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The future is now — and it is retarded. Anheuser-busch, the purported largest American brewery, really just a puppet of the transnational company InBev has done it again. A light beer that is not light by any measurement at 137 calories and 6% alcohol. Our descent into the void of meaningless language formulated by industries that need to flip semantics on their head to avoid the legality of verifiable claims is nearing absolute completion. Bud Light is now its own general category according to Anheuser-busch for which other beers can be organized into, and not rather that Bud Light is actually just one of the many easily categorized American light lager styles confirmed by their substance-free, watery-piss conglomeration of cheap rice, corn and a little barley — lightly scented with a hops Yankee Candle that is lit in the factory.
Oh, and a cobalt blue bottle reminiscent of the failed malt beverage Zima would only be appealing to somebody already with horrible taste. Where would this cobalt blue bottle even fit? I can’t see a bunch of fat guys in their sports jerseys with their boyfriend’s name on the back (sorry, I mean favorite athlete’s name) sucking these down, and even their dumpy girlfriends would look silly drinking Bud Light: Zima at a tailgate. All I can see is somebody freaking out in hammer pants like it was 1991, hydrating their sick dance moves with their malt beverage of choice: Bud Light Zima.
Bitter in the USA
Crisp, light, refreshing — the holy trinity of qualities to be found in any session beer. For those not in the know, session is a demure way of saying binge-drinking beer. Snobbery doesn’t allow one to admit that, yes, people do still want to drink beer for its refreshing, lower-alcoholic qualities, allowing oneself to drink deep into the night.
The craft beer movement made what was once easy difficult. Suddenly macro-brews were a sign of your lack of sophistication. Piss-driven, watery ghosts of their German pilsner forefathers offended the real beer revivalists.
A problem came forth: people still went to pool parties, yes, even beer nerds get invited to pool parties, occasionally — regretfully. Lawns, too, needed to be mowed, and the summers were still hot and oppressive. As much as the beer nerd tried, drinking the maltiest, 9% ABV, served-at-room-temperature barley wine at a pool party was a recipe for disaster. The grass became overgrown as the sophisticate nursed his cacao nip, espresso, chocolate Imperial Stout in a 750 ml bomber for hours. We still needed, we pined for the light, crisp, refreshing trinity that got us through the day.
Bitter American gives you what you are secretly wishing for when the barley wine hits your mustachioed-lips. And like the name suggests, it has an interesting bitter quality on the finish, that is a bit different than your standard bitter, vegetal hop-flavor. It is bitter almost in a way that champagne can be bitter on the finish, and it is free of that skunked taste of crappy light lagers, replacing the flavor with a dry, citrus peel bitterness. This stuff will revitalize you. It’s gatorade for your drunk uncle or professional binge drinker in your life… er, I mean, sophisticated session beer drinker who needs a break from the doppelbock he home-brewed.
Bonus Round:
I also created a cocktail with this beer, too. Get ready for it when the summer comes around:
Afraid of Americans
1 oz Rye or Bourbon
1 oz St. Germain or Yellow Chartreuse
—> Rocks, hi-ball, top off with Bitter American, tumble
Smoke ‘em Out!
The inconsistencies in fads and the fickleness of thirsty crowds have always perplexed me. Mescal, especially small-batch terroir-focused mescal, has become very cool and very popular over the past couple of years. A smoky, complex, vegetal spirit with plenty of burn and bite is not a flavor profile pre-diabetic America can get behind. In the age of cotton-candy, Mountain Dew and bubblegum-flavored vodkas, the dark horse mescal is finding its way on to many bars. Smokiness is a quality that has been found primarily in scotches at the bar, and scotch, even with the renewed interest in rye and bourbon-based cocktails, because of its smoke and peat notes has been kept on the sideline when it comes to mixing. Even classics have been looked over that contain scotch, assuming they have little chance for widespread appeal. The problem is really a perception of what scotch is and how it is used. If people like mescal, they in most cases should be interested in scotch. In the interest of bringing back some great scotch-based classics that will have a wider audience, we need to jump on the mescal bus and substitute scotch for mescal.
Blood and Sand becomes Blood At The Border:
3/4 oz Mescal Vida
3/4 oz Cherry Herring
3/4 oz Blood Orange Juice
3/4 oz Sweet Vermouth
—> Shake, Cocktail glass, cherry garnish
Mamie Taylor Cocktail becomes the Ay Mami:
1.5 oz Mescal Vida
1 oz Lime Juice
—> Top off with ginger beer, rocks, Highball
Suddenly scotch drinks are not so crotchety anymore — a thing you drink to assure everybody how old, wise and rich you really are. These smokey cocktail doppelgängers with bad puns and horrible stereotypes about Mexican culture (sorry, Mexico) in their names are fun, light-hearted and have market appeal.
