for folks who find long ingredient lists intimidating.

Read more

Links About Drinks

• The World Cup has been a boon to American bars: “The 11 host states have seen a 14.21% year-over-year keg increase in bars and restaurants, while even non-host states are recording a 6.21% increase since last year. Beer growth was particularly good in western host markets like Seattle and California, where bottle gains topped 33%,” reports Inside Hook. There’s probably a lesson here that goes beyond soccer fandom. Just as movie theaters have discovered that the way to get people to come out for films is to make them extravagant special events—you don’t just see The Odyssey, you see it in glorious IMAX 70mm, if you can find a theater—bars are going to have to discover how to make drinking with pals a special event.

• We have entered the age of little cocktails, miniature, single-sip drinks that are designed for a single taste. The most famous of these is probably Tayēr+ Elementary’s One Sip Martini. But I’ve started to see more and more of these drinks, including at some places that you wouldn’t think of as particularly cocktail focused, like All Purpose in D.C. And now Somssi, recently opened in New York, apparently has an entire menu section of “little beverages.” I appreciate the sizing options that can come from batched cocktails. But at some point, we probably need to acknowledge that these are just…shots.

• Ryan ‘Mr Lyan’ Chetiyawardana, the bar maestro behind Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., Seed Library in New York, and other acclaimed bars, has a new podcast. There are a lot of booze-related podcasts out there, but this one records in front of a live audience, and the audience is be served snacks and drinks to go with the show. So it’s not just a conversation, it’s a sort of live-to-tape cocktail party. Sounds fun, and probably quite expensive to produce.

• Speaking of cocktail parties: Friend of the newsletter Emma Camp is so good at hosting cocktail parties that he has been labeled an “apex predator” of hosting. “Camp says hosting is like ‘directing a play.’ She pictures the blocking of the stage: ‘people are gonna sit over here, and I have this big island in my kitchen, they’re gonna be standing by the island, almost like I’m a bartender, and I’m gonna be serving the drinks to them this way, and I wanna have it in this glass…’” As a former theater kid, I concur.

Under My Rummmmbrella

This week’s cocktail has three ounces of rum.

That’s a lot! One might reasonably argue that three ounces of rum is too much for a single drink. I can see the point. But I disagree. First, because you can always split it with someone else. And second, because this drink has loads and loads of ice and dilution, which reduces the boozy intensity. Given recent weather, and my own travels, this is quite welcome.

I spent last weekend in Las Vegas, drinking middling cocktails (like I said, I was in Vegas) and too much low-ABV beer in 110 degree heat. It felt like a journey to the underworld, and I had hoped to return to milder temperatures on the East Coast. But although it wasn’t quite as scalding, it was still pretty hot. So I wanted a drink that made copious use of ice.

That’s how I settled on this week’s cocktail, an old tiki drink from the genre’s godfather, Don the Beachcomber.

It’s blended with about a cup of ice to start, giving it the nice, icy feel of a frozen slushy. And then it also has a bunch more small ice pebbles loaded in, which helps keep it cool and also increases the dilution, which is important for a drink that has three ounces of rum.

This technique—blending with ice and then adding even more ice afterwards—is somewhat unusual and perhaps even unorthodox in some tiki circles. But it keeps strong drinks from being too overpowering. And it keeps you from being too hot. Which makes it ideal for a mid-July heat wave, whether or not you’ve just been to Vegas.

The other thing to know about this drink is that, like so many of Don the Beachcomber’s tiki masterpieces, it’s fundamentally a Daiquiri, or perhaps a Planter’s Punch—which, as we’ve discussed, is really just a spiced Daiquiri. And if you look back at the Planter’s Punch, which I have long argued is the ur-tiki drink, the root of so many of well-known tiki classics and tropical B-sides, you’ll see that many popular recipes call for…three ounces of rum.

You could say, hey, what a coincidence! But it’s not a coincidence. Even tiki drinks, as anarchic and overstuffed as they seem, have repeating structures and formulas that can be traced back through history, and that can help you understand how these complicated, multipart drinks work.

So this week, we’re going to look under the hood of a somewhat lesser known tiki drink that was lost for many years but rescued as part of the tiki revival.

• We’ll look at the long-lost rum that was a key ingredient.

• We’ll talk about the role of ice and dilution, especially in contrast with the often high levels of sweetness that tiki drinks tend to have relative to classic cocktails. W will show how ice can not only manage booze in cocktails, but sweetness; there will be some measurements.

• And we’ll discuss how this drink fits into and exemplifies basic tiki principles and the core tiki formula.

And at the end, you’ll have a delicious, icy, tropical beverage that you can not only drink, but understand.

One Punch Man

Usually we start with the background and work toward the recipe.

This week, however, we’ll start with the recipe, a six-ingredient spec that doesn’t follow our five-ingredient rule but is actually pretty easy and manageable for a tiki drink.

And then we’ll analyze and break it down from there.

Read more

Links About Drinks

• “The thought was to have a testing ground for our barware, and to really make us understand how barware was used on a busy Saturday night.” VinePair traces the history of the great cocktail supply shop, Cocktail Kingdom, which started with a holiday pop-up suggested by the founder’s mom.

• On his Substack, Derek Thompson goes deep on the history and social utility of alcohol, and asks whether the sudden, sharp turn against it is actually grounded in science. He allows that drinking moderately has some risks—but so does a daily commute. Thompson is one of journalism’s great Big Idea Guys, and I think he makes a strong case. (He’s also a Vesper man; you can find his preferred recipe at Secret Ballot.)

• Similarly, over at The Wall Street Journal, Mary Julia Koch looks at the recent revival of temperance attitudes: “There are risks to drinking, true, but some of the alternatives carry their own costs.”

• The whiskey boom may be fading, but not for Buffalo Trace. The mega-distiller, last seen opening a distillery cafe and planning a billion-dollar expansion, just announced an adult summer camp that reportedly blends “nostalgic summer camp-inspired activities with hands-on bourbon education.”

Star Crossed Cocktails

Margaritas and strawberry Daiquiris are two of summer’s great pleasures. This week we are going to look at an old cocktail that asks: What would happen if you crossed them into a single drink?

Last week, we made historic punch for a group. So this week, we’ll make a fresh, fruity, single-serve cocktail that’s easy to whip up in a minute or two. It’s made with basic ingredients you probably already have in your home bar, and while it is not complicated, it is quite delicious. This is an ideal transition drink after the chaos and excesses of the July 4th holiday.

Our July 4th holiday was quite chaotic. It included friends, family, a last-minute downpour, and—just minutes after the fireworks concluded—an exploding patio table. As much as I enjoy watching stuff blow up to celebrate my country, this was definitely not intended. No one was hurt, but I am now in need of a new patio table.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the furniture mishaps, it was a great evening, but rather hectic. So for this week’s cocktail feature, I wanted something simple and comforting. I suspect many of you feel the same way.

This is the sort of cocktail you make for yourself and a loved one when you need a vacation after your vacation. Conveniently, it’s inspired by a luxurious weekend getaway—and a romantic old movie.

Saucy With Saucier

This drink dates back to 1951, perhaps slightly earlier, and it comes from Ted Saucier’s delightful, still-influential cocktail book, Bottoms Up.

The drink is a nod to a movie that Saucier helped arrange.

Read more

Links About Drinks:

• “America was one of alcohol’s great contributions to the world. And after its founding, the nation returned the favor—in the form of the cocktail.” For Slate, I wrote about how America gave us the cocktail, the first uniquely American culinary contribution to the world.

• And for Reason, I wrote about America’s founding drinkers, and the role of alcohol in the founding.

• Over at The Wall Street Journal, Emma Camp recommends making Philadelphia Fish House Punch for your Fourth of July celebration. Fish House Punch was the very first Fourth of July drink I recommended in this newsletter, so many years ago, and it’s still a great option—just boozy enough yet surprisingly drinkable and great for a large group. I’ve made it countless times for summer parties, and it’s always a crowd-pleaser. It also has a great backstory: Fish House Punch was the official punch of the Schuylkill Fishing Club in late 1700s Philadelphia. If you’ve never made it, it’s very much worth a go. However, for this Fourth of July weekend, I want to recommend a different Revolutionary-era punch that is similarly delicious and historically relevant…

The First Rule of Quoit Club

At the Buchanan Spring Quoit Club in the late 1780s, political discussion was “strictly” prohibited. This was despite, or perhaps because, the club included some of early America’s political luminaries, including John Marshall, who became the fourth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Rather, the Quoit Club was a place where gentlemen of stature would gather to play Quoits, a game that involved throwing “heavy, ringlike quoits at posts,” somewhat like horseshoes.

And, of course, they would drink. They drank juleps. They drank toddies. They drank rum, brandy, and sweet, spirituous, imported wine. And, most notably for our purposes, they drank a special, boozy combination of all three: Quoit Club Punch.

