UPDATE: Ahoy, ye marauding hordes from Mashable! There be lot o’ non-pirate drinkin’ an’ thinkin’ about these waters, so search fer some other treasure afore ye be leavin’!


Ahoy there, me fine fellow corsairs! It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, or as we here on the good ship Buccaneer’s Strumpet like to say, International Drink Like a Pirate Day! Yarrrrr!
It be the time o’ year to celebrate the most entertainin’ internet meme of the all, arrrr!
What’s that, me proud beauty?
Yarrrr! Indeed, ITLaPD is the best o’ them all! Yes, even better than pictures of adorable little shark bait kitties with worse language skills than ours! Now get ready to drink up!

This year, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, yer bonny Pegu Blog has scoured the Seven Seas for appropriate refreshment to drink on this day… and any other where ye be feelin’ piratical! And I, yer genial host Mad Morty Rackham, have rounded up three potent potables to pour down yer parched pirate piehole! A good pirate cocktail is just what this old sea dog needs after a long day o’ keelhaulin’, and plunderin’, and pillagin’.
Now, I’ve been bloggin’ up a storm, a gale, me hearties, over ITLaPD this week. I started with a shot across the bow, then I wrote about supplies ye need to be fillin’ yer hold with for this bonny day, and I also addressed how to be talkin’ like a pirate in the most important port of all, a bar! Arrrr!
But today, lay yer helm hard over, and set yer course fer these three ports o’ call, each ripe for plunderin’!

• Cap’n n’ Coke
• Navy Grog
• Bumbo

But before ye be headin’ off to swill some rhum, me buckos, it be time for a pirate song!

Avast! Now, where be that tavern wench? Ah there she be! Drink up, me buckos!

It is coming…. (Actually, it’s already September 19th somewhere! Check the bottom of this post for the rest of the ITLaPD posts!)

Saturday, September 19th, 2009 is once again International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I’ll be posting something special, pirate drink-wise, and generally annoying my wife and tennis partners by talking like a pirate.
You need to do this too.
To help you get ready, I have a few links for you to follow now.
First up, via Dave Barry, is the pick of the litter of pirate name generators, What’s My Pirate Name? My pirate name for 2009 is Mad Morty Rackham!
Avast, ye lubbers! Fear Mad Morty’s thirsty cutla….

Hey! Chill out.
It’s not the 19th yet.

Oops, sorry.
Anyway, there’s also a new, but pretty cross bare-bones, name generator for your pirate ship, too! Mad Morty Rackham swabs the decks aboard the Buccaneer’s Strumpet.
See you September 19th!

Please just bear with him.
He’ll be babbling about this all week.
Here’s the mian post that leads to all the International Talk Like a Pirate Day Cocktails.
Here’s his discussion of Pirate Rum.
And here’s his list of instructions for talking like a pirate in bars.
This link is to the International Talk Like a Pirate Day Rum and Coke.
This link is to the International Talk Like a Pirate Day Navy Grog.
This link is to the International Talk Like a Pirate Day Bumbo.

My snarky comments in my last post about scientific studies came back to me this afternoon, as I perused my iPhone at the park.
A week ago I read (and I bet a lot of you did too) an article in the New York Times, entitled Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It. The article addresses controversy over a recent discovered, but uncontested statistical fact: Moderate drinkers live longer than heavy drinkers, but they also live longer than Teetotalers.
If no one contests the fact, why is it controversial?
You don’t follow politics much, do you?
Here is what lots of scientists are saying to argue that the obvious advice that arises from this fact should not be given:

