May marks five years of blogging here about cocktails and other aspects of the cocktail life.

Why?

Every year, bloggers tend to do a wrap up of the last years work, hitting the highlights of the period, and linking back to the best posts of the year. I’ve made a practice of it myself, but this year I want to do a little navel-gazing as well about what the Hell I’m doing here and what we here in the Cocktailosphere overall are accomplishing, if anything. I think that there are also things to be learned from this about the Blogosphere and related social media, and how these things that have changed how we communicate in turn are changing themselves.

Why do people blog in the first place? Similarly, why do exponentially more people post on Facebook, Twitter, and other similar avenues? The traditional answer is because they feel they have something to say. I don’t think this is quite on the nose. We write (online or traditionally) because we think that there is something that we want you to hear. And not necessarily something profound. You can make up jokes all day. They only get rewarding when you share them with others.

To be clear, you are not always right when you think that anyone else wants to hear what you have to say. Even your best friends don’t need to see 58 pictures a day of your kids, nor hear of the adorable little BM Junior made, right in the exact geometric center of the potty, today. And that is deathless prose compared to Breaking News that you have “Checked In” at the Starbucks on 34th.

When I started blogging here, my sole intent was to evangelize about the world’s greatest, yet largely forgotten, cocktail, the Pegu. Actually, my real desires were just to see how a blog worked from a technical standpoint, and maybe steer a few unwitting victims customers to my murder mystery party business. I left myself an out to write a little bit beyond Pegus with my tagline, “… and other ramblings on the cocktail life.” But basically I wrote about everything I could find on Pegus on the web.

Lots of, if not most, blogs start in similar fashion. Someone realizes that they have a few things to say about some subject that they think other people would want or need to hear. Blogs are dead easy to set up, for free or at minimal cost, so they create one, and write a post or two to scratch this itch.

After a couple of months, life intruded, and I essentially abandoned this blog, not posting or even logging in for several months. One day I logged in to my admin page by accident and stopped to think. This has been fun, I told myself, but you have done your schtick. There is only so much you can write about a single cocktail without appearing (more completely) compulsively insane. What I was discovering was that it was easy to set up a blog, and to write about the things I had in mind that made me set it up to begin with.
Now I had a choice. Do I hit the Add Post button and start expanding my subject matter, or do I chalk this up to valuable experience and move on?

This is an overwhelmingly common Rubicon moment. One most bloggers do not cross. Last decade, at least 60% of new blogs were abandoned in their first month, and 95% were abandoned after a quarter.

But I was one of the few who chose to wade across, with my legion of words. I did for a couple of reasons. First, some people were actually reading this site. Hard as it was for me to believe then, and for the PeguWife to believe to this day, a fairly gratifying number of people out there find what I have to say, or at least the way I say it, to be entertaining and/or informative. Second, I found that blogging is a profoundly educational kind of writing. When students in high school do a quarter or year of independent study, they should be required to blog their research as they go. Their advisers would know that they are advancing their study, and they would gain invaluable depth to their understanding of their studies by writing them up as they go.

In the course of these five years, I’ve gone from a guy with a few items of uncommon knowledge and enough general comprehension of the subject to talk a good game about drinks, to someone with such an obscene amount of information, utilitarian and obscure alike, tucked away in his noggin that most people think I’m a serious expert. I’m not, of course. Among the knowledge I’ve acquired is who the serious cocktail experts in this world really are, and what kind of knowledge and skill makes them so.
And I do try to never be serious.

Even once you move on to becoming a Blogger, as opposed to someone who “has a blog”, it remains a hard game to keep playing.
Most importantly, there is no money in blogging. The fraction of blogs run by bloggers worthy of the term is tiny. The fraction of those bloggers who make any money at all is tiny. And the fraction of those money-making bloggers who make a living at it is tinier still. “Sweet, sweet blog money” is as mythical as hen’s teeth, unicorns, and the President’s debt reduction plans. Blogs can be springboards or adjuncts to lucrative livings, but a blog itself is just not going to feed your kids. I do pretty well around here, and yet my total yearly earnings barely cover my annual purchases of Cointreau and Bombay Sapphire. I’ve understood this for a long time, and naven’t let it slow down my work here. But this year, as Doug’s Personal Economic Indicators continue to suck, it has been more on my mind.

