Over at Art of Drink this month, Darcy dons his white lab coat for some cocktail mad science. Entitled Cognac Oil, his post is an entertaining look at employing some non-traditional ingredients, such as the titular essential oil, to create a non-alcoholic drink that tastes like, well, a drink. It’s a fun post, with some great opportunities for drink-geeking out.

I’m not going to rehash what he does to make his drink. It’s his post, so go read it on his site. The link will open a new tab, so go on. I’ll be here when you get back because I want to talk about why you should be interested.

In his introduction, Darcy touches on this with what he calls his “buzz management concept”. This is something every responsible drinker does in one way or another, and with varying degrees of conscious effort. Simply put, if you want your evening to last long, and end well, you need to drink just enough of the right strength of drinks to let the alcohol take effect… without taking over. For a variety of reasons, this can be difficult.

You can always nurse your drink, but with possible exception of red wine, this is almost always unsatisfactory. The great Savoy barman Harry Craddock famously said, “The way to drink a cocktail is quickly, while it is still laughing at you.” Nurse a cocktail, and it gets warm. It was designed and balanced for consumption cold, and almost no up drink will taste as good once it starts to warm. Nurse a rocks drink and it may stay cold, but it will get watery. Ditto on the effects on the flavor there.

You could just go home (or go to bed if you are already there) the moment you reach your safe, effective limit. The less said about this ridiculous option, the better. The chief benefit of social drinking is the social bit. If you shut down just when things get good,you might as well have just curled up with a good book instead. It’s cheaper.

You can always mix in something non-alcoholic between in each round. Some suggest a glass of water between each drink as a way to slow you down and keep you hydrated to ward off some of the hangover. But water is boring, and well fish f*ck in it. You could try a “mocktail” or Preggatini, but I find them usually unsuitable for this task. Many are delicious, but usually they are far too sweet, and almost none offer the balance and depth of a good mixed drink. Very few non-alcoholic concoctions offer any reward if you take a moment to ignore a boring stretch of the conversation and just savor your third sip.

Fixing this last is what Darcy is trying to accomplish with his cognac-esque no or low-alcohol cocktail: An evening extender that you can consume in like manner to a full throttle one. This is a worthy goal, and one every ambitious bartender on Earth should work on too.

Face it folks, booze is a powerful thing. Too much will result in, at best, a bad morning and some embarrassment. But enough, especially if you maintain the right balance between consumption and metabolization, is even more powerful. Moderate drinkers may be more intelligent, and are certainly more creative. Drink well, and rule the world. Drunk too much, and destroy it. Darcy’s just trying to save the world, folks.

I’ll leave you with this little cautionary tale about the power of being just exactly one and a half drinks in, which Darcy’s post led me to recall. (Not safe for work because of mild language and your loud laughter.)

This is going to be the shortest of my Washington reviews, in large part because it was nearly 11:30 before I finally bellied up here, after great times at PS7 and the speakeasy inside The Passenger: Columbia Room. Maggi and I had wandered by the entrance to The Passenger earlier in the day, to make sure of our bearings, and we had raised an eyebrow upon seeing it. Despite being about two blocks from what I just described as the glittering power neighborhood surrounding PS7, the block the Passenger is on seems a bit… disreputable. This is due in no small part to the entrance to The Passenger itself. You see, when I finally got back there after walking my flagging wife back to our hotel, it dawned on me that, “Hey! This is a dive bar!”

I am not a fan of dive bars.
But that is because most dive bars aren’t anything like The Passenger. Sure, the place is raucous, ratty, and a bit run down (artfully so). But the drinks were awesome.

The Passenger taught me something about myself: Why I don’t like dive bars. I always thought I was just too effete for that scene. When your nose is as big as mine, you notice it when you find it shoved up in the air. But no. The reason I don’t like dive bars is because I can’t get a decent cocktail in one. In the Passenger you can’t get a decent cocktail either. You get a fabulous one. With that fixed, I loved the atmosphere.