“The bottom line is there has not been a single study done on moderate alcohol consumption and mortality outcomes that is a ‘gold standard’ kind of study — the kind of randomized controlled clinical trial that we would be required to have in order to approve a new pharmaceutical agent in this country,” said Dr. Tim Naimi, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This a completely valid scientific point, but also a terrible basis for debate. How’s it both? Well, the central assertion that correlation is not causation is critical to good science. And that critical rule is the most often ignored best practice in science, by both lay people and scientists themselves. So it certainly is reasonable to say that you should not take this statistical fact alone as advising moderate drinking.
But there are numerous other studies that show more direct causation between alcohol consumption and a variety of specific health benefits and risks. How do we balance them? Dr. Naimi’s suggestion that we employ a process similar to the FDA’s approval process for new drugs is flawed for various reasons. First, as the article notes, the only sponsor for such a test that might allow the results to be trusted by both sides would be the Feds. And they won’t pay for such a process because whichever side comes out behind will hate them. Further, I would suggest that using a process that would reject Aspirin or Penicillin as possessing too many risk factors to be allowed, would certainly find against alcohol. Which is more an indictment of the government’s process of approving drugs than it is of alcohol. The fact is, like everything else on Earth, alcohol has benefits and risks. If we want to know how those sides tend to balance, I’d suggest that we have a study already done, to the goldest of standards, about how those risks tend to balance. The sample size is humanity….
To be fair, the argument Dr. Naimi and some others (don’t you just love when reporters use the phrase some scientists say…?) make against my last point is this:

…the two groups are so different that they simply cannot be compared. Moderate drinkers are healthier, wealthier and more educated, and they get better health care, even though they are more likely to smoke. They are even more likely to have all of their teeth, a marker of well-being.

The problem I see with this distinction is that the scientists seem determined to believe that these sociological differences could have no causative relationship with alcohol consumption. This is of course ridiculous. No one claims that alcohol use can and does change people’s life circumstances, at least in the case of heavy use or abuse. Why should we reject out of hand the notion that moderate alcohol use might actually promote some of those social advantages the researchers say distinguish moderate drinkers?
I’m not saying this is certain, but I contend that the differences they are discussing can’t legitimately be used as control factors since income and education may also be affected by alcohol use. In fact, a Forbes article by Arthur Brooks cites a study that purports to show such a relationship.

Moderate drinkers are richer than teetotalers, too. In 2001 the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics found that light drinkers (one to two drinks a day) had a mean income of $49,000, versus $36,000 among teetotalers. This is a nuanced statistic; drinking may be associated with other variables (like education) that influence income. So the researchers did their best to strip these other causes out. If two adults were identical with respect to education, age, family status, race and religion, except that the first had one or two drinks each night after work while the second was a teetotaler, the drinker would tend to enjoy a “drinker’s bonus” of about 10% higher income.

Is this correlation or causation? Again, who knows? Especially since in this area we are leaving medical science and entering sociology. And sociology ain’t science, guys. Sorry, but it isn’t.
Finally, another article in Forbes (the one I was reading in the park while my kids played on the swings) makes a logical argument that in many ways trumps the entire debate. The article, by Jeff Stier is entitled I Choose Risk. And no, the fact that the term bikini waxing is found in the subtitle is not why I was reading it. Stier’s article is a general condemnation of how we are becoming increasingly, riskily, adverse to… well… risk.
Most of his article is devoted to the fish pedicures, video games, and the aforementioned bikini waxing, but he ends with linking the Brooks article and saying this about the correlation/causation question.

I believe that moderate drinkers have the ability to accept risk (unlike teetotalers) and manage it (as opposed to alcoholics). This is a discipline that they can deploy both at the bar and at the office. The ability to engage judiciously with risk in all facets of life may be a predictor of success–whether it’s part of a career, daily routine or society in general.

So let’s wrap up this rambling post. It is a fact that moderate drinkers happen to live longer than those who drink more or less. There are specific, well established health benefits from alcohol consumption, with more being found all the time. The are specific risks associated with alcohol use as well. In addition to living longer, moderate drinkers make more money, are healthier, and are better educated. Moderate drinking is a skill, employing talents that are valuable for success in all walks of life. And I’ll add that drinking is enjoyable and can improve our quality of life.

I’ll close with a famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that apparently was not quite what is usually reported:

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

That’s it. The modern craft cocktail movement has moved beyond teetering on the edge between fad and movement. All your bars are belong to us.

How do I know?

My 69 year old mother-in-law just called me this morning from Darien, GA. She wanted me to hook her up with a source for orange bitters….