That aside, my reward has always been mostly in having readers. Overall, my traffic continues to grow, as it always has. But since I’m an insecure dude, I always worry if this is because as the cocktail renaissance proceeds, there are just that many more readers out there in general, rather than because of a voracious appetite for my my purple prose.
And there is still the matter of my comments, or paucity thereof.

Oh God, no!
Are you going to go off on another of your whinging rants about how your readers don’t comment enough to suit your fancy and salve your ego?

Well, they don’t… But that’s not where I was going. I do love it when I get comments, especially comments that get responded to by other commenters. My point (this time) is that comments help a blogger know what things he’s writing about are really engaging people. Without them, I don’t know if the high-traffic post I’ve written is actually interesting to my target audience, or simply accidentally very SEO-friendly. Honestly, I often get a better idea of people’s reactions to my tweets than to a blog post like this.

But there is another reward to serious blogging that simply does not exist in Facebook or Twitterland: Fellow bloggers. Sure you have lots of friends (with quotes or without) on Facebook and on Twitter, but when you blog seriously, you will find that you have colleagues. In five years of doing this, I have gathered a stable of entertaining and valuable colleagues (and friends) who blog about drinks as I do. And though I’m much worse at this kind of networking than many of said colleagues, I’ve made a good number of contacts in the industry we cover as well. These folks are the readers and correspondents that I value above all, and what have made five years of sometimes ridiculously hard or expensive work all worth while.

So, if all is so right with the world, why the navel gazing, instead of a Happy Birthday To Me post detailing how awesome Tiki Month was this Winter, my incompletely blogged cross-country barcrawl, and how my first trip to Tales of the Cocktail opened up all sorts of new horizons for me?

Because for me and a lot of my fellow booze bloggers, we’ve reached the next great Rubicon moment in blogging: The “is what we are doing ‘over’?” moment. Our situation hardly unique. In fact, I’d suggest that it is universal. Every segment of the blogosphere has this Closing of the Frontier moment. The political blogs had it long ago, the blogospohere as a whole had it long ago. Mommy blogs have had it. Food blogging and cocktail blogging are among the areas that are having it now.

The Closing of the Frontier is when newcomers stop being perceived as, and feeling like, pioneers, and instead are more like the new neighbors. New bloggers don’t have to invent the way things are done anymore, and old bloggers (like me) look around and realize that this community we created isn’t precisely what we meant to or hoped to create. Further we find that there is no gold in those hills (see above). Or if there was, it was a small amount and is either gone or will never be profitable to mine. Colorful figures from the early days fade away, and whether this is due to real life intrusions, demands of the liver, or disinterest in the new, domesticated blogoscape, many readers and fellow bloggers will internalize the explanation as the last of these. And all this makes those of us who remain question our own place in things.

Part of this closing of the frontier in the Cocktailosphere is due to concurrent maturation of the world we cover, classic cocktails. It is no longer (as) weird or obscure. Bartending as a craft is once again becoming a thing. Great bars, and bar which aim to be great, proliferate across the world. And paradoxically, with the blossoming of our subject matter, a blog that looks like the average cocktail blog two years ago now seems a bit superfluous.

Yet, I don’t feel I’m reaching to say that I and especially my fellow pioneers of the Cocktailosphere had no small part in making this all happen. We helped give voice to the bartenders who revived the art. Some of us were those bartenders. Others of us have become those bartenders. We helped them hone the message. We tested and indeed created many of the ideas and themes you see now being used by the giants in the industry to nurture and profit from this growth area. We gave enthusiasts a means to find out about a world of possibilities and opportunities out there as we educated ourselves.

But are we needed now, for that? I know a lot of my friends think not. It can hurt to feel that the baby you helped nurture along is walking just fine now and doesn’t need you that way anymore. I find myself sad as I write this, but want to make sure you don’t think I share that bitterness.

Because, while I don’t think the craft cocktail world needs the kind of blog space the Cocktailosphere has been till now as much as it did, I deeply believe that there is now as much or more material to be written about than there was in the early days. How it is written about may change, and what exactly is the focus of many blogs will change as well. But the need for blogs like this remains, and will remain.

