Mr. Drinkies is a simple man.
He drinks his coffee black and strong, no sugar.
Given the option, he'll take an Americano, but he's not going to make one for himself. A long time ago there was an espresso machine in his house, but the difference between what is produced when hot water is filtered slowly through fine coffee grounds and what is produced when steam is forced through those grounds was not, in his judgment, enough to justify the extra fuss that goes into producing an ounce of espresso.
Especially not since he was going to dilute that espresso to the approximate strength of strong black coffee anyway. Mr. Drinkies likes Americanos but has to admit he feels a little precious ordering one. "Americano" strikes him as a euphemistic name for "watered-down espresso for poseurs."
The story is that Americanos are called Americanos because, during World War II, American soldiers would dilute Italian espressos with hot water to make them more like the filtered coffee they were used to drinking. This probably horrified authentic Italian espresso drinkers. To this day, to an authentic Italian espresso drinker, an Americano is probably an abomination.
But Mr. Drinkies is secure enough in his own masculinity to order the occasional Americano.
On the other hand, it's usually simpler and cheaper just to drink black coffee. Nowadays you can find good coffee in a lot of places, even (especially) in McDonald's, except for the one in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood on the corner of Chambers and Greenwich. Its coffee was so bad that whenever Mr. Drinkies feels moved to compliment McDonald's on consistently good coffee he also feels obligated to note that it wasn't very good at that particular "store," which he believes is the word used by those involved in the business of the commodification of daily subsistence, in which eating is reduced to a refueling process at the expense of family ties and social cohesion, so that people who would never dream of eating at a McDonald's can accrue more capital and power.
Simple man that he is, Mr. Drinkies trained himself to drink his coffee black. He might well prefer it with milk and sugar -- who doesn't like a little sugar? -- but as a teenager, he denied himself milk and sugar for long enough that his body acclimated to the hot and bitter variety. Now, he genuinely believes he prefers his coffee black, which makes it simpler for everyone.
He does not believe he would like lattes made with pralines or drizzled with Nutella, although he probably would drink one rather than risk seeming rude. For Mr. Drinkies would prefer not to be thought of as difficult. He is a simple man.
In much the same way, Mr. Drinkies drinks liquor. Mainly he will have bourbon, with a little ice. Or maybe no ice. When you order a bourbon in a bar this way, you say you want it "neat." (It is neat to order a bourbon this way; it sounds sophisticated in an old-school way, which is somehow not the same as precious and pretentious.)
It's also a very easy drink for a bartender to make. Mr. Drinkies imagines that some bartenders appreciate this, especially when the bar is crowded and there are people waiting on their pork fat-washed mezcals.
Yet, while Mr. Drinkies is simple, he is not a savage. He appreciates a good cocktail and can even mix a few without consulting the recipes handily screen-printed on the side of his Plexiglas cocktail shaker. He can make an excellent Manhattan, which relies on a judicious amount of Jim Beam's Red Stag cherry-flavored bourbon folded into a top-shelf rye. He can make an interesting variation of an Old Fashioned that features cherries marinated in moonshine imported from Missouri. He can make a chilly vodka martini that will seek out and murder one's social inhibitions. He can muster an average gin and tonic if required.
But being a simple man, he is no master of mixology. Mostly he is good at opening bottles. If his guests want something fancy, he is willing to try, but boat drinks are not in his wheelhouse.
And he has always stood against pre-mixed concoctions. No offense to Mr. & Mrs. T, but he has always considered pre-mixed cocktails, to use the legal term of art, a rip-off. Only part of that is due to personal experience. A few years ago, for scientific purposes, he broke the seal on a bottle of Skinny Girl Margarita and found it fine, just fine, as long as you added a little (or a lot) more tequila to it. Now, Mr. Drinkies understands that Skinny Girl Margarita is designed as a low-calorie alternative to a real drink, and he concedes that it's probably very good at being that. But take his point -- it wasn't a real drink.
It was like that White Claw stuff mentioned in this column earlier this month -- a low-impact alcohol delivery device for people who don't like to be aware that they're drinking alcohol. (Quick update on the White Claw that Mr. Drinkies hadn't actually tasted before writing that previous column: He has now tasted it and pronounces it fine, just fine.)