For a limited time only.
Granddaddy of iPhone local apps, Cocktails+ (reviewed here) has a new update with a post to Facebook feature.
They also, through April 12, 2009 have lowered the price to $0.00!
Get this excellent app for free while you still can!

I don’t do a lot of food blogging here, this being a drinks blog and all, but I just saw a really cool product I thought I’d share. (H/T: Legal Insurrection)
My nephew has for about a decade espoused his First Theorem of Food:

Any food will be improved by the addition of bacon.

Yes, it’s now an internet meme, but he was ahead of his time.
I will say that challenges arose among us to his theorem, so he added The Corollary:

Any food that cannot be improved by bacon, will be improved by vanilla ice cream.

Poke a hole in that, I challenge you!
Anyway, here’s the product that is just made for First Theorem foodies:

Squeez Bacon is a Swedish product that is now available here. You can get it from Think Geek.
I haven’t received my bottle yet, but I plan on using it for my daughters’ BLT sandwiches in their lunch bags. This could be a God-send on hungover mornings.
Of course, I have to consider how this might be used in cocktails. If the viscosity if low enough, I’ll use it as a shortcut for cocktails using bacon-infused vodka, or maybe I’ll finally try out a bacon-infused Old Fashioned. If it won’t dissolve easily enough, which I suspect will be the case, I’ll just rim the glass with it and have an earl grey-infused Pegu, or perhaps a simple Manhattan.
EIther way, I’ll post the results when I get to it!

UPDATE: For once, I beat Glen Reynolds to the punch!

If you happen to hit this post as your first visit to the Pegu Blog, Meandering Through Mitchell’s is a series of posts exploring the cocktail offerings of the Cameron Mitchell restaurants in and around Columbus, Ohio. For more on my reasons for profiling the Mitchell’s chain in particular, read the intro to my review of his restaurant, M at Miranova.
The Ocean Club has been my favorite of Cameron’s restaurants for as long as it has been open. This is remarkable, since it has been tinkered with relentlessly, leaving it in many ways unrecognizable from its original form. We’ve been going here long before I shifted my drinking focus from wine to cocktails. When the Ocean Club first opened ten years ago, it was our place to go drink champagne with dinner.
At its nativity, The Ocean Club was a fish house that served good steaks as well, and was decorated in an avant garde style of blue hues, bubbly glass, and wavy lines. Today, Mitchell’s Ocean Club is a steakhouse, with better and more varied seafood than is the norm. (Better seafood, usually, than that which I’ve eaten at Mitchell’s vaunted Fish Market restaurants, a chain he recently sold off for 3.84 potloads of money.) The decor now is the wood paneled look that seems the norm for steakhouses, but with a lighter, friendlier, more open look than many. The most recent change here is the huge wrap-around balcony. This area provides hands down the nicest, most elegant, outdoor dining seating in Columbus. On nice evenings, it can be a long wait to get a seat out there for dinner. This is actually not so bad, as you can wait in the bar, which is among the nicest in town as well, and the subject of this post.
The bar itself is a huge, black granite-topped rectangle. One of the narrow ends is for service staff, but there is abundant seating on the other three sides. There is lots of overflow area around the bar with places to sit or lean when the bar is full. There is a huge grand piano near the entrance, and live music, mostly of the piano man style. They always manage the pretty difficult trick of having the music be loud enough to hear all through the restaurant and out on the balcony, while not being so loud as to be annoying or make conversation difficult in the bar. The bar is always generously staffed, making for very short waits for service, no matter how packed it sometimes gets.
There is not a cozy nor particularly romantic atmosphere in the bar. Instead it is a great place to wait for a table, or meet up with friends, or wait while a spouse is shopping in the surrounding Easton Shopping Center.
And a darned fine place to have a drink.
The wine list here is excellent. I won’t link to the cocktail menu since the online version is out of date as of this writing. The current set of offerings ranges from a classic like the Bombay Sapphire Martini to a blueberry and blackberry smash of some kind. They even garnish a drink or two with a chunk of dry ice. They used to do this more than now. Back in the chrome and wavy glass days, the dry ice was in everything. You’d look down the bar at a horde of different colored drinks, all pouring mist out the top, and it would look a bit like Quark’s bar on Deep Space Nine. It was fun, and frankly I miss it a little.
As with all Mitchell’s restaurants, fresh citrus rules the roost. I got the whole we don’t have Rose’s here, just fresh lime and simple syrup lecture. While I don’t know if it is true or not, I get the impression that the bar’s spirits inventory is slightly broader at Mitchell’s Ocean Club than at M. But regardless, the selection still shies away from the seriously exotic. The staff knows the classics, and how to make them correctly (Our bartender Pat easily passed my Sidecar test, for instance). But I doubt a drink like a Corpse Reviver #2 has ever been placed on the granite here. The Angustora only comes out for Old Fashioneds and Champagne Cocktails, not even in Manhattans unless specified, and you won’t get vermouth in your vodka Martini unless you beg.
I decided to try a drink off of the cocktail menu called the Cucumber Gimlet. Essentially, it is nothing but a basic Gimlet with muddled cucumbers. Here’s how Cameron’s corporate bar master decrees the drink should be made:

