There was no game that night, so the Brazilian catcher and the Guatemalan second baseman decided to take their gringo teammates bowling in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro.
The bowling alley in Barra da Tijuca was unexpectedly crowded; the lanes were all reserved. They had to wait and so, as young men will, they started drinking, Brahma Chopp beer and cachaça, a type of rum made not from molasses but straight from sugarcane. And as young men will be, they were eventually joined by some women. And as young people sometimes do, they ignored the PA announcement calling them to claim their finally opened lane and sat in the bar and played a drinking game.
I do not remember what the game we played was called, or if we called it anything at all, or whether it was something we made up spontaneously, or whether the Brazilian catcher taught us all the rules, but I remember how it was played. We stretched a dampened paper cocktail napkin across the top of an empty rocks glass and balanced a cruzeiro coin (the heads side depicting a sugar cane plant) in its center. Then we took turns burning holes in that napkin by touching it with a cigarette.
You had to burn completely through the napkin. You could burn the napkin for as long as you wanted, and move the cigarette around to burn a wider or longer hole. You lost the game when, on your turn, the cruzeiro fell through and rattled in the glass. Your penalty was you had to immediately down a shot of cachaça.
I remember being good at the game. I burned little curls in the paper, and more than once I was the penultimate burner. I also had a few shots of cachaça that night. That's the thing about drinking games, you only win if you occasionally lose.
What happened after we left that bowling alley bar I can't say with any certainty. There were nights we slept on Ipanema Beach; there were nights when we drifted back to the apartment in Copacabana. But I remember taking my turn, burning around the edges of that coin in that dim bar. I remember the faces and the laughter and how good the beer tasted. (It's not that good. It took me years to find Brahma Chopp in the U.S., and when I did it was fruity and dull, a very American-style lager.)
Here at the Drinkies desk we take drinking seriously, which means we do not condone drinking games. But all things in moderation, right? People are going to drink. And when people drink, people are going to get silly.
Drinking games are part of what human beings have always done, they developed in every corner of the world, sometimes as religious or cultural rituals. One of the earliest recorded drinking games is the Chinese Jiuling, which dates back at least to the Western Zhou Dynasty (11th century BC-771 BC).
Originally it was designed to regulate people's drinking habits, to teach alcoholic discipline and decorum. It involves participants taking turns reciting poetry while drinking wine. If you make a mistake, you have to finish your drink. (The more you drink, the more mistakes you make.) Played during formal gatherings, it was fashionable among elites and intellectuals as a way to showcase both cultural knowledge and ability to hold one's liquor. It's still popular today, though the rules have become somewhat relaxed.
If you think that Jiuling sounds a bit more sophisticated than burning holes in napkins, consider that on the other side of the world, the Vikings developed another kind of really stupid drinking game — a competition where they held their heads under water while drunk. Apparently a lot of Norsemen were good at these drowning competitions; they blacked out underwater and actually drowned. But there was no penalty for electing not to play. They also had games where they drunkenly recited verse in kind of a Scandinavian rap battle.
These ancient Viking games should not be confused with the modern drinking game Viking, which involves finger-wiggling and pretending to row and is quite popular in certain Sigma Chi chapters. Trust me, it's stupid.
The ancient Greeks had Kottabos, which was extremely popular at their symposiums (drunken brawls). One form of Kottabos involved a drinking vessel called a kylix, with a wide shallow bowl and handles on each side.
After wine was drunk from the kylix, a thrower would fling the remaining dregs at a target — sometimes a metal disc balanced on a stand, sometimes a dish floating in a bowl of water. The fun derived from the thrower missing the target, splattering the walls of the andron, and watching the slaves try to clean up the mess. Har har har.
In medieval Europe, drinking games were hardly so sophisticated. Mostly they consisted of fighting. The present-day pastimes of thumb war and finger jousting (popular in Dallas prep schools in the 1980s) probably derived from these games, though some date finger jousting back to the Iron Age Israelites.
During the Renaissance era, drinking games became more refined and sophisticated. In Italy, a popular game was Battilarda, which involved participants drinking from a goblet and passing it around the room. Each person was required to take a sip then sing a song or recite a poem. If a participant failed to perform, they were required to drink again.