Because hey, what industry doesn’t need snarky quick hits and long-form speculation and innuendo, not to mention the occasional appearance by gin-soaked sockpuppets!

Don’t worry, Guy. You aren’t going anywhere.

My re-appearance at this point indicates that the maudlin reminiscence tone of this post has run its course.

Yeah.

I for one am going nowhere. (That didn’t sound right…) I have no intention of retiring this blog, nor do I accept that just because the frontier has closed, boozeblogging is somehow passé. I intend to continue to encourage the growth and vigor of the Cocktailosphere going forward on this, its fifth anniversary, and…

Wait.
It’s the Pegu Blog’s fifth anniversary. Are you claiming that you started the cocktailosphere?

Well, he is pretty arrogant, you know….

Yeah, but not usually this much!

Of course not. But I started right about at the point where the wave started to build. There are damn few cocktail blogs older than this one, and fewer still which remain active. I’m quite proud of my own little contributions to the cocktail world as a whole, and slightly larger ones to the Cocktailosphere itself.

So for me, and for the rest of my colleagues in cocktail blogging, we come back to the same place that I wrote about at the top of the post. Do I put it to bed, or do I hit Add Post and start covering different aspects of the cocktail craft, and write about the old stuff in new ways? For those of you who read my regularly, you’ll note that in this, my fifth year, I’ve already made that decision. Look for more to come, please. And let me know what you think.

While I have a cocktail shaking machine already, I never use it. It is nowhere near awesome enough to overcome the fact that using it is more work you save.

But this baby, I’d use. I’d have to build an extension to my back bar, but it would be totally worth it.

Incidentally, if you haven’t clicked the video, it is actually a lot better shaker than it looks. When you shake, just bouncing the shaker straight up and down doesn’t do a very good job and if you are doing it by hand makes you look like a colleague of Conan’s bear. On initial inspection, it looks like this shaker just goes up and down, but it is much more elegant and stylish than that.

All it needs is a quick-release and insertion mechanism and you could build a steampunk-themed classic cocktail bar around it. People would come.

I’ve written before of the four bedrock drinks of cocktailia. Each based on one of the four foundation spirits of classic cocktail mixing: gin, bourbon, rum, and brandy, I refer to these cocktails as The Four Gospels. There are other great and/or popular spirits that people mix with, of course. And there is for most of them an emblematic cocktail as well. I’ll refer to these drinks as the Gnostic Gospels, since the spirits they use aren’t quite canonical for one reason or another.

With Cinco de Mayo fast approaching, let’s discuss the (Gnostic) Gospel of Tequila: The Margarita.

Margaritas! Woo Hoo!

Um, no. Not quite what I want to talk about here. The Margarita suffers from all sorts of problems, few if any of them its own fault. The biggest is that, like the Gospel of Rum (the Daiquiri), the Margarita has been largely debased from great classic cocktail into a machine-dispensed, umbrella party drink that is consumed rather than savored. It’s a shame really, because when made well, the Margarita is a delicious, sophisticated cocktail that you can order in the finest cocktail bars in the world with your head held high.

Please note, I’m not totally dismissing the frozen Margarita here. There are times when a slushy, salt-encrusted bowl of green agave bomb is just the thing. They can truly rev up a party, and if you either cannot afford or do not want to pop for the good stuff on this set of guests, Frozen Margaritas are the best way to go to hide the genuinely crappy flavors of cheap tequila.
Cheap or expensive, Tequila really does seem to have a higher than average ability to knock down inhibitions. I banned the stuff from my own parties back in my late twenties after two incidents. The first ended with me rolling up and down the hill in our back yard in the wet grass with several of the neighborhood wives. The second had my own wife finding me taking a shower in the guest bathroom, fully clothed, but dry as a bone since I’d forgotten to turn on the water.

But this blog is a high-falutin’ operation, so I’ll leave off the frozen Margarita discussion with a single piece of advice for those who came here looking for insight into cold, green, party punch for St. Patrick’s Day (South of the Border Edition). Forget the blender. It is a hassle, loud, and unlike with lots of frozen cocktails, unnecessary. If you are going to do the Margarita Party thing, just try one of these products. The freezer bucket mixes just need a bottle of cheap tequila and some freezer space, and they make a plenty serviceable faux Mexican party drink.