Cameron’s corporate bar master is wrong. Made this way, you have a sweet mess that utterly destroys any character from the gin, and thus in the drink. You might as well make it with vodka.
Now, here is where you see the value of the well-trained staff at the Ocean Club. I never said a thing about what I thought of the drink. Indeed, I was deep in an interesting conversation, and not looking to fuss. But Pat was paying attention, despite being busy, and knew I was not digging it. He did not have to ask did I like it, he just asked if he could get me something else. I asked him for the recipe, and I blanched at the full ounce of simple in the drink. I asked him to make it again, but with just a quarter as much.
The result is a really damn good cocktail. If you visit the Ocean Club, I recommend the drink, just make sure they back the sugar way off.
Incidentally, they offer the same drink at M (I didn’t try it there), only they make it with Hendrick’s, which would seem to make more sense. I should have, in the interests of journalism, had a second Cucumber Gimlet, specifying the Hendrick’s. But I wanted a Pegu, which Pat absolutely nailed on his first try. At any rate, I’ll get a cucumber the next time I hit the store and try both myself.
As I said, the Ocean Club has been a work in progress for a decade. Apparently Cameron feels that he has finally gotten it right, as he has opened five more, under the slightly different name of Ocean Prime in Detroit, Phoenix, and Florida. The one in Tampa is supposedly especially gorgeous. All seem to be holding up very well, despite being premium restaurants, with premium pricing, in a slowish economy. I suggest you drop in, if you have the Ocean Club or an Ocean Prime near you, and find out why.

Here’s a complete list of the posts so far in my Meandering Through Mitchell’s series:

• The Blood Orange Margarita: A "Meandering Through Mitchell's" Find
• "Meandering Through Mitchell's": Mitchell's Ocean Club
• The Vanilla Bean Old Fashioned: A Meandering Through Mitchell's Find

I’ve written a number of reviews of cocktail apps on the iPhone, and I’ve got more to cover, but I was especially interested when Jimmy Patrick, one of my fellow elite, chair-borne, cocktail commandos (i.e. cocktail bloggers) gave me a heads up on his new entry to the race, 101 Cocktails.
Jimmy’s position is that too many cocktail compendiums (iPhone, online, and print) get obsessed with the number of recipes they offer, or to be charitable, they crave comprehensiveness. While there is a place for that, I have certainly noticed that my main problem with most apps out there is that a complete database is usually too large to be wieldy. Here’s Jimmy’s thoughts on numbers:

Working in a bar, as a professional bartender, you probably need 50 drink recipes on the fly. When you’re entertaining at home, you probably need to have about ten or twenty “go-to” favorites that you can whip up and impress your guests.