So whether you are a real dive bar lover, or a total cocktail geek, you need to drop in for at least one drink at The Passenger if you visit Washington. And for those of you who live close enough, why isn’t this your hangout already?

Apparently, I’m not quite the snob I thought I was!

Nah.
You’re pretty much a snob.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Washington stop, with links to all reviews for DC.

The magic here isn’t the result of distilling grain or grape, but of distilling the last three years or so of cocktail trends. This little video, produced using Xtranormal, was written by Phillip Duff for a seminar at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, featuring himself and Angus Winchester.
Oh, in this particular distilling method, all they kept was the most heinous of the heads and tails of the run….

This video is really a piece of genius. Most readers of the Cocktailosphere will need no annotation, but I can’t resist a little highlighting. (You probably ought to watch the vid first, as I try not to give away the jokes with my comments.)

• While in the video the customer is an off-duty bartender, not a blogger, I blush to admit I see a good bit of my own behavior in him. At least in the whole sitting at the end of the bar, watching the bartender work like I’m trying to break down the Zapruder film.
• I haven’t personally had any of the whiskey brand mentioned, you hear it specified all the time during Thursday Drink Night….
• I officially offer a prize to the cocktail historian blogger who unearths the recipe for the Gloogelflocken Swizzle. Offer void if I post it here first….
• I suspect the technique for drink making that they discuss may be the Hard Shake. If it isn’t… it should be.
• The customer is obviously not Rick Stutz, as he doesn’t want enough bitters.
• Love the name checks of Baker and Embury. Oh, and I am utterly guilty as charged.
• Two phrases: “A Kardashian” and “black hole”. The they aren’t connected but appear in the same riff. It’s epic.
• I don’t know how Duff or Winchester make their Old Fashioneds, but mine take less time to make than my Cosmopolitan, so it’s the only punchline to fail, at least for me.
• Since I have studiously avoided any mention of the barrel-aging frenzy gripping Cocktailia, I will simply sit back and feel superior to those who have succumbed and are summarily thrashed herein.

Thanks to That’s the Spirit! for the head’s up on the video.

No, that is not one of the rather over the top hats from the royal wedding this weekend. It is instead the work of mulitmedia artist Marcos Lutyens. And what you are seeing in the picture is what that cocktail tastes like to her. More accurately, (I think) it reflects changes in her brain activity as measured by the headset she is wearing, when she sips a highly flavored cocktail.

I think the results are gorgeous. If you are in England, you could see a large, and I hope interactive, exhibit of this work at the FutureEverything festival in Manchester in mid-May. Absolut is sponsoring the exhibit, which I heartily approve of, since a future without booze is no future for me.

So if any of my UK readers attend this thing, I have some questions. First, there are huge variations in the pictures produced by this technique. (Excellent slideshow here.) What changes the image? Is it dependent on the flavors of the drink, the individual drinker, or existing level of intoxication? Are effects duplicateable? And when can I buy the cocktail book using these images instead of drink pix for illustrations?

(Via Gizmodo)

(Source: Ice Ice Baby. Well worth reading.)

Giuseppe Gonzalez is, as mentioned here before, one skilled bartender. More, this man behind New York’s Tiki destination, Painkiller is a deep thinker upon matters mixological. Just last month, he wrote a genuinely exhaustive discussion about one of the major processes they went through setting up Painkiller: Determining the amount and form of ice to use in their drinks.

I’d planned on writing about his post a little later in the month, but the comment thread to my Kallaloo post encouraged me to advance the schedule. This is a bigger deal than it might seem, especially during this month, when Mr. Blendtec tends to be front and center.