Wine’s Many Smells
Wine not only numbs the brain, drowning the annunciation in senseless noise, it provides a carte blanche for the most horrendous use of language in describing its qualities. The bastardization of nouns into cramped, free-for-all adjectives that are as ambiguous as they are sonically jarring is painful. ”Oh, that wine, well, it is very… blueberry-y.” The description becomes accidently endearing with stretched, diminutive forms of neologisms that stab at fruit-like flavors. Mmm, bring me the blueberry-y wine, I’ve been sold on it!
Wine descriptions at table-side are always going to struggle for precision and clarity. Trying to remember the particular experience of a wine, conveying the many nuances of those qualities in a succinct, comprehensible way in a few sentences is a challenge. Wine cannot be fully blamed; language is essentially an attempt to capture the reality of experience. It fails as it is swept up in meaningless, thoughtless phrases, or it slowly loses its precision in the ambiguity of the words and the endlessness or impossibility of translation. Wine descriptions, clearly overcompensating for their great ruse that any wine experience can ever be captured and expressed linguistically, load on the adjectives and analogies. Gooseberry, lychee, Chinese five-spice, raspberry, strawberry, blueberry, melon, asian pear, kiwi, straw, grass, oak, licorice, vanilla, custard — the rotting cornucopia of adjectives stinks to the sincere who cannot help but upturn their nose, but nothing smells better to a bullshitter than their own shit.
It all becomes bad poetry. Poetry is a submission to language and finding an uncomfortable solace in its thing-less-ness-demonstrative-incompleteness. Horrible analogies, bombast and flares of adjectives make wine descriptions sound like they’re coming from the desperate, flattering mouth of a court bard right before a king sentences the execution. I guess sometimes analogies do work.
And to clarify I am not a total nihilist about wine description. I just think people need to be more careful with language and to approach the complexity of a sensual experience with nuanced and carefully selected words.
Bobby Brown
A lesser known drink from the canon is the Bobby Burns cocktail. Named after the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns, it takes its form after the Rob Roy — also named after another great Scot. Scotch, sweet vermouth and angostura bitters in the typical Manhattan proportions finds benedictine, the French, honied, herbaceous liqueur, in the mix.
Every age, every culture has their poet who sings sweetly the very bone, blood and soul of his or her people. While Robert Burns makes the Scot consider the Thistle, Bobby Brown, the semi-talented R&B singer and dancer is our man of this time and place, making us consider that it is our perogative. I’ve encountered Bobby Brown while tending bar on a couple of occasions, and he is, as expected, surly, inebriated and travels with an equally impossible coterie. I brought up my frustrations over a beer with fellow bartenders one day, and they related to me an exactly similar experience with him. He seems to haunt many a bar, and being that he is a local son, born and raised in Roxbury, I thought it was time for tribute.
I’ve been strangely preoccupied with white whiskey. It is basically the corn mash distillate that receives no aging from wood. It is high and low culture in that it is equivalent to your standard moonshine, but it is has been re-marketed and repackaged as a product to be used for cocktailing at a bar. Bully Boy, a newer distillery in Roxbury, has put out a white whiskey, and Bobby Brown is ready to put Roxbury on the map again.
The Bobby Brown Cocktail:
2 1/4 oz Bully Boy White Whiskey
3/4 oz Bianco Vermouth
1/4 oz Benedictine
1 Dash Orange Bitters
—> Stir, Cocktail Glass, Lemon Twist
Absolut waste of time
Flavored particularly citrus vodka is always bumped up in price by a couple of dollars. Who knows why as in many cases it is just a combination of small amounts of natural and/or artificial chemicals to produce surreal fruit flavors. If you’re going to waste time with vodka, recognize it as the perfectly neutral platform for infusion. Infusions don’t have to be complicated exercises in bar-nerdism. Take a peeler and peel off the citrus rind of any citrus you want or have hanging around the kitchen. Throw it into a container with the vodka. Let it soak for a couple of days. Now you’re the coolest guy at the party, so feel free to slap that fool who brought the Absolut Citron.