Let’s start with what is in a Margarita: Tequila, lime, an orange liqueur, and a bit of sweetener. Within this, there is a lot of room for variation and experimentation. Here is the recipe I use when my fancy takes me to Margaritaville:

I’ll go through each bit to show where you might want to vary the program, and why I don’t.

For the most part, I stick with silver tequilas in my Margaritas. The added character is largely wasted in this mix, and frankly, I don’t like the color as much in the final cocktail. Rather than spend your money on a reposado or anjeo, spend it on a better class of white tequila and you’ll be well ahead of the game. Whatever tequila you use in making your real Margarita, make sure it is actually drinkable.
If you take a sip and have to bite into a lime and lick salt just to survive the experience, it isn’t good enough tequila. If you do want to use a dark, aged tequila, I suggest you do it on the rocks, where the color will be less of an issue.

Which brings us to the choice of up or on the rocks. As I mentioned above, the frozen version is a fine drink, but it is not a cocktail. A good Margarita cocktail can be served either chilled or with ice, and in either a cocktail glass or a rocks. I prefer up, in a cocktail glass, because I think it is more elegant. But since it is so important that your Margarita be cold when you drink it, you may find rocks to be a better choice if you like to pour a larger portion.

In either case, please don’t use those giant, thick “Margarita” glasses. These things are ugly, clunky, and take up unnecessary space in your cabinets that could be devoted to booze. If you must use these things, do it with the slush.

Not the Devil, but it is what he drinks out of.

Cointreau is apparently the original liqueur in Margaritas. I use it because, well, I seem to use Cointreau in every damn thing I mix. Also, it is a magnificent step up from basic Triple Sec. You can also use Grand Marnier, or other orange liqueur such as Patron’s Citronage. Why you’d bother, I don’t know. Cointreau is delicious.

Fresh lime juice. ‘Nuff said there.

You may or may not want the sweetener. I like a little myself. I use agave syrup here, and in precious little else. It is not flavor neutral, and in most cocktails that is a problem. But for obvious reasons, it does go quite well with tequila.

The last big thing is the rim.

In an Art of Drink post two years ago, Darcy says a lot about the salts to use on your rim. For my part, I just want to focus on where, not what. Below is not how to rim your glass, for Margaritas, or any other salt or sugar-rimmed glass. Ever.

The salt needs to be outside the glass, not inside, and the standard bar rimmer, while fast, will put just as much or more material on the inside of the glass as the outside. Rimming materials that are inside the rim of the glass will wash into the drink. If you wanted the salt dissolved in the drink, you’d add it when you are shaking. Outside the rim, the salt will only dissolve on the drinker’s tongue, in the amount he or she desires.

To that end, always leave a gap at least a quarter of the way around the glass clear of ice, so the drinker can start out with a span of rim where they can be completely salt-free, even on their first sip. You should do this with any rimmed drink you make, salt, sugar, or Peruvian cocoa and parika dust.

Achieving this kind of rim, with the salt only on the outside and leaving a perfect gap, is harder than just slamming your damp glass into a ring of salt, but not by much really. To make the salt stick, take a freshly cut wedge of lime and run it around the outside rim of the glass as far around and down the outside as you want the salt to coat. Then lean the glass over on its side and pat its outside gently into a high pile of your chosen salt. Don’t turn the glass while it is in the salt, or you’ll get a messy rim and your salt pile will get contaminated. Instead, pat the glass down, lift and twist slightly. Repeat until you have gone as far around as you want. The result is a gorgeous, evenly crusted outer rim. With the slightest of practice, it takes 30 seconds, tops.

Before I leave you to your newly sophisticated Conco de Mayoing, I should explain why I classify the Margarita as a Gnostic Gospel. Good Margaritas have all the hallmarks of a gospel cocktail. They are delicious, simple to make, complex, beautifully showcase the quality of the base spirit, and they are the quintessential means of serving tequila.
But whereas vodka is so devoid of character it is relegated to the gnostic status, Tequila’s conversely overwhelming character makes it just too limited a spirit in its own right to merit full gospel status. It is a bitch to mix with in general. Its unique flavor profile is problematic with a host of the usual cocktail ingredients; so much so that most every tequila cocktail ends up being some kind of Margarita derivative. Also, despite tremendous money spent in recent years by the industry, with lots of creative advertising and a concurrent increase in sales, tequila remains a boutique or niche spirit. Most Americans drink it only in Mexican restaurants or on Cinco de Mayo. Similar to what I said about Old Fashioneds and Mad Men season premiers, 95% of everything you will see written about tequila this year, will be written this week.