Giuseppe’s article is well worth reading in its entirety, possibly more than once. It contains a wealth of information about bar management, recipe tasting, and general Tiki-tude. It also has some great reminders that Everything You Think You Know May Not Be True. But the real meat of the article is how ice changes your drink. And how many ways ice changes your drink. And he gives some good theoretical and experimental backing for what he concludes. I want you to read it yourself, and I couldn’t do better than he has anyway, so I’ll merely try to give you some things to focus on when you think about implementing what he talks about, whether you follow the link or not. (Expert Tip: Follow the damn link!)

First, whether you are making a Martini or an Hawaiian Bongo Wahini, ice has a second equally important function beside making your drink cold.
It dilutes it.
Water doesn’t just make your drink weaker, though too much of it can do that. Water changes, and usually enhances, the flavors of a cocktail. Determining the right amount of water content in a drink is often a big challenge on its own, but Gonzalez addresses the added complication that comes from (as is common with smooth blended drinks) much of that water content still being frozen. This month, I’m going to spend a lot more time considering the amount of ice I use in blended drinks to improve my results. And I’ll try to give some more clear directions in recipes I give.

Second, the strength of your ingredients affects your drink’s balance. This is especially important with dealing with classic recipes, or substituting liquors. Something I took away from this that I’ll apply immediately here at home is the need to modify my pours when I make my Mai Tais with Smith & Cross. I love the flavor profile S&C gives, but I knew I was facing some problem somewhere. It’s pretty significantly over-proof, so I think I’ll try simply cutting back a bit on the amount.

Lastly, we all have different ideas of perfect balance. Know your own. Adjust your ratios to reflect your own preferences in any recipe as you get more experienced. But you also need to know your ice. Is it colder or warmer than what you expect the recipe envisioned? How’s it’s surface area? Are you swizzling pre-crushed ice from your Lewis Bag? Flash blending? Smoothieizing? Shaking or stirring? Or even just putting it on the rocks? Whatever the case, know the effect of your ice on the dilution, because here is Gonzalez’s number one conclusion:

1. Balance appears to be (more) a universal quality than we had previously expected.
… when you take dilution into account and style of ice being used, the trend from sweeter to drier becomes pretty self-explanatory. Adding sweetener to a cocktail that is higher dilution, becomes vital to achieving balance.

Finally, I’ll point you, without further comment, to the bit well down in the article in which he discusses how the way they serve Zombies at Painkiller has evolved. It’s both fun and highly instructive.

My daughters’ school just had a three-day weekend and we took the opportunity to head up to Detroit. Maggi had some things to do, but our main aim was to spend a few days at The Henry Ford museum.
I had about given up on finding any interesting watering holes in Detroit to write about here. A few years of blegs, tweets, and FaceBook requests for a top notch craft bar in that city have been met with bewildered silence, so I’m forced to conclude it is a cocktail wasteland. (I look forward to your letters. No, really I do. Prove me wrong… please!) So I was certainly not expecting to get any blog material on this trip.
Instead, I find an unique and extraordinary working cocktail bar than should fascinate any drink geek who enters.
And I found it in a museum.