Somewhat arbitrarily (the best numbers are usually arbitrary), Jimmy decided to come up with a list of 101 cocktail recipes everyone needs, and with which anyone could survive on a well-stocked desert island. And he then put said recipes into a handy iPhone App for easy reference. My little desert island analogy falls down here, because while well-stocked desert islands are rare, desert islands with charging stations are damn near non-existent.
First, let’s examine Jimmy’s list…. French 75, Martini, Manhattan, Cosmopolitan, Sidecar…. Ah! Pegu! Yep. It’ll do.
Actually, it’s a fabulous list. There isn’t one essential I could think of that is missing. As I said, Jimmy is a pro and a connoisseur in one package. Armed with this app, you can get what you want from/torture any bartender you like in furtherance of quenching your thirst as you like. The recipes are accompanied by good photography, so 101 Cocktails is pretty to use too.
The conclusion here is that the content is top notch. It won’t help you with obscure stuff, but that is not its plan.
Next, let’s look at the interface. I hope Jimmy does well with this project, so he’ll have an incentive to do a version 2.0. The app is certainly usable, and Jimmy clearly learned from others who came before, so it avoids some of the very annoying problems other apps have. Its mild hiccups should not deter you from buying it. But I’ll list them here in the interests of fairness, and also so I can warn you of a few and tell you how to navigate around them. First off, the default view is by individual recipe. Beautiful, but not the most useful. To get to the list view, you have to click on the button that looks like the iPhone’s default email item button. When you click on it, you can either email the current drink, or go to the list page. It took me a while to figure this out.
In portrait orientation, you can flick from one cocktail to the next, like CoverFlow, or you can shake the phone and get a random drink.
This brings up two things. First, if you drop the phone in your pocket while you work, it’ll activate the random shake function. Grrrr. Second, I had the app for a few days before I noticed that it has a landscape view as well! In portrait, you must tap the i button to bring up the ingredients and instruction popup. In landscape, the info is there full time.
The app lets you rate each drink, and gives you a separate listing of the drinks according to your ratings. I like this better than the usual favorite list function on many apps.
Another thing I found only after searching was that there is a preference panel for the app. Useful stuff there, plus twitterific support, whatever the hell that is. Perhaps Jimmy will chime in in the comments to let us know….
All of these problems are essentially documentation issues. There are no instructions inside the app, and Jimmy’s support page needs much work. Again, no feature would escape discovery with a little fiddling around, but a central compendium to save the effort would be nice. After you crest the learning curve, the app is fast, attractive, and as I said before, has very useful content. I can’t stress that last bit enough.
101 Cocktails is a good app, and a darn good value, even at version 1.0. I suspect it will get even better.
UPDATE: As I read over this post, I’m concerned that I don’t sound as enthusiastic about this app as I meant to. It really is, documentation wartlets and all, one of the most attractive and really useful cocktail apps I’ve seen.

Here’s a list of the other posts here about Apple iPhone software:

• iPhone App From CocktailDB: Cocktails
• iPhone Cocktail Directories
• iPhone App: Pocket Cocktails
• Pocket Cocktails Update
• iPhone Software Review: Are You Smarter Than a Bartender?
• iPhone App From Cocktail Dreams: Cocktails App
• iPhone App: 101 Cocktails
• iPhone Cocktail Apps Contest!
• iPhone App: Flip 'N Drink
• iPhone App: Cocktails Made Easy
• iPhone Cocktail App: Cocktails+ is Free!
• The Corporate World Starts Getting In On iPhone Drink Apps
• iPhone App Review: Tiki+