In France, a popular drinking game was La Grace, played at formal dinners. Participants would attempt to catch a small ball in a cup while standing on one leg. If a player failed to catch the ball or fell over, they were required to drink.
Quarters, which involves trying to bounce a quarter off a table and into a red Solo cup, probably dates from America's Colonial period, when red Solo cups were more wooden mugs or pewter tankards. But drinking games in this country really hit their stride in the early 20th century, when Prohibition led to the rise of speakeasies. Drinking games such as Bootleggers and Never Have I Ever became popular in these establishments.
In the post-World War II era, drinking games continued to evolve, particularly in college campuses across America. Beer Pong is said to have been invented at Dartmouth College sometime between 1950 and 1960, when some students apparently left cups of beer on a pingpong table during a game, and others began aiming for the cups.
Originally the game was played with table tennis bats, but at some point fraternity brothers at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania disrupted the sport by throwing pingpong balls instead of paddling them. There's a Canadian version called alcohockey played on an air hockey table with players shooting at beer cups with pucks instead of balls.
Other popular drinking games include Flip Cup, which involved flipping cups; Ring of Fire, which involves a deck of playing cards; and Where the Hell Are My Keys? which can involve going to jail and paying a substantial fine.
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One of the drinking games grownups play is called blind tasting.
This is where you sit around with your buddies and pour shots of some anonymous brown liquor, and everyone proceeds to give opinions and make guesses about what it is they're putting in their bodies. This can be fun because most of us get most of our information about whatever whiskey, beer or wine we're drinking from the label. Take access to that label away from us, and we can't always reliably tell bourbon from rye.
(Or at least Mr. Big Shot Drinkies Man here can't; some of you Facebook bottle hoarders driving up the price of Four Roses Small Batch Select probably believe you can.)
Blind tastings have utility beyond mere entertainment in that they can help us recognize that there's no sure correlation between price and our enjoyment of a beverage. Old Grand-Dad does well in blind tastings; sometimes Rebel Yell does too.
But one of the problems with blind tasting is that someone has to set it up -- they have to acquire the bottles, figure out a way to obscure all visual identifiers (decant them) and generally keep track. Which means they know the answers to the test. It's a bit of work, and the proctor doesn't have as much fun.
Enter a company called Blind Barrels -- blindbarrels.com -- which essentially does all the work for you. Blind Barrels is tightly focused on facilitating blind tastings of numerous styles of American "craft" whiskey -- smaller distilleries around the country rather than Jim Beam and his frenemies (Little Rock Rocktown Distillery is being considered as a future contributor) -- and it works as a subscription service, sending out a quarterly box containing four whiskey samples, simply marked as A, B, C and D.
The whiskeys might all be bourbon, but are more likely to be a mix of bourbon, rye, wheat whiskey, malt whiskey, etc., with varying cask finishes and proofs. You get your box -- the retail price of a single box is $69; a prepaid annual subscription is $199.99 -- taste the whiskeys, and make notes. If you can actually guess the brand of whiskey, you'll amaze your friends.
When it's time to reveal what the whiskeys are, you scan a QR code in the box, which will reveal the whiskeys in your game and tell you about their flavor profiles. If you particularly enjoy any of the samples, you can purchase a bottle directly from the service -- as of right now, this is legal in Arkansas.
I like the concept of Blind Barrels, though don't know that I'd want to commit to hosting four of these blind tastings a year. The price doesn't strike me as exorbitant, though you should note that each sample bottle consists of 50 milliliters of whiskey -- which means each bottle is just a little bit more than a standard shot (1.5 ounces equals 44.3 milliliters). Which means you probably don't need to invite the whole book club over for the tasting. And that you'll probably have to supplement the tasting material with extra alcohol.
On the other hand, as an educational tool (which for tax purposes, it certainly qualifies) the Blind Barrels kit makes a lot of sense. It's a fun way to discover craft whiskeys from all over the country. It's not a night spent burning holes in a napkin in a smoky Brazilian bowling alley a few months after your 18th birthday, but as grownup-pleasures go, it's another one.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com