This year, to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, I think you should do the same.

Quoit Club Punch captures the spirit—and even the specific spirits—of the era. It’s a drink for celebration and socialization, an all-day tipple meant for sharing and relaxation. It’s a punch for sidelining the squabbles of politics. You make it, and drink it, when you wan to come together with your fellow Americans to play games, make nice, and set aside the inevitable disputes one sometimes has with their countrymen. So this Fourth of July, drink punch, have fun, watch some stuff blow up—and maybe try not to talk about politics.

Life, Liberty, and Lots of Booze

Over the past few months, as America’s 250th anniversary celebration approached, I’ve been reading about the drinking habits of America’s Founders and their contemporaries. I suppose it’s inevitable; as men enter middle age, they find themselves thinking more about history. For some it’s World War II. For me, it’s America and booze.

As I’ve been reading about early American drinking, a few big things have become clear to me.

First, the Founders and their contemporaries drank a lot. I keep coming back to a receipt detailing the lake of booze consumed by George Washington and his pals at City Tavern one night around the signing of the Constitution, showing the truly massive quantities of beer, wine, cider, and punch they consumed.

Second, booze was an integral part of their social, intellectual, and professional life. Sharing a drink, often from a communal punch bowl, was a way to gauge the character of another American (or soon-to-be American), and drinking and talking was how much of the nation’s political philosophy was hashed out.

Third, they specifically drank a lot of rum, brandy, and Madeira, a fortified wine, something like sherry, from an island off of Portugal that was popular amongst the Founders. We sometimes think of whiskey as the ur-American drink, and that would become true over time. But whiskey as we know it didn’t really rise to prominence until the 1800s, with the rise of mid-Atlantic rye.

In the years leading up to the Revolution, America was rum country, especially in Massachusetts. In 1750, Boston was just two miles long, with a population of about 15,000—what we would now think of as a quaint small town. But according to Brooke Barbier’s Cocked and Boozy, a new history of the American Revolution through the lens of booze, that single small town supported 63 distilleries, many of which distilled rum from molasses. And the rum they produced wasn’t enough to quench their thirst. They still imported more.

So this year, to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, we’re going to drink an old, Founding-era punch that combines rum, brandy, and Madeira in a single bowl.

Quoit Club Punch is simple to make, with straightforward proportions and little in the way of technique. It’s served over ice, which makes it ideal for this unusually hot weekend. And while it’s somewhat boozy when you first sip it, it will mellow and loosen over time as the ice dilutes.

Mad(eira) Men

The biggest challenge for most of you, I suspect, will be finding Madeira.

Madeira isn’t a common cocktail ingredient. But the wine, named for the island on which it’s made, was incredibly popular in early America. Some reports suggest that during the colonial era, America consumed up to 95 percent of all the wine produced on the island (although some sources suggest the figure was lower).

But it was widely consumed around the time of the Founding. “I drank Madeira at a great Rate,” John Adams once wrote in his diary, “and found no Inconvenience in it.” George Washington himself supposedly used it to toast the Declaration of Independence.

Why was Madeira so popular? The reasons come down to practicality—and politics.

During the colonial era, wine generally had to be imported, because there wasn’t much winemaking capability in America. Madeira, rather conveniently, was both durable and portable. As I noted earlier, Madeira is a fortified wine, which in this case means that grape spirit (essentially unaged brandy) is added during the production process. That makes it sturdier and less delicate than ordinary wine, and thus ideal for importation.

Madeira was also not subject to the same British taxes that other European wines were. And thus, as the Massachusetts 250th site puts it, the wine “became the drink of choice in the American colonies, untaxed, widely available, and suited to transatlantic shipping.” Then, as now, trade and taxes explain a lot of American consumption habits.

Quoit Right

The earliest known printed description of Quoit Club Punch comes from Sallie E. Marshall Hardy, in an 1896 article about John Marshall: “The following recipe for the punch used I got from an old Virginia gentleman: lemons, brandy, rum, Madeira, poured into a bowl one-third filled with ice (no water), and sweetened.”

You’ll notice there are no proportions specified. When cocktail historian David Wondrich, who is primarily responsible for bringing this punch to modern attention, first reconstructed the recipe, he called for equal parts brandy, rum, and Madeira, along with slightly smaller volumes of fresh squeezed lemon juice and sugar, which is incorporated via a lemon-peel inflected mixture known as an oleo saccharum.

Since then, he’s revised the proportions, calling for a brandy-heavy mix that merely uses Madeira as an accent. He says the revised recipe is more accurate.

But accuracy is less important than ease or pleasure, so I’m going to recommend the equal parts formula. The equal parts version also has the benefit of making the Madeira a co-equal ingredient, and a significant part of the appeal of this drink is that it’s a showcase for Madeira.

You are, of course, welcome to make the more historically accurate version. It is, as they say, a free country. And it’s your punch.

But I prefer the equal parts formulation both for taste and for the ease of scaling. Sticklers should note that I have also altered the lemon and sugar proportions very slightly for taste and scaling ease.

In America, we enjoy history, but are not always bound to it. We make things our own. Happy birthday to America, and happy Fourth of July to all my wonderful readers.

Punch Out

Before we get to the recipe, a few preparation notes and bottle recommendations:

• Like Fish House Punch, Quoit Club Punch calls for an oleo saccharum, a sugar-and-lemon-peel infusion. That might sound intimidating, but all it really means is that before you mix things up, you’ll need to let your sugar rest in a bunch of lemon peels for at least an hour, and possibly for as long as a day. Making an oleo saccharum only takes a few minutes, but if you’re concerned about time, you can make it the morning before you serve your punch—or even the night prior.

  

• For the brandy, I recommend Pierre Ferrand 1840, a cocktail-focused quasi-replica of a young, lively Cognac from the 1800s. It’s somewhat pricey, but worth it. If you want something less expensive, or you can’t find that specific bottle, most decent Cognacs will do, and in a pinch you can even use an affordably priced, widely available, aged American brandy like E&J VSOP.

• For the rum, I recommend Smith & Cross, a high-proof, ultra funky Jamaican rum that captures the oomph and character of colonial era imported rums. It’s quite intense, but it gives the punch a great personality. For a mellower, lower-key punch, try something like Appleton Estate Signature. Please, however, do not use a light, white rum.

• For the Madeira, the usual recommendation is a “rainwater” Madeira—a sub-style that is on the light side. But for my test batch last weekend, I used Broadbent Reserve 5 Year, which is a little richer and sweeter. If you’re concerned about using a sweeter expression, cut the Madeira proportion by 25 percent when you first mix, then add it back in later if it’s too dry. (The initial mix of a punch is something like a first draft. It may need some editing and revising, and you can always add sweetness.) Really, though, most any Madeira is going to work here. Just use something relatively affordable. You don’t need to splurge on a $50 sipping wine.

• Unlike many punches from the same era, this punch calls for no water or tea. It does, however, call for ice. You should ideally use a very large block of ice, or two. You can prepare an oversized ice dome by filling a Tupperware container or silicone measuring bowl with water and placing it in the freezer overnight.

• Because there is no water, the punch will start out quite strong. But over time, as the ice melts, it will dilute. This will lengthen and loosen the punch, as well as lower the ABV. This is supposed to happen. Punch is designed to change over the course of the day or the evening. It’s a party drink, and parties tend to relax over time; this is a drink that quite literally chills out with you.

• Finally, for those who really feel like rewriting history, or flat-out ignoring it, an absolutely not historically justified tweak that I think improves the mix: As the punch dilutes, it will weaken somewhat, and the booze will lose some of its presence. So consider adding some light spice—by adding Angostura Aromatic bitters to your ice. Just add a couple dashes to the water before freezing, so that the warming spice of bitters slowly melts into your drink, adding new layers of flavor as the day goes on. You’ll end up with a punch that’s something like America itself: always changing, always shifting, perhaps losing some of its original intensity, but gaining depth and character over time.

This is a scaled down recipe that should suit groups of 4-6. To make a larger batch, just scale up the recipe by multiplying each ingredient.

Subscribe now

Quoit Club Punch

• Peels from 4 lemons

• 6 ounces white sugar

• 6 ounces (by volume) fresh squeezed lemon juice (juice the lemons after peeling them)

• 8 ounces Madeira

• 8 ounces dark rum, preferably Smith & Cross

• 8 ounces brandy or Cognac, preferably Pierre Ferrand 1840

• 2 dashes Angostura Aromatic bitters (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. If making large format ice, fill a silicone or Tupperware bowl with water, and Angostura bitters if desired, then place it in the freezer a day or so before you plan to serve the punch. (You can use smaller ice, but a big half-dome of large format “punch” ice looks better and dilutes more slowly.)

2. At least an hour before serving, and up to one full day, make an oleo saccharum by combining the white sugar with the lemon peels in a bowl. Let sit until just before serving time.