Small’s Gin, Word To Your Cardamom
Small’s gin is an oddball for gin. Though the standard mix of botanicals finds its way into this gin, the inclusion and prominence of cardamom makes for the unexpected. Cardamom is a beguiling spice, and I generally dislike using the word beguiling. It is earthy, pungent, has qualities to match our more traditional warming spices such as nutmeg and allspice, but there is this astringent, bright note that reminds me of something like ginger peel. All the botanicals are locally grown in Oregon, and there is also curiously raspberry (not in the Stoli Raz formulation, thank god) that hides at a distance.
For the most part, this is a bottle that is going to sit on the shelves of bars whose vendors tricked them into purchasing. Gin is not an easy sell, and those that drink gin are usually looking for either a juniper-forward gin or more citrus notes.
But this gin has been on my mind since I took a whiff. I consider myself a gin fan, but my willingness to experiment draws me away from what is standard. Maybe, and quite oddly, it is because I like Indian food, where cardamom is going to be found more often than anywhere else, or maybe it is because I have the psychological quirk/failing for loving what other people will automatically hate. My new infatuation with this off-beat spirit will stay a mystery.
I enjoy the challenge it poses for how to use it in cocktails. Cardamom rarely makes it into even the most highfalutin of cocktails. How I would use it would embrace the cardamom rather than trying to down play its prominence.
Curry Cooler:
1.5 oz Small’s Gin
3/4 oz Spiced Honey Simple Syrup
3/4 oz Lemon Juice
-> Build in Highball, top off with quality ginger beer, lemon wedge
Masala Smash:
Muddle together pinch of cilantro bunch, 3 lemon wedges with
1 oz Raw Sugar Syrup
-> Dry shake with
2 oz Small’s gin
-> Tea Strain into rocks glass, add crushed ice
Everybody’s favorite
Appletinis and Authenticity
Those that hold on dearly to their White Zinfandels, Appletinis and Cosmopolitans make me realize that history is not a real force these days. Oh, those people are stuck in the 80s or the 90s, etc. — really? Is that why I am subjected to irony-free Zach Morris jeans and uni-sex mullets, women who look like Pamela Anderson in her “heyday”, seeking desperately the endless reproduction of cloyingly-sweet, rococo cartoon-beverages. No, I think that common-sense psychological assessment, that somebody is stuck in time, is a result of deeply impacted belief that we are all, as individuals, as a nation, as a people, going somewhere in a historical, linear sense and it has purposeful meaning.
That person who descends upon your bar like a transcendent being, appearing from nothingness without a flicker of self-awareness, who orders an Appletini is not the psychologically-impaired person stuck in a better time, but rather, an embodied sign that speaks to the breakdown of an evolution of history and culture. Our culture at present is no longer the Modernist progressive quest for novelty, driven by information in fields of science, but instead has gone through an implosive whiplash, moving backwards into itself from the accelerated expansion of the past hundred years.
Everybody in the here and now populates a pastiche, schizophrenic culture that consumes at random isolated pieces of cultural artifacts at any point in human history for superficial desires of contemporary formulations of coolness, happiness and identity, moving backwards and forwards. To be hip or cool, which means current, cutting-edge, something that, in our originally Modernist period has always been a force of historical evolution, is a re-appropriation of the past with ironic styles. Everything comes back into style. Hipster are dressed now how I dressed when I was 5, and they are the heralds of cool. History is dead, stuck in an endless folding in on itself. Appletinis will never die as there is no cultural or historical force left enough to wash its neon green glimmer away.
Bartending is stuck in this world, too. Bartenders take at random from history and culture to create and keep their drinks relevant and interesting. In this, they try to establish a meaningful connection to their obscure spirits, beers and wines, (here enters the bar-nerd) but having an endless knowledge of a product does not establish a meaningful relationship with a product. The endless availability of new products in a consumerist market, the globalized relationships built on sterility of economics, and the bartender’s slavish adherence to distributors that build markets for their products, these are the mechanisms at work that create your bar experience; it is not the authentic experience of a foreign culture as you hoped.
We have St. Germain the elderflower liqueur from France, for example, only available to us very recently by distributors and not because my great-grandfather collected elderflower near the Alps (a most likely fabricated story anyway). I don’t make cocktails with St. Germaine to engage with a culture in its proper totality. I have St. Germain to work with because distributors built a consumerist product and made a market in the United States by building interest, so now, I make you a drink with St. Germaine because it is a alienating piece of hip coolness that you have been convinced to want by distributors. So, before you make fun of the Dawg-the-bounty-hunter impersonator drinking B&J Wine Coolers at the bar, look down at your impossibly hip vermouth-and-rye concoction and ask yourself if this makes any more sense.
