Things I Drink and So Should You: The Mint Julep

There’s a woman in my church who wears a proper church crown. I call it that because it deserves the name. It’s a royal blue, straw hat with plastic sunflowers emanating from the brim. She wears it proud, as each year of the 93 she’s been alive has earned her the right to wear it, and nothing could take that crown from her head.

I wish we lived in an era where it were not only appropriate but fashionable for women to wear church crowns. Hell, as a pastor, I wish it were fashionable for women to just come to church. But, barring that, I wish women would bring the hat back. Because when a woman wears a hat, a real hat, it lets everyone know that she is not to be trifled with, not to be played. A woman in a church crown is a woman who runs shit.

I suppose I should define church crown. A church crown isn’t just a hat. Every grandmother has a hat she’ll break out when the weather gets warm and the sun beats down. This is not that hat. In fact, if you’ve never been to a prayer meeting, you don’t know what a church crown is. Church crowns don’t just cover your head and keep you cool; church crowns let everyone know you’re in church. When you stand up to praise, it’s your hat that’s seen. That royal purple blob twenty pews ahead? That’s Dotty, praying for Raymond, like she has the last twenty years. And damn if you don’t put your head down and pray that this might be the week Ray finally gets it.

After 30 years of church, the sight of an honest church crown can put my chin into my neck for a minute of prayer, or simply some good old “yes ma’am”, even when I’m running the show. When Phyllis shows up with that sunflower halo, I know she needs Jesus, and I know she needs prayer. She’s got a dozen hats that she wears for church, but Sunday School kids that graduated before I was born made her that one. When she deigns to bring that to the congregation, we all know. We all pray.

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Things I Drink And So Should You: The Bloody Mary

I was on vacation all week, which was fantastic. I watched the marathon on Monday, went on a date with my wonderful wife in the middle of the week, caught up on reading and sleep, and, sadly, discovered that I am not as hangover-proof as I thought. I have simple rules to prevent hangovers, and they are generally effective and easy to implement. But when I have nothing to do the next day, actually going through those motions doesn’t seem quite so urgent and I let them slide. It was at this point that I discovered I not only can be hungover, but that I can be wretchedly hungover.

Time was, I could wake up after an hour’s sleep, eat a couple Starbursts to bump the sugar, drink a cup of coffee and two of OJ, and the old body was back to normal. Now, however, I apparently need to follow a strict regimen in order to be able to stand the next morning. The steps, which you likely already know, but I’ll outline regardless, are as follows:

1. Drink a glass of water every two drinks. I know people say between or with every drink, but screw that. That’s way too many trips to the bathroom, and since you’re generally slamming that pint of water to get to the next real drink, you’re not absorbing most of the nutrients anyway.
2. Eat before and after. This is so simple. The worst hangovers always come when there’s a sea of booze in your belly with no food sponges to soak it up. Eat before you go to the bar, or eat something while you’re there. And when you get home, even just a peanut butter sandwich — carbs and protein! — before you go to bed can seriously reduce the ferocity of the hangover.
3. Eat again. Even if you don’t think you can keep anything down when you wake up the next morning, give it a shot. This is where a bacon sandwich is your best friend. Just don’t burn it, because there’s nothing like crispy bacon shards on the way back up. Again, bread is a fantastic booze mop and you should never tire of using it as such.
4. This is the don’t list: Advil before bed is just fucking up your liver even more when you mix it with booze, don’t give it more shit to process; juice before bed is disaster as all the acids will just churn in your stomach and probably cause you nausea, while water just sits; just like coffee while you’re drunk doesn’t make you sober, coffee while you’re hungover won’t make you more alert, but if you need a cup in the morning just to shake off the cobwebs it won’t hurt, but don’t overdo it.
5. HAIR OF THE DOG: a great drinking story involving my mother and Poplicola as well as this week’s drink after the jump.

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Things I Drink And So Should You: Lager

There’s something about springtime that compels me to remember my youth. It’s remarkably hackneyed to have these remembrances, and I try to shove them off, knowing that they’re empty, knowing that they’re shells of memories that ought to be tinged with a sadness of what’s been lost. In the end, I fight off that urge to remember the whole and embrace the part that my mind asks me to recapture. I throw off the fringes of the memory that taint the innocence of the image I hold in my head.