One of the posts I always look for and read each morning in my RSS reader is Jacob Grier’s Morning Links. For those of you who don’t know of Jacob, he’s a genuine, free-range Libertarian, as in former Washington Think Tank-type Libertarian. In additions to writing about cocktails and coffee, he has political thoughts available to puzzle, challenge and generally irritate and piss off both Republicans and Democrats alike. He recently moved from D.C. to the Pacific Northwest (further demonstrating his intelligence), but then exposed his Beltway background by changing his blog’s name (but not the number of the website thankfully) to Liquidity Preference. Jacob, why on Earth did you rename your blog to sound like a white paper from the Rand Corporation?
Anyway, among his other virtues, Jacob posts a selection of political, culinary, and downright odd links. They are always interesting and occasionally (as in this morning) thought-provoking. Check his daily post out; it’s like Fark without the unsolicited fingers or Instapundit without the blender-blogging.
Anyway, biography done. Let’s talk about what he linked today that got me thinking: An article in Scientific American about taste in space. The article is about how astronauts find flavors quite bland in microgravity, making them crave hot sauce and shrimp cocktail. Now, given who I am and where I read about this, my thoughts immediately turned to how this will affect the offerings to be served at early versions of Ten-Forward.
Of course for now there is (officially) no drinking booze in space. Which is too bad, as any reader of this blog can tell you, since there will clearly be no real progress toward living in space until we get the details of cocktail hour ironed out. At least the Russians (of course) are making the right noises. It is a sad comment on our political environment, IMHO, that for all the effort and money being spent studying how to get a number of astronauts from here to Mars and back in a confined space without killing each other, there has been virtually no discussion of the simple expedient of a nice Manhattan. Mark my words, when NASA hires Gary Regan and starts sponsoring symposia at Tales of the Cocktail, you’ll know that we are getting serious about successfully going to Mars or colonizing the Moon, and not until.

Mission Specialist Gary Regan (Astro-Mixologist)

Oh, and by the way Gary. Quit kvetching about the metric system. The Administration does not have time for another massively unpopular imposition of change on our chosen lifestyle right now. And NASA in particular needs no more worries on that front. You don’t want to be splattered all over the Martian landscape before you stir up your first Mons Olympus Martini, do you?
Alright, what will we need to do for space drinking?
First off, space missions will go with cocktails, not beer and wine. Yay! But why? Because beer and wine are inefficient uses of space and mass. They also do not last as long or store as well. We will have to sacrifice freshly squeezed juice of course, leaving men like Gabriel Szaszko ineligible for space travel, but is that such a bad thing, really?

Inefficient spaceship design.

I’d hope that we won’t just go with those plastic foil baggies like I showed above. Let’s mix the drinks on board. Space cocktails will be solely for therapeutic purposes after all, and part of the simple, refreshing pleasure of a good cocktail is mixing it, or watching it being crafted for you. Also, one good bartender could replace a whole staff of astro-shrinks. More mass savings!
However, microgravity does present some obvious difficulties with standard drink serving. Getting the drink out of the shaker would be hard, and getting it to stay in a cocktail glass even harder. I think we can all agree that having astronauts floating around the cabin while snorking up globules of Sidecar might produce dangerous levels of silly. And I think we can all imagine the mayhem that would result should you help yourself to some of Buzz Aldrin’s G&T as it floated by….
Fortunately, NASA appears to have some people on staff who have their minds in the right place. Witness the shape of the new spacesuit water container:

But to return to the generally serious nature of this post, astronaut and obvious master mixologist Don Pettit really has invented an open drinking vessel that actually works in microgravity. The following video is seriously worth a look.

Just add a stem or some kind of lanyard to keep your hand from warming the drink, and we have the drinking vessel that will carry man and broad into space. (Note to NASA, dudes and chicks do not good astronauts make.)
And finally what will be the recipe for the Martian Martini? What will we put in our Moonhattans? And what will be the secret ingredient in the someday to be famous Tiki drink, the Tycho Bowl? Well, the article that Jacob linked to start all this wretched silliness suggests that our taste buds are dulled the longer we stay in space. We can expect therefore that more potent, bitter and sour, even spicy flavored cocktails will be the norm. Cross Cosmopolitans, Nutty Irishmen, and Vodka Gimlets off the list.
When the new space craze hits, expect ads with chicks in skintight spacesuits for Angostura Bitters to be as common as Grey Goose ads today.

Astronauts will also be wanting drinks with enhanced sour components. So expect drinks that use lemons and limes to outstrip those with OJ or pineapple juice or sodas. And we should see scientific advances is storing and preserving fresh citrus. But the once exotic Screwdriver will fade further from the public consciousness.
And I’d expect that more flavorful spirits will also surge again to the fore. Sorry, vodka folks. Look to whiskeys and rums, and especially gin to be the choice of the extraterrestrial generation.
So what will be the really popular cocktails in space? Lets see….
(I swear on my father’s grave that I was not going here when I started this post!)
A gin cocktail, with potent sour elements like lime, and front stage featuring of Angustora Bitters…
You know it, baby!