3. Just before serving time, add lemon juice to the sugar-peel mix. Stir to integrate. You can strain or pull out the lemon peels at this stage, but this is not strictly necessary.

4. Add rum, brandy, and Madeira to the mix, stirring gently to integrate.

5. Add ice to mix, or pour the mix into a punch bowl over ice. Serve with a ladle in small, ice-filled glasses.

   Thanks for reading Cocktails With Suderman ! This post is public so feel free to share it.

   Share

A Pair of Patriot Pups

Who, sadly, are not going to enjoy the fireworks.

Links About Drinks

• We now live in a world where the Sardine Martini is real. What miracle will science bestow upon us next?

• When we talk about bars, we tend to talk about cocktail bars, restaurant bars, dive bars, neighborhood bars, or hotel bars. But Dave & Busters, a sort of adult-friendly video game arcade that also sold booze, is also a form of bar. It is, however, a form of bar that is going out of style. Outside of the occasional Tron sequel, arcades are anachronisms, and skee ball, the greatest of all arcade attractions, sadly never became a real national sport. But raves—dance halls with DJs and lights and music—well, raves are still happening. And it seems as if Dave & Busters might be revived by a wild plan to host raves. I was never a Dave & Buster’s regular, but I had my first sip of Jack Daniels at one, around 2003 or so, and I’ve always enjoyed the booze-and-games concept. Rebooting as a rave doesn’t really appeal to me, but it’s a fun idea.

• Move over, Aperol Spritz. There’s a new sheriff, or at least a new spritz, in town. As one bartender says: “Sometimes, you have to roll with the punches and give in to what is trendy.” Do you, though?

• Speaking of trendy: In the future, all drinks will be dirty.

  Cocktails With Suderman is the home bartender’s guide, with tips, tricks, techniques, theories, anecdotes, opinions, and recipes. So many recipes! Become a paid subscriber, and never miss a drink.

Stack ‘Em, Pack ‘Em, and Daq ‘Em

The Daiquiri is a stripped down drink. It consists of just three ingredients—rum, lime, and sugar (or syrup)—plus, if you feel like complicating things, trace amounts of flavor enhancers like salt and absinthe. It can be sweet, sour, or strong, depending on how you balance those elements, and ideally should be some perfect synthesis of all three.

Just as we think of Nirvana as a conventional guitar-bass-drums trio even though they often played with a second guitarist, Pat Smear of the Germs, and even a cellist, Lori Goldston, the Daiquiri is fundamentally a three-parter, even if some other notes come into play.

But like the three-piece rock band, the Daiquiri format is flexible and robust enough that bartenders throughout history have attempted to build on it, adding other key elements, like pineapple. (Because we’re rich.) Indeed, in some cases, the pull of the Daiquiri is so strong that drinks get reinterpreted through the lens of the Daiquiri even when the original connection is somewhat tenuous.

Rum heads and Daiquiri devotees can probably see where this is going: This week, we are going to make the Hotel Nacional Special, a variation on the Daiquiri that adds both pineapple and apricot to the core trio. When you take a sip, you’ll smile and think, oh, yeah, of course, this is obviously a Daiquiri with pineapple and apricot!

But it wasn’t always that way. And that’s what makes this drink so fascinating from both a historical and recipe-design perspective.

There are multiple competing claims to authorship, and the drink has evolved substantially over the years as bartenders have attempted to modernize it. And in the end, it essentially became another type of Daiquiri—rum, lime, and sugar, but with some prominent additions. If Nirvana is the stripped-down, three-part Daiquiri, this cocktail is the Pat Smear/Lori Goldston version: richer, softer, fuller, but still essentially the same idea for a drink.

This week’s drink is both a lesson about the enduring utility of classic cocktail structures and a tribute to the difference pineapple makes. Tracing its history will teach you something about how to make, modify, and adapt cocktails that aren’t quite working. And if nothing else, it’s a truly delicious drink entirely independent of any of the theoretical-historical intrigue.

History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Often Limes

Today, we think of cocktails as having definitive structures, which tend to be rooted in one of a handful of core, classic drinks. An Old Fashioned made with mezcal or a combo of rye and apple brandy is still, in spirit, an Old Fashioned. But it wasn’t always that way. While bartenders have long made iterations and adaptations of well-known drinks, many drinks were looser, less rooted in any existing idea. They were just collections of things that seemed like they should go together.

Like rum and pineapple, two of the core elements of the Hotel Nacional Special—a drink associated with the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, a luxurious Havana hotel that opened in 1930. A grand hotel has to have a grand bar, and this was its house drink.

Probably the earliest printed recipe for this cocktail appears in the 1930s cocktail book Bar La Florida Cocktails. In that book, the drink was simply known as the National Cocktail, making it something more like the godparent of the current drink.

It calls for a mix of rum, pineapple, and apricot brandy—but no lime, and no added sugar. The sweetness would have come entirely from the pineapple, and there would have been no tart or sour element to balance it out.

The Daiquiri connection would become stronger, however, in the Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book.

Read more

Links About Drinks

Instead of our usual links section, I just want to highlight all these incredible tales of Scottish soccer fans drinking Boston dry.

It takes a lot to out-drink Boston!

Rum for Cover

This week’s cocktail has even more pineapple—so you can feel extra rich. Juice the fruit. Discard the rest. Bask in one of modernity’s great not-quite-natural luxuries.

It’s a shame there aren’t more pithy quotes about pineapples. But I suppose pineapples don’t exactly lend themselves to brevity. Pineapple juice, and the cocktails that employ the stuff, are drawn out pleasures, for long, endlessly sunny summer days when you have time on your hands.

So it’s fitting, then, that this week’s cocktail is literally a long drink. A long drink is a cocktail extended by soda, beer, Champagne, tonic, and so forth. Long drinks can be simple, like a rum and Coke or a Scotch and soda. They can be somewhat more complex, like a French 75.

With nine ingredients—yes, one for every planet, because tiki doesn’t recognize the IAU’s reclassification of Pluto either—this week’s cocktail errs on the side of complexity. It decidedly does not follow the five ingredient rule, but as I noted last summer, tiki is a lawless zone that is often exempt from such mandates.

Tiki is anarchic, exuberant, lawless, and, like the pineapple itself, a symbol of modern abundance. In contemporary parlance, tiki is so very, very…extra.

Part of what makes it so extra is its use of rum, or rather rums, plural. It’s reasonably common for tiki drinks to call for two, three, occasionally even four different rums. And even when just a single rum is called for, as in last week’s cocktail, it often pays to use multiple bottles. Tiki godfather Donn Beach described his drinks as “rum rhapsodies.” As the tiki diehards sometimes say, what one rum can do, two rums can do better.

This week I want to talk about an element one often sees in tiki drinks: dark Jamaican rum. Dark Jamaican rum was the foundation of last week’s drink. And although it’s not the only rum specified, it’s the most prominent boozy element in this week’s drink too.

When you see a recipe call for dark Jamaican rum, what should you do? There are some obvious choices, and some less obvious options too—including, if you’re feeling contrarian, rums that aren’t even from Jamaica at all.

Tiki follows no laws. Perhaps neither should you.

So this week, we will…

• Discuss a lengthy list of Jamaican dark rum options, including some that aren’t technically “dark rum,” or even from Jamaica.

• Talk briefly about the virtues of blending different rums together in the same drink, even when the recipe doesn’t call for it.

• And then look at a nine ingredient tiki smorgasbord that calls for three rums, and might be better with four.

It’s total rum anarchy! And it’s delicious.

Rum Conundrums

Something to understand about “dark rum” as a general category is that “dark” doesn’t really mean anything. Dark rum isn’t a legal category, so government-approved labels declaring a rum to be “dark” or “black” don’t reveal anything particular.

Tiki’s use of dark rum was at least partially a reaction to the lighter, brighter, often clear rums of the day, the kind you might now find in a by-the-book Daiquiri. Tiki drinks were designed to show off a wider array of rums and rum styles, and how they could work together.

So “dark” doesn’t necessarily point to any consistent feature except color.

Dark rums are sometimes aged, sometimes not, sometimes artificially colored or otherwise look-enhanced, and sometimes not. They are made using various processes, including pot and column stills.

And while Jamaican rum specifies something clear and consistent—it comes from Jamaica!—rum production methods, as well as how they are described, have changed considerably over the decades since tiki was born, sometimes without clear acknowledgment from the producer.

This is a point that rum expert Matt Pietrek has been making for years, especially with regards to the Mai Tai, a drink that is now often made with a blend of Jamaican rum and rhum agricole in a nod to some of the later formulations of the drink, but which might be more historically, or at least spiritually, accurate with an all-Jamaican rum blend. So using historical reference points for rum calls may not provide you with the rum that currently tastes like the old bottle.