I’ve got to take a paragraph or two to explain what The Henry Ford is first, because it helps explain the Eagle Tavern, and because the place is just so awesome in general. If you don’t want to read about it, just skip down to the next break where I’ll pick up again with the drinkie thingie.
The Henry Ford bills itself as “America’s greatest history attraction”. I’m sure a number of folks who work in the legacy of James Smithson would beg to differ, but having spent a good deal of time in both Washington, DC and Detroit in the last few years, I think the Ford folks have at least a good case. Sure, the Smithsonian has the Star Spangled Banner and the Spirit of St. Louis, but do they have an exhibit that makes 60 real trucks every hour while you watch? OK, that “exhibit” is really the Dearborn Truck Assembly Plant in the Rouge Factory Complex. But the tour and exhibits there are a major feature of The Henry Ford and are more than worth your time and dime.
The primary element of The Henry Ford is its main museum, which contains in its massive, multi-day-sized confines at least one each of pretty much everything from the entire Industrial Revolution. There are hundreds of planes, trains, and of course automobiles. There are pre-Victorian steam engines, farm machinery, one of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Houses, and the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. The section called With Liberty and Justice for All reminds us that the entire American experience has been the story of realizing and protecting civil rights. Among the exhibits that will give you goosebumps here are the very chair from Ford’s Theater (no relation) in which Lincoln was shot, and the bus on which Rosa Parks (refused to) make her stand.
The third major element to the Henry Ford is Greenfield Village. This outdoor “village” consists of Henry Ford’s personal collection of, well, history. Ford bought and moved here many of the actual building in which the modern world was created by him and his friends. You’ll see his home as well as the first Ford factory, just a few paces away from Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, which is around the corner from the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. If your feet get tired of walking around to see all this history, you can take a ride in one of many Model Ts that cruise the streets.
The element that most pleases me about The Henry Ford as a whole is the underlying message. What is demonstrated here unequivocally is the unmatched power of private industry to advance and better the world for mankind. And yes, the irony that this message has its home in the city that most clearly exemplifies what happens when management, labor, and government all decide to start treating industry like an ATM instead of a mighty enterprise is not lost on me.

Anyway, among the buildings in Greenfield Village is the Eagle Tavern, an 1831 stagecoach roadhouse moved here from Clinton, MI. This working restaurant is set up in the communal style common to the era, and the food is straight out of that time as well. You can get your fill of Pork & Apple pie, Bubble & Squeak, or Salmagundi. In this writer’s humble opinion, those were dark days if indeed people had to eat as much cauliflower as is on offer here….
As we sat down for lunch, I was surprised to see a drinks menu. And shocked to see what was on it.

The world is filled with many old school cocktail bars. We currently enjoy a wealth of cocktail bars dedicated to classic cocktails. But I doubt that you’ll find another whose menu consists of nothing but Cobblers, Cock-tails, Punches, and Juleps. Nor will you find one where the only regular wine on offer is claret, but they serve hock by the bottle. In the time period represented by the Eagle Tavern, a venerable Manhattan would have seemed as futuristic an offering as something from Quark’s Bar on Deep Space Nine.
Beers are served in ceramic mugs, while all drinks come in the same plain, low, glass tumblers. The only garnish to be seen are long, straight tubes of uncooked ziti (I think) for swizzles and/or straws.

The bar itself has no seating, though there are a few tables in the room for patrons who choose to eat there, instead of the main tavern room. The decor is sparse, as you can see above, and gets only sparser out of the frame. It makes a clean, elegant joint like Pegu Club look like a TGI Fridays. (My girls had the camera, so this image stolen from Flickr) As with everything else in Greenfield Village, a great deal of effort has been put into making this place appear as authentic as possible. The only things present that shouldn’t be are women in the bar, and the only thing absent that shouldn’t be is a pervasive, choking cloud of tobacco smoke.
Before the railroad siphoned off much of the Eagle Tavern’s transient traffic in its original location, owner Calvin Wood must have prepared a vast number of Cobblers, Cock-tails, etc. of all types behind this bar. As the menu notes, the period reconstructed here was the peak of American alcohol consumption, which resulted in the birth of the Temperance movement.

So, just how are these vintage drinks? Eh, they’re decent actually. But there is a reason you just don’t see dudes kicking back after work with a good Cobbler these days… like most everything else, we’ve gotten better at making drinks than we used to be. One of the best ways that they illustrate progress at The Henry Ford is by so vividly depicting what things were like before said progress. It’s one thing to go into a museum display of an empty bar and look at a period menu on the wall. It is altogether something more to lean over that bar and ask a living bartender to mix you a liquid time machine. For the casual observer, it is a lasting lesson that there haven’t always been vodka tonics. For the cocktail geek, it’s your imagination come to life, making you both appreciate the history of hooch, and how good we drinkers have it today.