The wheels of government grind ever on, and often in the wrong direction. But every once in a great while they do eventually get where they ought to go. For instance, through a trade agreement with Brazil, the United States has agreed to recognize the category of Cachaça as a trade designation, in return for Brazil recognizing our definition of Bourbon and Tennessee Whiskeys.

I wrote extensively on the background of these negotiations, and the efforts in support of them by major cachaça brand, Leblon. Leblon has had a great deal of fun with the process, and apparently sold a great deal of fire-water along the way. In fact, I’m wondering what the heck Leblon will do to promote its product, now that they have won their “insurgent campaign”….

I note the slowness of the government’s movement on this only because the post I reference above, wherein the deal already seemed done, was written in 2009.

And lo, in recent days, the king of cocktail blog traffic, Darcy at Art of Drink made an accidental foray into Rule 4 territory. Rule 4 states that you can pump up your own traffic by making controversial statements that rile up other online personalities. They denounce you publicly. And both of you reap the traffic reward as onlookers flock to both your blogs, tumblrs, feeds, or whatever. Happily Fortunately for Darcy, his Rule 4 trigger also employed Rule 5… Rule 5 is at its core: Everybody is interested in boobs.

In this particular case, Darcy tweeted a comment about how he is looking for a bartending job, and wonders if his search would be more fruitful if he got a boob job. He got some blowback… His tale and defense of his musing is summed up at Art of Drink in the post, Bartending and Your Boobs. You should follow the link and read the whole sordid, fascinating tale. (See what I did there? that’s Rule 2 of blogging success. And I went Rule 2 because Darcy went Rules 4 & 5)

Enough blogging about blogging. Darcy’s little contretemps illustrates an interesting question/controversy/fact of life in the bartending world. Like it or not, good looks are remarkably valuable as a professional asset in the bartending world.

To be clear, I am less worried about being pilloried than Darcy is on this subject because

1. I’m older and married, thus giving less of a damn about what other women think
2. I have already written on this subject (humorously) and have established my cred as a believer in the value of skill over looks
3. No one takes me all that seriously. (This is invaluable if you wish to say what you believe in this PC world)

That said, I do wish to make several beliefs perfectly clear at the outset, so any fights I get into will be on the merits, instead of misunderstanding.

This does not just apply to women. Hot is hot, female or male. Everybody objectifies hot people, and everybody avoids ugly people, in circumstances where we don’t know each other. Darcy focused (hey, he’s a guy) on bartenders who went out and purchased their “charismas” from Dr. Feelgood, but the issue remains just as germane when discussing naturally attractive folks as well.

If you are a bartender, the better looking you are, the more drinks you will sell, and the bigger tips you will get, all other things being equal.

But…

Looks will not help you if you suck. The customer will quickly lose interest in gazing into your dreamy eyes or magnificent cleavage if you take forever, get their order wrong, or your Margarita tastes like ass. Or if you shake their goddamn Manhattan….

Being a great bartender, or at least a competent one, is a skill. Most anyone has what it takes, should they care to work at it, to become a decent bartender who will care for customers adequately and be a value to their employer. Smokin’ hot looks are not a skill. If you have them, bully for you. If you don’t, you are not going to get them. (Dr. Feelgood disputes this, and for $10,000 he will endeavor to prove it to you)

As the internet meme goes, this post is useless without pictures, so I shall indulge my juvenile side with a few pictures so that you may have some illustrations of what hot bartenders might look like, you know, in case you are having a hard time with the concept….

If you want to be a successful bartender as a career, your looks will never be the deciding factor. They may make you successful more quickly, and they might raise your ceiling of success, but you can be Bo Derek and you will never be a successful bartender if you go around serving single malt scotch shaken with ice in a cocktail glass.

Kids, Bo Derek was this amazing looking actress back in the Pleistocene… never mind.