And besides, tiki recipes shifted even during their heyday. Later this summer we are going to spend several weeks looking at Zombies—yes, Zombies, plural—because there are so many different recipes that bill themselves as Zombies. In fact, just this week I had a Zombie at Washington, DC’s Service Bar. It was recognizably a Zombie, with distinct rum, lime, and cinnamon notes, but it veered slightly from classic recipes and also used a single rum, Appleton 12.

The Dark Rum of the Soul

Appleton 12 is, by most definitions, a Jamaican dark rum. One of many.

So let’s talk about some others—and some that don’t count, but that you might use anyway.

The main thing I want to stress is that there are a lot of ways to go with a specification like this. There is room for creativity if you have a large home bar. But for those with more limited selections, you shouldn’t be afraid to try something even if you don’t have a bottle that’s technically correct.

The most basic, most obvious options are the ones I recommended last week:

Read more

Links About Drinks

• The Hawksmoor Martini Bar sold 20,000 Martinis in six months.

• Speaking of Martinis: How do you feel about an Everything Bagel Martini? Or a Pomegranate Martini? Or a Pizza Martini? Or a Brioche Martini? Vogue asks whether we’ve reached “peak experimental Martini,” and suggests that the boom in experimental riffs can be traced to a post-pandemic desire for silliness and novelty. I confess I’m a sucker for a high-concept Martini, and every now and then I will even make one at home. But on a random Tuesday night, I’m probably not going to make a Pizza Martini for myself; sometimes I just want the cocktail equivalent of Miller Lite.

• “The very best cocktails in the world are made from bulk manufactured, industrial products, marketed and sold by large companies. The best have had the same flavour for a hundred years. The best martini in London is made of components designed and manufactured to exactly the same tolerances, at the same scale and with the same attention to technology and brand science as a Big Mac.” Tim Hayward’s tribute to cheap booze is worth reading, and it echoes a point I’ve made in this newsletter: While pricey, small-batch spirits can sometimes make great cocktails, and bars like Death & Co. have made a practice of elevating their creations by employing obscure ingredients, the best—or at least very, very good—versions of most well-known cocktails can be made with relatively affordable, relatively widely distributed ingredients.

• Former Columbia Room mastermind and non-alcoholic drinks guru Derek Brown is writing a new book about N/A drinks. It’s tentatively called Spirit-Free: Non-Alcoholic Drinks from Around the World, and he says it’s intended as a companion to Adrienne Stillman’s excellent Spirited: Cocktails from Around the World.

Pineapple$

Every time you eat pineapple1, or drink pineapple juice, or make a tropical cocktail with pineapple juice—heck, every time you even see a ripe pineapple—you should give thanks, for it means that you are rich. Not rich in the support-yacht-for-your-main-yacht sense, but rich in the sense that you live in a time and place where pineapples are cheap and abundant, a casual commodity rather than a rare luxury.

It wasn’t always this way. Last year, Works in Progress published a long and delightful piece on the history of the pineapple, “King of Fruits,” tracing its path from rarified delicacy fit only for the richest to everyday foodstuff.

When European travelers first encountered pineapples on early journeys to the Americas, they were astounded by its sweetness and taste. But the long trip back to Europe meant they were difficult to transport in good condition. Nevertheless, they longed for its sweet, succulent fruit.

Early efforts to cultivate pineapples in Europe did not go well, since the fruits take two to three years to grow and require sustained tropical heat, which is not exactly abundant in Europe. There were some small successes here and there, but as the Works in Progress piece notes, individual pineapples continued to be rare and highly valued.

Wealthy individuals would sometimes display fresh pineapples at dinner parties in order to wow their guests, like proto-social media influencers flashing expensive swag. Even before Instagram, people liked to show off status goods; the pineapple was the limited merch drop of its day.

This, in turn, created a market in rentable pineapples used strictly for show:

“The pineapple became valued more for showing than for eating, and some people, who wanted to show their wealth but couldn’t afford multiple specimens, reused the same one again and again for weeks until it began to rot. A rental industry of pineapples arose to meet this demand. A pineapple was one of the riskiest items a maid could carry around since it presented a particularly attractive target for thieves.”

Like I said: In the sweep of human history, you’re lucky to even see a pineapple, much less drink a cocktail made from one’s juice. It’s a sign of just how rich we are that we can extract the liquid and discard the rest.

To make that even more concrete: In 1764, the cost to grow a single pineapple was, in today’s dollars, somewhere north of $16,000.

Today you can buy a pineapple at your local grocery store for three bucks. It’s just as decadent and delicious as ever.

That decadence helped make the pineapple a key component of tiki culture, with hollowed-out fruits sometimes serving as a natural vessel, pineapple imagery decorating tiki bar walls, and pineapple juice playing a role in a large percentage of popular tiki drinks. Just to take one measure, of the roughly 360 drinks currently listed in the Total Tiki app, 90 call for pineapple juice.

The birth of tiki culture and the mass-production of pineapples in the 1900s are clearly intertwined: Tiki was more than a way of making drinks; it was a Polynesian-themed lifestyle fantasia that first sprouted during the 1930s from Donn Beach and his bar Don the Beachcomber, and then spread throughout the country in the 1940s and 50s with experience-focused tiki bars like Trader Vic’s.

By the time tiki took off in the post-war era, pineapples and pineapple juice were cheap and plentiful enough that you could reasonably serve them to the masses. But they still exuded exotic luxury, a legacy of wealth and status. The long effort to domesticate and mass produce these once-unattainable status symbols had, well… borne fruit.

So this week, I want to look at an old Trader Vic cocktail that calls for pineapple juice, along with passion fruit, lemon, bitters, and dark rum. (Yes, it’s a five ingredient drink. Even tiki drinks sometimes follow the rule.)

It’s delicious, decadent, delightful—a true miracle of modern progress. Drink up, and feel rich.

Fiona (Pine)Apple

I am a proponent of the pineapple. It’s a key ingredient in one of my all-time favorite cocktails, the Jungle Bird, as well as its many riffs and uncredited iterations.

Pineapple juice adds sweetness to a drink, acting as a sort of natural sugar, which is why those early Europeans desired it so much. It also adds froth and texture, especially if you juice your own—which you really, really should. Cocktails shaken with fresh pineapple juice have a creamy, thick feel to them, and they tend to develop a pleasantly sturdy head of foam, giving them more texture and visual interest than simple lemon or lime sours.

This week’s drink is, fundamentally, a fruity rum sour that uses pineapple juice as one of two fruity sweeteners, along with passion fruit. Let’s look at the recipe and how to make it.

Read more

Long ago I declared that the Daiquiri is the ultimate summer cocktail.

Last year, I argued that you’re probably not using enough raspberries in your cocktails.

At various times I have made the case for the Collins and its many bubbly siblings—the sweet and sour highballs that add soda to a simple sour structure.

This week, I want to implore you to combine all of these elements in a drink that is essentially a carbonated, raspberry Daiquiri Collins.

Alternatively, you can think of it as a raspberry lemon Mojito. Or a rum highball riff on a Clover Club. The comps, cousins, and cocktail family-likenesses are many.

In any case, it’s a five ingredient drink—it follows our house rule—that’s delicious, colorful, seasonally appropriate, and incredibly easy to make. And if you want to modify it using ingredients you already have on hand, it’s easy to adapt to whatever is already in your bar cart.

It’s probably not quite easy enough to be anyone’s personal Miller Lite of cocktails, but this one goes down easy and has extremely broad appeal. If you have ever liked a cocktail, and you’re not some sort of scowling dry Martini purist, this will be almost certainly be a drink for you.

The Wine-Dark Sea

My path to this drink was relatively straightforward.

When I’m near the ocean, I want a drink that sells the concept of the ocean.

When it’s summer, I want a drink that feels like summer, and a Daiquiri always feels like summer.

And this drink’s name called to me, since there’s a lot of boating and fishing in Boston’s greater North Shore area.

Read more

This week we are making another cucumber drink. It’s a Martini variation, and it involves Cynar. You knew it would come to this. It was inevitable.

But first I want to discuss Miller Lite, which turns out to be surprisingly pertinent to this week’s cocktail. (I briefly considered titling this piece: What Miller Lite Has to Do With a Cucumber Cynar Martini.)

I’ve been thinking about Miller Lite recently, partly because it’s summer, but mostly because of Tyler Austin Harper’s case for the mass-market, low-calorie beer in The Atlantic. “Miller Lite is not a great beer,” he writes. “It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness.” He tries to describe the flavor and comes up with frozen corn” and “off-brand Cheerios.” He tracks down Miller’s official tasting notes, which “include such descriptors as ‘light to medium body,’

‘clean,’ and ‘crisp,”’ all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that ‘you will notice it in your mouth.’” Even apart from the merits of the argument, Harper’s piece is simply a pleasure to read.