Now, I should say that there is considerable “stage magic” at play here. The preparation of these vintage drinks is anything but historically accurate. They make and use a vast amount of simple syrup to shortcut the preparation, which I doubt was much employed in 1847. What they call on the menu “Holland Gin” is actually London Dry. (Attention Jacob Grier, next time you are in Michigan, head down to Greenfield Village and do your Brand Ambassador thing!) They carefully hide a soda gun in a side closet for making sparkling “Temperance Drinks”. There’s lots of ice.
Even the “applejack” they use, isn’t. It’s Laird’s good 7 1/2 year old apple brandy, not that I complained. And not that Laird’s Applejack is really true applejack either. True applejack is made by “jacking”, or freeze-distilling. With an apple orchard in Greenfield Village, I think they ought to set up a demonstration of real applejacking during the annual Christmas Festival. I can attest that it is certainly cold enough then. I think people would be fascinated, but perhaps it would be illegal.

They do have one problem that I’ll call them out for, that both undermines the accuracy and quality of the drinks in the Eagle Tavern. Sometime not too recently, they ran out of bitters. (Perhaps the Bitterlypse struck?) Regardless, the drinks they are producing right now are missing this historically and mixologically essential ingredient. I snuck a peek at the recipes they use, and they call for bitters in all the right places. They just don’t have the bottle behind the bar. Remember guys, the right amount of bitters don’t make a drink bitter, they make it better, more flavorful. They need to get the bitters back.

Regardless, the Eagle Tavern is a drinking experience for anyone with a taste for cocktails and an inquiring mind, and is simply not to be missed for the serious student of drink.

(See the end of this post for what is going on with this series)

Our first NewYork experience that I want to share with you was dinner at a Latin (Cuban) restaurant called Ideya, on West Broadway in SoHo. We were sent there by the concierge at our hotel, the Tribeca Grand. A concierge who actually sends you to good places to eat is all too rare, so props to her.

In this case, Ideya was very good. The restaurants in this part of SoHo all appear to have a quite Parisian feel, open to the street, long and narrow, with small tables so closely placed that the patrons sometimes jostle elbows. I’d never tolerate this in most cities, but here in New York, as in Paris, it not only works, it feels vibrant and alive. The staff is small, but efficient and pleasant.
The food was very good. We chose to pass on entrees and just had several appetizers. I hesitate to say we ate tapas-style, since that implies “small plates”, and these plates were so huge as to overwhelm the small table.
We had a vegetable patty dish wrapped in pastry that was very nice, though I thought the wrapping was a little thick. Next, a broiled shrimp plate with an exceptional salad. I was impressed with the texture of the shrimp, especially for a restaurant this far from real shrimp country. And best of all, a chicken dish, Pupusa de Pollo, that was just flat delicious.
Of course, I’d not be writing about the place, unless there were also some tasty drinks. I never talked to the bartender, but they know how to do things right, from what I saw. I had a pretty good Pisco Sour whose foam held up really well. Maggi had a really delicious drink that I will have to reverse engineer for her when we get home. Ideya calls it a Ginger Swizzle, making it with house-infused ginger vodka, fresh lime juice, ginger syrup, and soda.
We finished with a Chocolate Mojito for dessert. While a lot of folks will like this sucker just fine, thank you, I think that they need to either use a more funky, flavorful rum, or perhaps even muddle in a thin slice of jalapeño with the mint to balance the flavors out. Regardless, it looks great on the table, and really appeals to the Cosmo-drinking set.

The rest of the cocktail menu was a pleasant mix of familiar classics and house inventions. If you vacation here, or if you live nearby, it’s a menu worth exploring. We really enjoyed it.

The Summer New York Adventure is the first truly kid-free vacation Maggi and I have taken since, well, we’ve had kids. By day, we’ll be exploring Manhattan’s Garment District, buying fabric for Maggi’s coture workings, and by night we shall explore the SoHo dining and drinking offerings, which should give me some of the best material to blog about in a good long while! Cheers!

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.