Now that I’ve established a set of opinions upon which I doubt I will be contradicted, let’s get controversial. Darcy, shortly after making the most convincing argument yet in our on-going back and forth about whether Canada is better than the US or (obviously) not, writes this key paragraph:

The choice is always up to women as to how they live their life. For example, this is a job ad for bartenders I saw a few months ago: “wanted: female bartenders, send picture and phone #”. That was literally the complete ad. I thought about dressing up in drag and sending my picture in, but I opted out. The thing is that an ad like this probably did result in a number of responses, and if a person responds to this type of ad they realize that the talent portion of the contest is secondary.

This is exactly right… here in the US, Canada, and a few other, lucky places on Earth. This is not the natural order of things now, or ever in the past. And if we want to preserve this historically anomalous state of affairs, we need to recognize our achievements on this front, and quit acting as if there is some moral equivalence between Western puerility, and the subjugation, open human trafficking, and even gendercide of women in most of the world. I have two young daughters, so this really matters to me.

But I have Sitemeter, and I thus know most of you who read this are fortunate enough to live with me in one of the good neighborhoods on Earth, so lets focus on how to live in our world. Darcy is over-reductive, I think, when he focuses on the ad I reproduced atop this post. Here is another such, longer and more detailed ad that makes the same point. Yes, in the Hooters-esque sub-sector of the hospitality biz, women do need to sort of “tramp themselves out”, but I feel the women who work in these places deserve more respect than they get. To succeed, they still have to have skills, and they have to work hard. A box of hammers with the best boob job on Earth will still fail in short order. (Or, alas, moved to the hostess stand)

But tramping oneself out differs in the professional context. It’s easy to see in the gay bar, where John Goodbody wears tight jeans and a shirt that shows off his chiseled, tanned biceps and pecs, or even at TGI Houligan Tuesday’s, where Jane Juice never sees the need for a bra and apparently has some disability that prevents her from working the buttons on her blouse more than one above her navel. Like these fine professionals:

But having great looks, and using them, will be just as effective, and just as calculated, for a seasoned pro working at a class outfit like a Violet Hour or a Pegu Club. I chose those two because during my last visit to each, neither had any really outstanding lookers, male or female. Other top of the line cocktail bars I’ve visited have had such, and don’t think it doesn’t matter. It is a simple matter of dressing conservatively, but tailoring, um, less so.

This last picture isn’t quite what I mean, but it was hard to find the right picture on the web without resorting to one or two that I took myself, of lady bartenders who might actually read this….

OK, enough with the eye-candy, let’s wrap up.

Um,
That means many of you can stop “reading” here….

The point that Darcy makes, which I agree with, is that in our civilization, no one makes you use your looks. Nor can they dictate how you choose to do it, should you choose to. Only in our ludicrously PC society would anyone equate a natural, automatic increase in your revenue and your earnings with being oppressed….

Similarly, if you got it, you’re an idiot not to use it. How you use it, or how much, is up to you. When choosing between otherwise identical bars, I’m going to the one where Cindy With the Rack works, at least most of the time. I’m not being crass, I’m being honest. In fact, straight as I am, I’m probably going to prefer the bar with they guy who looks like Robert Downey, Jr, over the one with the bartender who looks like Marty Feldman. (Kids, Marty Feldman was a famous… never mind.) You see, attractiveness isn’t just about sex. It’s about being pleasant to simply be facing for a while.

This is the world we live in. It is not going to change much. None of what is at issue here is about right and wrong. It is about practicality. If you are good-looking, use it, it’ll work out well for you and your customers. But don’t forget you still have to work, care, and educate yourself well, or you will not cut it as a bartender. If you look ordinary, fine. Grump about the “unfair” advantage of others, then out-work and -create the pretty people, and you will do better than they. It might be harder at first. As someone who, um, has never gotten a lot of professional advantage from his looks, I sympathize. Any way you cut it, it is the truth, so we might as well laugh about it from time to time. Humor is the natural human mechanism for dealing with truths, especially the slightly uncomfortable ones.

Brother, can you spare $4.5 million? If you can, you can buy the entire retail liquor establishment of Washington State right now! With the transfer of the sale of liquor to the private sector in Washington State proceeding apace, all state-owned liquor stores are up for sale, cumulative asking price, about four and a half very large.