His case for the beer is, understandably, somewhat defensive. Beer snobs, aficionados, obsessives, people with functioning taste buds—they know, and can prove, that Miller Lite is not a good beer. But he’s only sort of arguing with them. Rather, his argument is directed more at his former self, a beer and bourbon snob who sought out highly regarded, hard-to-find craft brews—and who would have looked down on someone who habitually drank Miller Lite.

Harper acknowledges that Miller Lite is not a quality brew—a bad beer. But his argument isn’t focused on the drink’s artisanal qualities. Rather, he makes a case that Miller Lite is functional, practical, and useful. It’s cheap, abundant, low-impact, and broadly inoffensive—the good beer versus good beverage distinction.

The piece is framed around advice from his father, and it’s really about what you drink when you’ve aged out of a certain sort of novelty-seeking young person’s scene. It’s about what you drink every day, when no one’s looking and no one’s judging, not even yourself—or if they are, you no longer care. It’s about getting older and accepting who you are and what you like.

I’m not much of a Miller Lite drinker—my cheap beers of choice for both parties and personal consumption are Narragansett and PBR—but I greatly enjoyed the piece and recommend it to anyone who likes good writing about booze.

I think there is a similar story to be told about cocktails. I don’t want to reduce them to mere beverages, exactly, but like cheap beer they can be functional, practical, and useful. There is great pleasure and comfort to be had in simple, familiar drinks made well.

So this week, I’m going to open up and talk about what I really drink, the handful of cocktails I make on an everyday basis, and what I drink when I don’t have time or energy to make complex drinks. Is there a cocktail version of Miller Lite?

A Box on Both Your Houses

I write a weekly cocktail newsletter. Nearly every edition has a new drink or at least a new twist on an old drink—this one included. That means some amount of intentional novelty seeking is necessary. I don’t have a regimented R&D program, but every week I look at dozens of recipes and I generally aim to try at least two new-to-me cocktails, ideally three or four. Sometimes I’ll spend an evening workshopping a drink, preparing four or five versions to try in sequence and iterating from the winner.

But life is hectic, and there are weeks when this isn’t possible. Like this one. I returned to Boston’s North Shore area, where I will be, on and off, for much of the summer. This took a full day of driving, and then there was a lot of housework to do once we arrived. I moved furniture, carried boxes up and down stairs, and filled heavy-duty contractor bags with junk. I took the week off, but it wasn’t exactly a vacation.

Basically, I spent most of the week hauling stuff from here to there. It felt good, honestly, though my lower back isn’t what it used to be. By the end of the day I ached and groaned and had little interest in making complex drinks that required custom, homemade ingredients. The closest I got to an experiment was taste-testing some vermouth that had been left in the fridge for the better part of a year. I’m relatively forgiving of elderly vermouth so long as it’s been properly refrigerated, but this stuff was no good at all. It was like watching a “performance” by a long-dead actor brought to life in CG zombie form—lifeless, empty, sort of tasteless.

At the end of each day, with an aching back and the sort of kneecaps-deep physical exhaustion I recognised from my time waiting tables but rarely feel as a middle-aged guy who mostly looks at screens for work, I wanted a crisp, cold, comforting cocktail, but I didn’t really want to make any effort to make it happen. I wanted something resembling the Miller Lite of cocktails.

So most evenings, I made a Martini, equal parts gin and vermouth, with a single dash of orange bitters. Like Miller Lite, it was clean, crisp, and easy. One night I made a Negroni, which is not quite a crisp drink, but is easy enough to pour and makes for a comfortingly bittersweet respite after a day spent torturing my lower back.

This is how I tend to drink at home when I’m not working on the newsletter: Martinis, Negronis, Boulevardiers, Monte Carlos—simple drinks that require little prep and only a few ingredients.

Read more

Links About Drinks

• Among the many fascinating details in Hannah Goldfield’s long New Yorker piece on the new age of drinking: Keith McNally, the restaurateur behind Balthazar in New York as well as scene-y hotspots like Pastis and Minetta Tavern, says he’s sold more alcohol this year than any year since the pandemic. Goldfield suggests this might be because his restaurants serve a somewhat older clientele.

• Obviously, many bars are still struggling. But maybe social media can improve their fortunes? At Vinepair, the story of how some bars are using Instagram to revive flagging operations and rally public support during financial or legal troubles.

• Another week, another article on cocktail prices: Bloomberg Pursuits takes on the $20 cocktail. I’ve said a lot about this over the past few weeks, but I will just remind you: On a per-drink basis, drinks made at home are much, much, much less expensive than drinks purchased at bars and restaurants.

• Ralph Fiennes describes his favorite Martini—freezer chilled gin in a frozen glass with a rinse of dry vermouth. Very dry but cold and silky. (This is basically a Dukes Martini.)

• I am not going to vouch for the methodology here—this is not based on actual sales data—but a new survey from Supreme Whip claims to have found the most popular cocktail in every state. The biggest winner? The Long Island Iced Tea, which won top honors in 11 states. Dicey methodology aside, I am not surprised. Years ago, when I spent summers waiting tables at a touristy Florida seafood restaurant, I sold tons of LITs, often to bushy-haired dudes who ordered it with a smirk. It wasn’t really a drink you were supposed to enjoy. Rather, it was widely understood as a way to get very drunk very fast, which did not strike me as much of a recommendation. There’s probably a reason I didn’t come around to cocktails until many years later. Also on the list: the Paloma, the Moscow Mule, and, in New York, the Spicy Margarita. Speaking of Margaritas…

The Green Mile

Let me start with an apology: I am truly sorry that this week’s cocktail is not as green as it should be. Sometimes, depending on the light, it is green…ish, maybe leafy green, like fraser fir tree or a sophisticated winter turtleneck. But it is never bright, neon, Slimer-from-Ghostbusters green. This is, perhaps, a flaw—a cucumber Margarita just feels like it should be green!—but not a fatal one. It makes up for it by being ridiculously tasty.

Like last week’s Gimlet, this week’s cocktail involves cucumber. It’s a Margarita—to be precise, it’s a spicy, salty, cucumber Margarita. I meant it last week when I said that cucumber is like Cynar: You should put it in everything.

Unlike last week’s Gimlet, which took a basic gin sour and added cucumber to the shake, this Margarita is blended, using the power of a blender to incorporate cucumber directly into the mix. It’s thick, chilly, spicy, vegetal, and coolly refreshing.

Yes, it’s slightly more time-intensive than last week’s drink—but still fairly easy to pull off, so long as you have the ingredients and a blender.

That makes it an excellent cocktail for the long holiday weekend. Memorial Day is the real start to summer, no matter what the calendar—or your weather app—says. In DC this week, temperatures hit 90 degrees three days in a row, but this weekend we might not even hit 60.

That’s life in the imperial city: Sometimes you need a drink. The good news is that this one works in any weather. And if it isn’t as green as it should be, well, all will be forgiven once you have a taste.

Work It

This drink required some workshopping. So beyond the final recipe, I’m going to walk you through how I got there—where I started, the process of iteration, and where I ended up. Good cocktails are always a journey.

See, every drink makes a promise—even before you taste it. You hear the words “frozen cucumber Margarita” and you get an idea in your head. The drink should match that idea.

A frozen cucumber Margarita makes a promise of being light, lifting, summer-friendly, icy cool, and refreshing. It should have a particular texture—thick enough to hold up a straw, but soft and slushy enough to go down easily.

The way you get that texture, for the most part, is by blending the drink with ice. In this case, however, I was also planning to blend in a bunch of cucumber, which would add to the thickness and solidity.

So on my first attempt, I went easy on the ice. Way, way, way too easy.

I started with a fairly basic Margarita spec: 2 ounces of blanco tequila, plus an ounce of lime juice and a half ounce each of Cointreau and agave syrup. If you shake that up, it’s pretty good, with a nice balance of sweet to sour.

Then I added 6 sliced cucumber coins (I use smaller Persian cucumbers from Trader Joe’s), and 70 grams of crushed ice, plus a bit of salt, like so…

• ¼ tsp salt

• 6 cucumber coins

• 70 grams crushed ice

• ½ oz agave syrup

• ½ oz Cointreau

• 1 oz lime

• 2 oz tequila

Well, that did not work. Not at all!

The drink was runny and liquidy, more like a muddy Margarita puddle after a rain shower than a frosty-thick frozen drink. Before I even had a sip, it was clear that this liquidy mix needed much, much more ice.

So I started scooping crushed ice in until it came closer to the right texture. It turned out that I needed more than three times as much—about 250 grams.

Note: You really need to use crushed or pebble ice here. Don’t try to grind up 250 grams of giant ice blocks. If large ice blocks are all you have, hit your ice blocks with a mallet a few times before blending. It only takes a few seconds, and smashing things is fun and cathartic.