I remember Sunday mornings with my mother, hurrying off to church and wearing shoes I only wore once a week. Sitting in the choir loft, tucked close to her, enfolded as the preacher went on, still stuck to the pew as my mother and the rest of the choir stood in their robes, their music surrounding me as much as my mother’s arm had during the sermon. Going to brunch after with friends of hers, digging into pancakes and bacon, sipping on coffee when she wasn’t looking, building towers out of the unused creamers. Getting home and slipping off my dress shoes and being reminded to take off my nice pants before heading out with friends to play in the streets or in a park. Coming home, muddied, bruised and exhausted, my mother forestalling homework to sit on the couch with her and enjoy the last moments of the weekend.

I remember working with my father, on the weekends I wasn’t in church, climbing into his truck and bouncing in my seat as we careened down tree-lined back roads. Smoke filled the cabin, and my father sang in a rough voice, octaves lower than what came out of the radio, but he found it fun to sing anyway, perhaps more so because I cringed as he did. Falling out of the door, high off the ground, him picking me up and dusting me off as we walked toward some half-finished addition he was working on. I crawled under a sink or into a closet to string wire or hold a length of pipe, my father still singing in a voice so deep it hardly sounded like singing. At one, the baseball game would be turned on and my father stopped singing. The hammering and the sawing and the everything happened at the pace of the game. After a few hours, my father and I would sit in the bed of the truck, facing the site, his eyes passing over what he had done and what was yet to be done, every Sunday taking inventory of his life’s work, the late innings of the game in our ears as we ate sandwiches.

I don’t mistreat these memories by remembering how much those shoes ached or how heavy the pipes were, how long the sermons dragged or how cramped it was under the sink. My mind draws me to those times because they are the childhood I want to bring with me into adulthood. To sully them with the impertinent whines of a child, to steal from myself what little purity remains of my childhood, is a way of telling me I’ll never be happy, I’ll never be satisfied. I want to always remember that moment when, as the sun went down, I sat on the tailgate of my father’s truck, surveying a completed staircase, and he said: We built this, you and me, and it wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t done it. Then he handed me his can of beer and I took a sip before handing it back as I imagined all adults did, wiping my mouth with my sleeve.

I hated it.
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Things I Drink And So Should You: The Manhattan

As this is posted, yours truly will be about to board the world’s greatest conveyance: the train. When you ride in a car, especially if you’re driving — and I always am, since I’m a control freak* — you’re worried about the car in the lane next to you, or the one oncoming, or the deer/pedestrian/deer-pedestrian about to veer into your path. In a plane, you never have the feeling of traveling, but rather of being transported from one location to another, without ever having had any interaction with the miles between. I hate that. I love of hurtling just above the earth as the landscape ticks by as through an old-time movie, all frames and constant flickering, unencumbered by the need to actually attend to what exactly is inside those frames and what precisely is flickering past.

The train is my preferred mode of travel. On a train, there are no worries, no security lines, no hidden fees and no tolls. On a train, there are comfortable seats, stations right downtown, bar cars and a sense of romance. You can watch as the stories of the places you pass become the narrative of your journey: the city itself fades to a stretch of industry and loading docks, which become dense suburbs, which in turn give way to a stretch of seeming desolation, yet beyond that strip of trees lies the suburbs, hiding from this heavy-gauge rail that thunders past with just as little care for it; as the hours pass, the ocean comes into view, but only fleetingly, tauntingly,as  small cottages and masts of pleasure boats come in and out of view, giving glimpses of leisure and amusement in momentary fits; the scene reverses itself as those dalliances disappear and return to the mask of suburbia, which in turn yields to the city, the train shuddering and clattering to announce its arrival. Yes. A sense of romance. A flirtation with a world between places of interest, as if every inch of creation were actually a place of interest yet to become known to you.

What’s that? A drink? It would seem appropriate, with all this love of rails and locomotion that today be about Boilermakers or Night Train. Perhaps another day. For today, in honor of my destination, we’re going with the first non-gin delicacy: The Manhattan. Continue reading »

Things I Drink And So Should You: The Charles River Highball

It is Easter weekend, which is about the busiest my calendar gets every year. I have hardly had time to breathe this week, let alone read this blog, never mind contribute. The craziness of my schedule has even prevented me from doing that which I love most: watch sports and drink. And that all ends Sunday afternoon.

Every Easter, I throw a Resurrection Barbecue, where we throw some ham on the grill, dressed in our Sunday best, drinking beer and, more importantly, breaking out the greatest summer drink you’ve never had: The Charles River Highball.