OK, if you are really interested, you can just buy one if you like….

(H/T: Gizmodo)

Blogging Rule 5, the (in)judicious use of sexy images to draw attention is considered by most to be a staple of booze advertising as well. “Sex Sells” after all, right?

This new ad from Sauza Blue Tequila, a Rule 5 treat for the female readers, illustrates perfectly an important corollary of Rule 5 for advertisers, and because it does, it is well worth watching for the guys, too.

See? Now that is funny folks. And that is what an overtly sexually-tinged booze ad has to be.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this phenomenon. First and foremost, both men and women buy hooch, and if you just do a straight appeal to below-the-gut, you will usually end up appealing to only one sex or the other. Worse, you may well end up turning off the gender not targeted. Make those folks at least laugh, and everyone feels OK.

Second, humor engages the brain, which I imagine is important to an advertiser. Effective sexual imagery kinda shuts it down, no?

Well,
the big brain at least!

If the mind is too focused on “desire”, there is little room for assessing the product on offer, which is why a lot of very sexy ads ultimately fail. Humor breaks up the focus, letting the mind wander over and ponder the ad, if only briefly. But that broadening is likely what your mind needs to remember that there is even a tequila bottle in this ad to begin with.

Plus, kittens!

Andrew Stuttaford at National Review noted this weekend the passing of one of the classic bars in Manhattan, the former speakeasy Bill’s Gay Nineties Restaurant and Piano Bar. (That’s Speakeasy as in, Large Men Will Break Your Legs If You Work For The Cops, not Speakeasy as in, Dude, You Get To Go All Maxwell Smart On The Phonebooth In Back Of The Hotdog Shop!) In so doing, he makes mention of a great essay by George Orwell in which he describes what is, for Orwell, the perfect English Pub. George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, kiddies. They are two books you used to have to read, but usually don’t any more because, well, they don’t want you to read them anymore.

The Moon Under Water, the pub Orwell describes, is a fantasy, simply Orwell’s description of what a Pub should be, or ought to have been in wartime England. It is a lovely piece of writing, and while it would likely not be (as Andrew suggests) the perfect American bar, there is much here to chew on. I’m going to highlight a few of the elements that Orwell imagined in his perfect pub that I think ought to be universal, and a few that perhaps don’t work across time or ocean.
Also, it’s a chance to quote Orwell and generally class up the writing around here a bit.

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

He opens by noting that the Moon is easy to get to, but is neither hip nor happening. Assholes need not apply. I think you can certainly agree that a great bar should be generally free of rowdy assholes. Unless you are a rowdy asshole, of course. In such case we can take comfort in the likelihood that you don’t read this blog, and the near certainty you don’t read Orwell….

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

Mega-Dittos, Rush, er, George. Nightclubs should have loud music. Pickup joints in general should have deafening music. There is no reason in places like that to risk your personality taking away from whatever attractiveness alcohol has bequeathed you. There will be time enough in the morning to discover what a crashing bore you’ve hooked up with, right? But a good bar should make socialization easy. Either with friends, or with complete strangers. If you cannot solve the Problems of the World with a drinking companion known five years or five minutes in a bar, it is simply not a great bar.
In America today, by the way, this means no TV… anywhere in the bar. Nothing sucks the life out of conversation faster than the flickering idiot box. Sports bars need TVs, but beyond that, keep one in the back and wheel it out for people to listen to in the event we declare war, or Elvis returns.

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

First, I did not know this about china and beer. I intend to try it and see. Anyone else in America use china? Any bars?
This and other comments in the piece show that an English pub, at least of Orwell’s day, was about beer. Here, cocktails are much more the focus, whether you mean the extravagant concoctions of the discerning booze nerd, or the sea of Jack and Cokes and Kangaroo Cocktails in more mainstream joints. And even for customers who don’t actively notice it, drinking vessels matter. The size, heft, and quality of glasses lend more to the quality of the drinking experience than most customers, or bar owners for that matter, realize.
And care of those vessels matters too, though Orwell neglects to mention it. A dirty, water-spotted glass puts me off almost instantly. And you best have built up a veritable sea of good times with me in the past if you want me to ever darken your door again should my glass, or those of any of my party, sports even a trace of lipstick.