Subscribe now

Sweet Child O’ Mine

Now I had something closer to the right texture. But the balance was way off. The drink was watery and limp and not nearly sweet enough. I should have known; adding that much crushed ice amps up the dilution, which requires compensation elsewhere in the formula.

Clearly, I needed much more of the two sweetening elements, agave syrup and Cointreau. I pushed both of those elements up—¾ ounce agave and a full ounce of Cointreau.

• ¼ tsp salt

• 6 cucumber coins

• 250 grams crushed ice

• ¾ oz agave syrup

• 1 oz Cointreau

• 1 oz lime

• 2 oz tequila

This was the right texture. And it tasted much more like an actual Margarita.

But it was supposed to be a cucumber Margarita. And there wasn’t nearly enough cucumber.

So I nudged the cucumber count up to 10 coins. For precision and consistency going forward, I weighed it; it came out around 50 grams.

More cucumber made it, well, more cucumbery. Which is what I wanted. But this exposed some other small issues with the drink. It was a little bit basic. It needed more layers, more complexity, a bit of heat, smoke, and brightness.

So I made three final changes:

• First, I split the tequila with mezcal—an ounce of each—giving the drink another layer in the spirit section, and a bit more smoke.

• Second, I added ¼ teaspoon of crushed red chili to give it some heat and bite. At one point I nudged this up even further, to ½ teaspoon, but found that was slightly too aggressive.

• Third, I doubled the salt, to ½ teaspoon, giving it lift, brightness, and flavor separation.

Salt is a flavor enhancer. It helps everything taste more like itself. In this case, it helped make this cucumber Margarita taste more like a cucumber Margarita—vegetal, spiritous, summery, lime-y bright and refreshing. The promise, the idea I had in my head, had finally been achieved.

It was everything I wanted in a cucumber cocktail—except, maybe, bright green.

Since this is a drink that feels like it should be a little more green, but isn’t, I’ll name it after my favorite should-be-green comic book character:

Subscribe now

Grey Hulk

• ½ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp crushed chili pepper

• 10 Persian cucumber coins (50 grams)

• 250 grams crushed or pebble ice

• ¾ oz agave syrup

• 1 ounce Cointreau

• 1 ounce lime

• 1 ounce blanco tequila (Espolon)

• 1 ounce mezcal (Del Maguey Vida)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender.

2. Blend for about 15 seconds, until the mix is a consistent slushy-like texture.

3. Pour into a glass and drink through a straw.

Huckleberry Is More of a Martini Dog

Links About Drinks

• You have almost certainly had large format, perfectly clear ice at a bar. You may have made it yourself using a mold system like Clearly Frozen or Ghost Ice. What you may not realize is that homemade clear ice is a relatively new development made possible by the persistent experiments of one man, spirits writer Camper English, who writes Alcademics. In Imbibe, Wayne Curtis tells the story of how clear ice took over the world.

• Do want your beer topped with an extra creamy layer of foam? The Japanese sharp pour might be for you. Apparently, there’s been some sharp pouring at Notch Brewing in Salem, Massachusetts, which is not too far from where I’ll be later this summer, so I might have to check this out.

• Cocktail writer Robert Simonson will appear on a regular Milwaukee radio segment about drinks and bars. It’s called “Bar Talk,” a nod to Car Talk, which was a fixture in my house as a kid. You can listen to the first segment here.

• The market for Soju, sometimes known as “Korean Vodka,” appears to be booming. I don’t think I know any Soju cocktails, at least not off the top of my head.

• Alcohol prices are so high that some adults are going back to “pregaming” to avoid paying for pricey booze at event venues, reports The Wall Street Journal. I’m not a big fan of drinking before going out in the way this article describes. But it’s true that cocktails have become considerably more expensive over the last few years. When I first started going to fancy cocktail bars in D.C. and New York in the 2010s, quality drinks were typically priced around $15, and occasionally as much as $16 or $17. There were complaints at the time, and that really felt like the limit of what most people would pay. It wasn’t. Today, it’s reasonably common to see menus where every drink costs $20 or more—although I have noticed some welcome movement toward simpler drinks with lower price points. At the very best bars and some restaurants, I think a $20 drink can be worth the price. One of the best cocktails I’ve had in the last few years was the Olive & Honey Vesper at Martiny’s, which is $25. But most bars aren’t Martiny’s. And given that many bars aim to maintain a 20 percent “pour cost,” which refers to the cost of the liquid ingredients in the glass, a lot of those $20 cocktails can be replicated at home for about $4. Plus, you get the pleasure of making the drink yourself.

Sometimes I think gin sours are underrated. Specifically, I think they are underrated by me.

It’s not that I dislike them. It’s not that I haven’t written about them in this very newsletter.

It’s that I often forget to make them or order them. I really need to change that, because the gin sour—gin, lemon or lime, and sugar or syrup—is more than a wonderful drink. It’s a wonderful template.

On its own, that trio is basically a Gimlet. I say basically because although that is exactly how I make a Gimlet—as a sort of Daiquiri but with gin instead of rum—some would argue, with historical evidence at hand, that technically [pushes glasses up nose] a Gimlet involves lime cordial rather than sugar syrup and lime juice. Yes, yes, fine, your concerns have been noted. But commercial offerings like Rose’s Lime are dicey at best. And homemade cordial involves, well, sugar and lime juice. (I believe it was Shakespeare who said something about Rose’s by any other other name…)

Whatever you call it, the gin sour is a great starting point for other drinks.

Add another element or two, and you might find yourself with a classic like…

• the Clover Club (a gin sour with egg white and raspberry)

• the Bramble (a gin sour over crushed ice, with blackberry liqueur)

• the Fitzgerald (a gin sour with several dashes of bitters)

• the Southside (a gin sour muddled with mint)

In these drinks, the highlight element plays a role something like the one Alec Baldwin plays in Glengarry Glen Ross.

In that movie, Baldwin shows up in the first act, delivers one of the all time great movie monologues—and then is never seen again. But his single scene hangs over the rest of the movie, coloring everything else that happens. It sets up the story’s existential stakes (third place is you’re fired), gives it a memorable hook (always be closing), and sets an intense, cutthroat tone that carries through the rest of the film. It’s the signature element in a familiar dramatic structure.

Gin sours excel at showing off the qualities of various special guest stars and letting them shine for a moment—even while the gin remains the star of the show.

I know this, and I enjoy gin sour variations whenever I have them. But I often forget to make them or order them. They’re good, but they’re rarely top of mind. So I’m writing this week’s newsletter to all of you. But it is at least partly a reminder to myself.

Gin sour variations tend to be quite easy to execute. You just need gin, lemon or lime, syrup…and something else—mint, raspberry, bitters, blackberry liqueur, and so forth. You’re looking for that Alec Baldwin monologue, the memorable element that sets the tone.

So as we head into summer and sour season commences, I want to recommend another accent for your gin sour: cucumber. It’s simple, gardeny, and incredibly easy to incorporate into your drink.

Note to self: Don’t underrate gin sours. And especially don’t underrate them with cucumber.

Duke Cuke ‘Em Forever

Cucumbers are like Cynar: They’re vegetal, they’re surprisingly delicious—I say this as someone who for many years was not much of a vegetable eater—and you should put them in everything.

Okay maybe not quite literally everything. You probably don’t want a cucumber in your Manhattan. But most drinks made from lighter, clearer spirits like gin, mezcal, tequila, and sometimes aquavit can accommodate a cucumber. Cucumbers add zip, zest, and grassy, gardeny freshness to cocktails.

You don’t even need booze to see how well cucumbers work in beverages: You can just infuse some cucumbers into a pitcher of water. This is what the Columbia Room—now closed, but for many years D.C.’s best cocktail bar, and the site of so many of my formative cocktail experiences—used to do, to great effect.

Cucumber water is still mostly water. But it’s a little more fun, a little more refreshing—water, but better.

Right on Cue(cumber)

What works in water also works in gin, specifically a gin sour. Cucumber makes your gin sour a little more fun, a little more refreshing, a little bit better.

And it only requires a few simple steps to incorporate.

Read more

Links About Drinks

• Inside Hook ranks the 50 Best Whisky Bars in the world. Washington, D.C.’s own Jack Rose, where I have been many times, makes the cut. Not surprisingly, quite a few of the entries are located in New York, including one of my favorite little cocktail bars, Bar Goto.

• Related: As Emily Sundberg reported earlier this week, Inside Hook, a sort of online men’s lifestyle mag, has a new Editor in Chief: James Jung, formerly of Blackbird Labs. Inside Hook has long been a home for excellent cocktail writing, including many pieces by my pal Jacob Grier, so I’ll be curious to see where Jung takes the magazine’s drinks coverage.

• Cranberry juice brand Ocean Spray is trying to engineer a comeback for the Cosmopolitan.