The Charles River Highball is liquid summer. It is warm evenings on a porch with friends, the rhythms of a gentle breeze and the fading noise of a neighborhood getting ready to go out. It is walking through a park with your partner (or dog), feeling the sun on the back of your neck. It is sitting in the bleachers at a Little League game, cheering for some stranger’s kid, because if baseball is being played, it’s a sin to walk past without watching.

It’s also gin, ginger ale, orange juice and bitters, but like the 2010 West (By God) Virginia Mountaineers, it’s not the parts, but the whole that matters. I think this makes Bob Huggins, appropriately, the bitters — without them, this drink still works, but it doesn’t quite come together to blow your mind. Let the Dukes of the world have their vodka martinis, all shine and pomposity. Let the Butlers of the world have their Jack and Cokes, workmanlike and predictable. Let the Michigan States of the world die in a fire*. Give me a Charles River Highball, a drink that blends too many things together, looks like the polluted river it’s named after, but comes together as the worthy champion at the end of it all.

The drink, as the inventor crafts it:

Get a large pitcher and half-fill it with ice.

Cover the ice with gin (any gin works, but Hendricks gin brings it up an extra level)

Fill the rest of the pitcher with equal parts orange juice and ginger ale.

Pour on the bitters and stir slowly until it looks less FFFF and more FFCC**.

Drink it ’til it’s gone and make another, but now with equal parts gin, ginger ale and orange juice.

Be a champion.

Cheers.

* I hate Michigan State like Pop hates Glenn Beck, with a bemused fury.

** I will search the archives for an actual picture of one, but HTML geekery will have to suffice.

Things I Drink, And So Should You: The Negroni

Because this place needs another regular feature, I’m here, every Friday afternoon, to tell you that what you drink sucks.

Being married to an Italian can be fantastic. The food is amazing. The scenery, when in Italy rather than on Mott St. or in the North End, can be breathtaking. The language, the art … seriously, it’s a good deal, even without considering the individual Italian with whom I chose to spend the time before she decides to divorce me.

The drinking, however. If you’re not careful, you can find yourself beyond sauced before the bruschetta shows up at the table. Wine, beer, prosecco, can all run up on you with a quickness. And it will. You need a drink that forces you to slow down and savor the moment, that doesn’t overwhelm or confound the other great tastes you’ll be dealing with. And you’ll need a drink that doesn’t knock you on your ass but gets you nicely buzzed. If you want to be alert and affable when it comes time to impress your date, or just to enjoy the osso bucco — and save drinking room for the world’s greatest digestif, grappa — try this.

The Negroni
Perfect for all seasons, full of flavor, served in a heavy glass, the Negroni is exactly what you’re looking for. I think it’s a perfect match for an Italian dinner, but truth be told, I’ll order it whenever I see a bar proudly displaying a bottle of Campari. It looks fruity, but don’t let that dangling scurvy-stopper deceive you. Gin, Campari, sweet vermouth. End of story. This is the Mediterranean Old Fashioned. If Don Draper were Dona Draparoni, hipsters in Williamsburg would be drinking the hell out of these. Except, of course, you can’t drink them as a PBR chaser without the ghost of Antonio Gramsci shooting you in the name of the workers.

This weekend, separate yourself from the faceless crowds of vodka-drinkers* and order yourself a Negroni. You’ll look like you know your way around a bar and a Tuscan villa, you’ll distance yourself from the kids drinking IPAs (because, let’s face it, you’re not getting any younger and you can use it), and you’ll be enjoying the hell out of yourself. As an added bonus, after four of them, you’re sitting on the shores of Lake Como with Sophia Loren, about to get into an Alfa Romeo Cinque Cento.

This week, we raise our glass to the king of the Mediterranean: the Negroni

1 pt. Gin

1pt. Campari

1pt. Sweet Vermouth

/garnish with orange or lemon wedge

*It is my contention that people who drink vodka don’t like to drink. They like to be drunk. For serious, professional drinkers — rather than professional drunks (though like vision, that can get blurry ’round last call) — vodka is a no-go. It doesn’t taste like anything, and, as such, doesn’t change the flavor profile of the drink. A good cocktail uses every ingredient’s unique flavor to its advantage. Vodka is a way for people to look fancy (and drunk) without having to go through the difficult work of figuring out what they like (other than being drunk). Be adventurous. Find out what you like. There’s a wide world out there, and it doesn’t begin and end with “I’ll have a Ketel and … ”

Cheers.