On the other hand, pre-mixed cocktails are having a moment, and even some high-class establishments are allegedly serving them. The theory seems sound. Mixing in advance allows bartenders to precisely control the ratios of ingredients in a particular drink, even making allowances for the amount of ice that might later melt into it. And you can mix up a batch and stick it in the freezer, which makes the drink more viscous, sometimes to good effect.
(This is why Mr. Drinkies used to stash vodka in the freezer, back in the simpler days when there was always plenty of room in the freezer before he started losing half-pound Hurts doughnuts in there.)
A pre-mixed cocktail can make things simpler, which ought to appeal to Mr. Drinkies. While some folks might bemoan the loss of the pageantry of bartender mixing, Mr. Drinkies had always found that sort of stuff tiresome, preferring the sort of good listener/old soul brand of barkeep to the bedazzling drink-slinger embodied by Tom Cruise in the 1988 film Cocktail. (One of my favorite bartenders was, in his day job, a highly successful corporate headhunter who told me some of the people he'd placed in high-paying executive positions he'd actually met in a bar. But maybe he just told us barflies that to keep us hanging around.)
But, as Matthew Arnold reminded us, there is the world of theory (where we do not live) and the world of practice (where we do).
And in practice, Mr. Drinkies' limited experience with ready-to-drink cocktails has not been great. Manhattans do not come from a can. Buzzballs can be eliminated on purely aesthetic grounds, but when you see on the label that they're only 15% alcohol, they're for sure a hard pass. While pre-mixed bloody Marys sound like a good idea, better results can be had by buying the bloody Mary mixer and adding your own vodka.
Or by skipping the mixer altogether.
Even so, Mr. Drinkies perceives a place for a high-quality pre-mixed cocktail.
During a recent trip to our nation's capital, he wandered into a downtown liquor store and found something new -- a pre-mixed Old Fashioned made with Knob Creek bourbon from a Dallas-based company called On the Rocks.
He inspected the label, which instructed him to "pour over ice and enjoy" and asserted that they stayed "true to the original recipe" using whiskey, bitters, cane sugar, orange, cherry and lemon zest. It was a 375 ml. bottle -- enough for two 6-ounce drinks with a bit left over; call it three drinks -- and was priced at a remarkable $11.50.
Mr. Drinkies doesn't know precisely what they charge for a Knob Creek Old Fashioned at the Old Ebbitt Grill around the corner from this liquor store, but he does know that the OEG (a fine establishment to drink in) charges $11.95 for a Manhattan made with Mitcher's Rye. Figure $20 plus tip at the minimum for two. So instead of making the usual purchase of a bottle of wine for him to sip with Mrs. Drinkies in their hotel room before going out, he took the On the Rocks bottle and ran.
(Or actually, he paid for it. He remembers this because the store clerk asked if he'd like a bag. When he said, "Well, sure, what the heck, I'll take a bag," she narrowed her eyes and said, "You know we charge for bags," at which point Mr. Drinkies lowered his eyes and shoved the bottle into a coat pocket.)
After procuring ice and cracking open the bottle, the Drinkieses enjoyed a really good Old Fashioned. Maybe it wasn't quite as good as the one they serve at South on Main or Big Orange, but a really good one. And for what worked out to be less than $5 a drink. Mr. Drinkies was sold. Finally, a simple product he could wholeheartedly recommend.
Then he got home and started looking around for On the Rocks products -- in addition to the Knob Creek Old Fashioned, it offers a Cosmopolitan made with Effen vodka, a Mai Tai made with Cruzan rum, a Margarita made with Hornitos plata tequila, and a couple of other cocktails. And you won't find them for $11.50.
More like $56.
Which still might be worth it if you're a simple man who doesn't mind paying for a well-crafted cocktail you can drink or serve at home. But Mr. Drinkies liked it a lot more when he assumed the $11.50 was just a 50% off close-out price and not, as now seems likely, a horrible misadventure with a label gun.
Besides, he mostly drinks his bourbon straight. He's a simple man.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Style on 11/17/2019