• New York and Washington, D.C., have some of the most expensive Margarita prices in the country, while Kansas has the cheapest, according to an article in Vinepair based on consulting firm data. Not exactly surprising. I would just note that even in Kansas, the average price for a Margarita at a bar is more than $10. That’s not bad compared to New York’s $14 Margs. But if you’re cost conscious, you can make a delicious Margarita at home for about $4, maybe a little less. Make two and serve one to a friend and you will still come in under the Kansas price.

It’s sour season.

From now through the end of August, many of the drinks we make in this space will contain some sort of citrus element, a lemon or lime complement to sugar and spirit. Some of these will be simple Daiquiri style sours—spirit, citrus, syrup, and little else. Some will be complex tiki drinks, most of which can be understood as elaborate, spiced riffs on the Daiquiri; later this summer we are finally going to spend some time with the Zombie. And some might be more like Margaritas—more conventional sours that rely on a sweetened liqueur instead of (or in addition to) syrup.

But this week we are going to look at a drink—really a style of drink—that is not quite any of those things. Or perhaps, in a way, it’s all of them.

It’s an amaro sour, a sort of Daiquiri-esque drink that replaces the usual strong spirit base with a bittersweet amaro, like, for example, this newsletter’s artichoke-y obsession, Cynar—though there are many options beyond that bottle.

More specifically, it is a double amaro sour, in which two amari are employed: one as the base, and one to serve as an offsetting sweetener.

With the layers of sweetness, spice, and earthy complexity embedded in nearly every amaro, there’s even something vaguely tiki-ish about this class of drink.

I have been thinking about these drinks recently because I’ve found myself making them for friends who ask for something lower proof. I am a proponent of lower proof cocktails, but there are times when they read as lower personality.

In contrast, these amaro-driven sours are positively bursting with personality. In some ways they remind me of my beloved bullmastiffs when they become excited: I tell them they’re being “a little bit too much.”

But in both dogs and cocktails, sometimes a little bit too much is, in fact, just the right amount.

So this week we are going to briefly trace the structural connections between the Daiquiri, the Margarita, and tiki—and then apply them to a double amaro sour format that draws a little bit from all of them without quite fitting into any category.

At the end, there’s an original cocktail—and a format for modifying and making your own.

A Daq Of the Clones?

The most basic unit of the sour is the Daiquiri. It’s just rum, lime, and sugar or sugar syrup. Sweet (sugar) and sour (lime) create a contrast that balances against a strong spirit (rum). It’s a three-ingredient cocktail, surprisingly similar to an Old Fashioned, which is essentially the same idea except with a bitter element instead of a sour element. This idea is at the heart of nearly every cocktail; these are the building blocks of mixed drinks.

A Margarita takes that idea and makes one key theoretical swap. Yes, it swaps in tequila for rum, but that’s just subbing one strong spirit for another. No, the important distinction is that instead of the Daiquiri’s sugar or syrup, the Margarita uses a sweetened, flavored liqueur like Cointreau to balance out the sour citrus element. (This is sometimes classified as a Daisy.) You might make a few other tweaks around the edges, and perhaps even add a hint of agave syrup to thicken the mix. But—unless you’re making a Tommy’s Margarita—the crucial structural change is using liqueur instead of syrup.

A tiki drink adds a layer of spice and, often, additional layers of sweetness to the mix. In many though not all cases, the “strong” element is a blend of rums rather than a single bottle. Planter’s Punch is basically just a Daiquiri with a spice element. A Mai Tai uses multiple rums plus some sort of orange liqueur as well as orgeat, a nut syrup, for sweetness —and then tops it with a bouquet of mint. You get multiple, complex layers of sweetness, plus a hint of spice. It’s not “just” a Daiquiri. But it’s a Daiquiri with some add-ons. And tentpole tiki drinks like the Mai Tai nod to the Margarita/Daisy format with sweet liqueur elements.

Daiquiri→Margarita→Tiki

• Strong (Rum)→Strong (Tequila)→Strong (Rum/Rums)

• Sour→Sour→Sour

• Sugar/syrup→liqueur→layers of sweetness

• N/A→N/A→Spice

The amaro sour structure I want to look at this week borrows from all three.

But of course the big difference is that it only uses amaro.

And amaro is different. Because amaro is a loose and sprawling category of bittersweet liqueur that already has all the elements of a cocktail—strong, bitter, and sweet, often along with some herbs and spice—inside a single bottle.

Read more

Links About Drinks

• The Kentucky Derby is this weekend. I don’t care much for gambling, personally, but I do like large animals and bourbon. (My dogs come from a former horse breeder who drinks Woodford Reserve.) In any case, the Derby is a great reason to make a Mint Julep. I think many, perhaps even most, Mint Juleps are quite mediocre. It took me a very long time—literally years!—to figure out how to make a version that I liked. But eventually I settled on a recipe that makes a rich, delicious, boozy, minty version. Here’s how to make it.

• One of my most successful drinks, and one of my personal favorites, is the Aperol Schlitz, a riff on the Aperol Spritz (and a sort of gussied-up version of the Spaghett). I often put some version of this on party menus, and it’s always a hit. You can make a perfectly good version with most any basic American lager; I often make it with Yuengling. But it was designed with Schlitz in mind. Sadly, as Robert Simonson reports, Schlitz is no more. Due to declining sales and lack of demand, production of the iconic Milwaukee beer has been completely discontinued. Pour one out for a great American beer.

• VinePair asked a bunch of bartenders the secret to a great Martini. There are lots of good answers here—proper glassware, intense chill, accepting that there’s no one way to make the drink—but as an avowed partisan of the vermouth-heavy Martini, I’ll just note that the very first answer is: “It’s vermouth!” Yes, with a (well-deserved) exclamation point.

• While we’re on the topic of Martinis: I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 this week. It’s a surprisingly affecting and particular movie about the dashed hopes of elder millennials who moved to large East Coast metros in the mid-00s, told through the decline of magazine journalism. It’s not exactly the sort of movie I can write about from an objective distance, but this light and fluffy film hit me a good bit harder than I expected. Like the 2006 original, it’s full of well-chosen consumption signifiers—including booze. In the first film, the characters drink wine and Cosmopolitans. In this one, they drink beer, whiskey, and Martinis with a lemon twist. What a difference 20 years makes.

• Another one for the nostalgia files: Charles Hardwick remembers bar regulars.

• Even more Martinis: Sip and Guzzle—recently named the number one bar in North America—has a Dirty Martini riff that looks extremely intense.

Martini Shot

In Hollywood, they call the final shot of the day the Martini shot. This is the final installment in our month of Martinis—which, yes, I am aware has now extended from April into the month of May. Martini hour often runs long.

In any case, I suppose that makes this newsletter a kind of Martini shot.

In recent editions, we have looked at…

• the glories of the 50-50 (equal parts gin and vermouth) Martini

• the benefits of adding orange liqueur to the mix

• blending your orange bitters

• adding Angostuta Aromatic bitters to a vermouth-less Martini in order to transform it into Pink Gin.

Our final installment is something of a grace note, a coda, an epilogue that is once again focused on modifying your Martini with small changes, and in particular a focus on bitters.

It’s a small idea. But to some it will be a radical one.

Because what I want to propose is that you can make a Dirty Martini—typically understood as a Martini with an olive and some olive brine—without an olive, and without brine.

Years ago, when I wrote in defense of the Dirty Martini, my argument was that it was really just a Salted Olive Martini, a savory, flavored variation on the format.

If you think about the drink this way, then what that means is that all you really need is salt and olive flavor.

There’s a way to do this. We’ll need to talk a little about research design.

Read more

And so it came to pass that, just a few weeks after questioning the dry Martini on Substack, I found myself at a party, hosted by Substack, drinking dry Martinis.

This was last weekend, at Substack’s New Media Party, which is an alternative to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. I’ve attended the Substack party in years past and always had a great time. In my experience, Substack events are always good events. This year’s was Texas-themed, and among the decorative touches were bedazzled, couch-sized corn stalks hanging from the walls. You certainly don’t get that at the WHCD.

This year’s New Media Party was held at the Renwick Gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue, about a block from the White House. The location is relevant to this story because, as you are probably aware, there was, well…an Incident at the official WHCD that night. As a result of the Incident, the president was rushed back to the White House, and the entire surrounding area was locked down.

Inside the New Media Party, Substack co-founder Chris Best took the stage to inform us about the Incident. (There were quite a few journalists in the room, phones in one hand and drinks in the other, so most of us were already aware.) We were safe, Best said. But at least for the time being, we weren’t allowed to leave.

Which meant we were stuck in the gallery, wearing black tie, with an open bar—and no dry vermouth.

I’ve been to enough Washington galas over the years to know that this is the norm. It’s genuinely difficult to set up a bar for a single night in a location that wasn’t purpose-built to be a bar. Yes, there was a themed cocktail menu with fun drink names for those so inclined. But given the circumstances, I wanted something stiffer.