Orwell speaks of the Moon’s garden, a family friendly environment.

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

He is more open to the presence of children, at least on the periphery, than I am, or think Americans in general are with our bars. But his main thrust here is that wives drink with their husbands in his mythical perfect pub. I also think this is a huge deal. A bar whose customer base is too much one sex or the other is dreary for every day drinking. Yes, a boys’ or girls’ club is refreshing from time to time, and frankly, we need more of them in these politically correct times. But a really good general purpose bar ought to mirror one’s community and civilization. Further, a great bar should have a solid leavening of couples in its crowd at all times. And not just dates and hookups in progress, but husbands and wives out meeting other husbands and wives. Such atmosphere is healthy and robust, and offers all involved a richer, fuller evening out.

Not all of his suggestions, though are that great, at least to me.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women—two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone ‘dear,’ irrespective of age or sex. (‘Dear,’ not ‘Ducky’: pubs where the barmaid calls you ‘ducky’ always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

Some of this is awesome. Regulars expect and deserve to be known and recognized as such, and newcomers likewise deserve to be taken interest in. But I am not a fan of the motherly or fatherly aura in my bartenders or servers. Likewise, I’m not advocating the whole “breastaurant” concept for this either. But if given my druthers, I’d rather the bartenders and servers be attractive, and perhaps just a bit younger than the clientele… so long as they don’t act like it.

The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece — everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

Yes, I really like a good bar that has a well-maintained but lived-in feel. And true, nothing makes a space feel more “lived-in” than yellow nicotine stains. But I do not personally like the smell of cigarettes; not when they are being smoked, and especially not when they were smoked 18 years earlier. That said, the perfect bar can allow cigarette smoking. It just won’t be my hangout. Bars should absolutely be allowed to allow smoking. As a business decision, most of them should not. But that should be their choice. A perfect bar for the smoker is one that allows smoking, and non-smokers should just go elsewhere. And vice-versa.
A great bar is filled with happy people, and smokers who can’t are not, and non-smokers who essentially must are not either.

There is more, and the piece is well-worth reading just for the atmosphere it evokes. It is nice to see that Orwell could paint a luxurious fantasy idyll just as well as he could a hideous, plausible nightmare. What else do you think a perfect bar should boast?

Yup. It’s pretty reliable. Don Draper and the firm must be about to hit the airwaves with a new season of Mad Men.

I‘m just sayin‘.

Maggi and I will be celebrating by actually getting around to watching Season One for the first time. Better late than never.

For the record, here’s the way to make an Old-Fashioned. This is not “my take” on this subject. This is Old Testament, tablets of stone stuff here. Really.

Oh. And no post about Mad Men is complete without one of these:

Oh dear.
One of the most pointless controversies on the internet is the battle of over which spelling of whisky is the correct one. (See what I just did there?) You get the die-hards on each side of the Great Brown Liquor E Divide, each claiming their spelling is the “real” one, and then both are slapped around by the pedants with their “rules” about geographic origin, etc. More pixels have been pointlessly flipped on and off on the subject of whether whisky is spelt “whisky” or “whiskey” than on any other meaningless distinction except the one between Pinnacle and Three Olives.

But you don’t become a blogger if you aren’t amused by pointless controversies, so I was delighted to see Camper English of Alcademics and FineCooking.com take this one and jamb the knob to 11.

Don’t go feeling superior, reader!
You don’t start reading blogs if you aren’t attracted to meaningless controversy either!

You see, there also a distinction between the plurals of the two spellings. The plural of whisky is whiskies, and the plural of whiskey is whiskeys. Camper didn’t know this until he stumbled upon it. I didn’t know it until I read it from him. It is likely a legion of internet trolls and spelling nazis didn’t know it until now either.
But now they do.
Someone, somewhere, has just added this to his list of things to watch for, and make sure are corrected forthwith in every occurrence. So, fellow bloggers, better mind your ies and eys, or you will. be. set. straight!

Now, as I wrote shortly ago, we don’t have the same density of internet-obsessive compulsives monitoring cocktail blogs as other fora have. Nevertheless, this is just one more thing for that type to latch onto, bringing us just one step closer to critical mass… and the sweet traffic levels that would accompany it. Thanks, Camper!