This month’s Mixology Monday, hosted by the fabulous broads at LUPEC Boston, asks a question that is of genuine importance: Given someone who has never had a cocktail before (tragic, I know), what would you offer them as their first? You never get a second chance at a first impression, after all.

Let me guess.
You suggest a Pegu!

No. No I don’t, Ms. Smarty-Pants. And for all you who know me and were waiting for me to suggest the One True Cocktail, don’t be silly. For the gin-virgin cocktail drinker, I absolutely suggest the Pegu as a perfect gateway, but that’s another question.
What’s at stake here? You don’t want to offer something so bland or sweet as to leave them with the impression that cocktails are just another form of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, one you have to mix yourself. You want to give them an idea of the depth and sophistication there is to be had in the cocktail world, thus we’ll discard such offerings as White Russians or Strawberry Daiquiris.
On the other hand, let’s be honest. A lot of the favorite drinks we love around here in the cocktailosphere are a bit… sophisticated for a first time drinker. Just as you wouldn’t take someone to King Lear for their first play, you aren’t going to want to spring a Corpse Reviver #2, a Negroni, an Aviation, or even a Pegu on a neophyte.
Let’s answer three basic questions about what our entry level drug should be like.
I’ll start with the base spirit. I’d stay away from gin or whatever variety of whisk(e)y. These may be the kings of booze, providing the most depth and interest, but they have strong flavors what are all, to one extent or another, acquired tastes. Likewise, I’d avoid any specialty liquors, such as tequila, pisco, cachaça, ouzo, etc. That leaves us with vodka and rum. In fact, the case could be made that the best of all possible introductory cocktails would be either a well-made Cuba Libré, or a similarly executed Screwdriver. But either of those would would be too easy for for a MxMo post, and besides, I’d want someone’s first cocktail to be served in a cocktail glass, not a highball. I’m going to go with vodka because it has the fewest negative connotations (to the non-connoisseur), and because it is the blankest of slates.
The next thing is the personality of the drink. Attitude is the core of cocktails and the cocktail mindset, folks. A first cocktail should be evocative for the drinker. It should be publicly cool, and secretly a little silly. Most of all, the neophyte needs a decent chance of having always wanted one of those. So my advice is to go with a well-known, iconic drink. This eliminates otherwise excellent possibilities like the Moscow Mule.
Lastly, is our hypothetical drinker a man or a woman? This last is obviously not about the drink, but the drinker. And yes, it lets me cheat LUPEC’s question by offering two answers. Sue me. It also gives me a chance to get on my old, familiar hobby horse about Broads versus Chicks. The differences are myriad, but for this post, I’ll focus on broads as women who are more robust in their tastes. A chick given a binary choice will always hew to the option perceived as more feminine. A broad will choose based on her personal taste. There is a similar dichotomy with men, but for once it’s more complex than for women. It’s also less likely to come into play here so I’ll save you the time right now.

Thank you, Dr. Doug.
Where’d you get your degree again?

Shut up. The point is to offer two choices, both vodka-based, both well-known to Americans (at least) of all drinking types, one appealing to the bright and lively, the other to the darkly cool. When made properly, both are darn fine drinks. Neither is terribly complex, but both give a hint of the magic mixology can produce. And both will provide a lesson in the importance of skill and quality ingredients in making cocktails; said lesson will be learned later, the first time your new cocktailian orders one of these at an airport bar….

OK, get on with it.
I’m thirsty.

Oh, very well. The offerings shall be: The Vodka Martini and the Cosmopolitan.
Appeal to the guys, and the brassier of broads, with the old-school James Bond cocktail.

Appeal to the chicks, and your most beta of males, with Carrie’s concoction.

Whichever you make for your neophyte, make the same for yourself. Then, for the second round, make them the same, but make yourself a more advanced product like a Pegu, a Manhattan or even a Pisco Sour. Watch their face as they eye your drink and start to get an idea of the vastly greater variety hereabouts than in the world of Bud versus Guinness….