So I ordered a Martini. It was just gin, shaken over ice, with a lemon twist.

Was it a cocktail? Was it even a Martini? On Saturday, none of these questions mattered.

What mattered was that it was serious and bracing, which is what the moment called for. Indeed, eventually I ordered another. This time, the bartender actually looked for dry vermouth—I could see his hand searching as if to grab a bottle that wasn’t there—but, finding none, he splashed the glass with a bit of white wine. A clever touch. But it was still a dry Martini.

I left early, as soon as the exits were opened. Substack throws a fine party, even in the strangest of circumstances, but I was in the wrong mood. When I walked out, the roads downtown were cordoned off, populated mostly by tipsy party goers in formal wear—there are events all over the city during WHCD weekend—who ambled through empty streets like lost puppies as Secret Service agents sternly directed everyone north, away from the White House. It was a surreal experience, and no amount of vermouth would have changed that.

A day later, as I ruminated on the evening’s strange turn, I realized I was in the mood for another Martini. But this time I wanted a wet Martini, a Martini with an unusually large portion of vermouth.

Now, I am no stranger to vermouth-heavy versions. I drink 50-50 Martinis with some frequency. In recent years, that equal parts version has become my go-to. But I wanted something wetter, vermouth-ier, something to retroactively rebalance the dry Martinis, and perhaps my sense of reality.

So I made a reverse Martini, with two parts vermouth to one part gin.

I recommend this simple cocktail for anyone trying to learn about dry vermouth, or make sense of the world.

Given the all-around topsy-turvy state of things, we will call this inverted formula the…

Subscribe now

Upside Down Martini

• 2 dashes orange bitters (Regan’s, or a blend)

• 1 ounce London dry gin

• 2 ounces dry vermouth, such as Dolin Dry

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass.

2. Add ice, then stir to chill and dilute. You don’t need to stir this as long as a typical Martini.

3. Strain into a Martini glass.

4. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel. Consider the state of the world, however you see it.

A Dog and His Martini

Links About Drinks

• The big news in the world of cocktails this week is the release of this year’s North America’s 50 Best Bars list. The number one spot went to New York’s Sip & Guzzle, which entered the list at number five last year, the first time it was eligible. Sip & Guzzle is a two-bar concept: The dark, intimate, downstairs bar, Sip, offers more intricate concoctions; the upstairs bar, Guzzle, offers smart twists on classics. On the food side, S&G is known for its limited-edition $150 burger, which, if nothing else, is a clever stunt. The space is impressive, and the drinks are outstanding. I visited both last summer; at Guzzle, I had a Sherry Colada Highball, which is somehow just what it sounds like: a Sherry Piña Colada along the lines of the one we once made in this newsletter—but transformed into a clear, bubbly soda. It was memorable, delicious, and exquisite, a true feat of liquid magic.

• Other notable entries on the list are the return of Attaboy to the top 50 (last year, the bar was ranked 72), and two new New York bars that leapt into the top five: Bar Snack and Shmuck. I’ve heard great things about both, but I have not made it to either.

• On my home turf, Washington, D.C.’s Press Club, a press-themed underground record bar near DuPont Circle, is now the highest-ranked bar on the list, at number 34. I’ve visited several times since it opened, including just last week. It’s excellent and worth grabbing a seat if you’re in the D.C. area. Reservations will almost certainly be more difficult to obtain for the next few months, so plan ahead.

• Sip & Guzzle pays homage to the celebrated SG Club in Tokyo, so it’s a pleasant coincidence to find Wayne Curtis writing this week about a 10,000 word academic study on Japanese bar traditions. Curtis focuses on the tension between tradition and innovation, which is something we’ve discussed quite a bit in this space. The best drinks come across as simultaneously familiar (it’s a Piña Colada!) and novel (but rendered as a clarified soda!). This concept is related to Derek Thompson’s “law of familiar surprises.”

• It’s Martini month, so I feel obliged to inform you of the existence of these custom Martini glass holders for bar bathrooms. On the one hand, drink shelves in bar bathrooms are nothing new. On the other hand, this seems slightly disturbing. Too familiar? Too surprising? It’s certainly too…something. I learned about this from Emily Sundberg’s booze-forward London dispatch; she also notes that the city’s pub traffic fell 54 percent during a week when tube service was disrupted.

• On the one hand, American bourbon is in trouble. On the other hand, Buffalo Trace, the company behind brands like E.H. Taylor, Eagle Rare, and, yes, Buffalo Trace, seems to be doing quite well. They’re pushing forward with a $1 billion expansion. And in May, they’re opening the brand’s first permanent cafe. This makes sense, given how central bourbon tourism has become to the area. When I flew into Louisville a couple years ago, it seemed like every single ad in the airport was for whiskey.

• This New York Times visual feature about a 350-year-old sake brewery that makes everything manually is fantastic, the sort of thing a newspaper could never do in print. This was the top trending story for the entire paper when I checked in on Thursday evening.

  Cocktails With Suderman is the home bartender’s guide, with tips, tricks, techniques, theories, anecdotes, opinions, and recipes. So many recipes! Become a paid subscriber, and never miss a drink.

Pink Stained Wretches

This week’s drink is Pink Gin. It’s a drink every Martini drinker should know.

I say “drink” and not “cocktail” because there is a reasonable argument to be made that it is not actually a cocktail. We’ll get to that.

But in the meantime, there are three things you need to know about Pink Gin.

The first is that, despite its name, Pink Gin is not always pink. A two-ingredient mix of gin and bitters, the color comes from the combination of concentrated, intensely flavored bitters and clear gin, which absorbs and diffuses the darkness and intensity of the bitters. Sometimes, if you go easy on the bitters, this comes out a reddish pink. Certainly if you search for pink gin online you will find many pictures of a drink that is reddish pink. But in my tests it mostly came out a sort of sandy brown, like store-bought firewood, or a liquid version of Matt Damon’s beard. Somehow, it’s more appealing than that.

Today you can buy various bottles of something called Pink Gin that is quite pink. It looks more like something Barbie would consume, or a dress you bought at Tuckernuck. It does not look anything like Matt Damon’s beard. It is a different style of gin that is only minimally related to the maybe-a-cocktail called Pink Gin.

A Pink Beam of Light

The second thing to know about Pink Gin is that there is no standard way to make it.

As noted, Pink Gin consists of just two primary ingredients: gin and bitters. In nearly all cases, that means Angostura Aromatic bitters—as one would assume from any recipe that calls for bitters without specifying brand or style—although David Wondrich’s entry on the drink in the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails reports there is some evidence that at one point Stoughton’s Bitters were employed. Stoughton’s bitters were created around 1700, used for about a century and a half, and then faded from history around 1850. Even as a bitters maximalist, I don’t have a bottle of Stoughton’s bitters. I doubt you do either. So Angostura Aromatic it is.

But Pink Gin’s malleability isn’t just in the choice of bitters. Sometimes it’s served in a rocks glass; at other times it’s served in a V-shaped Martini glass. Sometimes it’s served over ice; at other times it’s merely stirred or shaken over ice for chill and dilution, then strained, ice-free, into a glass. Sometimes the bitters are incorporated by rolling them around the edges of the glass for a light coating, like the absinthe in a Sazerac; at other times, they’re dashed heavily into the mix. Sometimes the drink is served with water or club soda on top; at other times without. Sometimes the garnish is a lemon peel; at other times it’s a bit of lime.

Even the style of gin is unsettled. Sometimes—probably most of the time—the gin is Plymouth; at other times, it’s a sweeter historical style known as Old Tom.

You can’t even definitively pin down the name. Charles H. Baker’s old Gentleman’s Companion lists the drink under the moniker Gin & Bitters. The entry notes that it’s also called both Pink Gin or, in India, “Pahit.” His entry is not comprehensive, but it underlines at the decision-tree-like nature of the drink’s recipe, noting multiple possible gins, garnishes, and bitters proportions. Even back then, the drink refused to be defined.

Pink Gin is like that friend who always seems to be adopting a new fashion-sense and a new persona: The underlying material is always the same, but every time you meet up, there’s some new styling. You never quite know which character you’re going to encounter.

The only thing you can say for sure about Pink Gin is that it’s a combination of gin and bitters. The rest is up to the maker.

So how should you make it? That’s a tricky question, and it requires knowing something about the drink’s backstory.

Pinkerton

Which brings us to third thing to know about Pink Gin: It’s a drink with a long history.

And contained within that history is a question relevant to this month’s theme: Is Pink Gin a Martini?

To some extent, the answer depends on how you make the drink and how you categorize the Dry Martini. But another less obvious answer might be that, actually, it’s a secret Old Fashioned.

Let me explain.

Read more