There are times when ditchwater is the only thing you think you can handle, just as there are times when you just wanna put your head down on the desk and wait for someone to bring you milk and cookies. On the other hand, if it’s under 28 percent, you’ve got ditchwater. Now, you may want-need-jet fuel, but that’s a medicinal judgment, not a culinary one. But that takes careful balancing and people get most anxious about the details of that.Īfter more than 40 years of drinking Dry Martinis and at least 30 of mixing them with embarrassing frequency I’ve come to believe that it’s actually quite simple: if your Martini after stirring and straining ends up being over 32 percent alcohol, it’s gonna taste like jet fuel. The very best Martinis stand in between: like cat’s paws, they’re soft and smooth yet with a wickedly sharp edge. The ginny one, however, can easily topple into tasting like rocket fuel, while the vermouthy one can sag into ditchwater. Cutting the poetry, that means a Martini where the gin takes a firm lead, and one where the vermouth is more than an “also appearing.”īoth versions can be exceptionally good. Or it can be what Ogden Nash called “a yellow, mellow Martini,” where it’s a soft and elegant and comforting drink even a sweetly (but not sweet) nostalgic one. There are two ways a Dry Martini can be great: it can be sharp and incisive, an icy liquid blade that slices through the tough tentacles of worry and duty and aggravation that drag down the spirit and prevent it from soaring. Let me show you how to make the best Dry Martini you’ll ever have. This isn’t the time for such stuff, and besides, at this point in our national dysfunction the idea of writing such things fills me with as much fatigue as the thought of reading it must instill in you. I’m not going to unroll a lengthy investigation into the origins of rum or attempt to figure out who invented the Bloody Mary. I’m going to try to go out as helpfully as I can. All we can do is try to stay afloat in that mighty river and hope to wash up somewhere interesting, at least for a time. But panta rhei, as Heraclitus said-“all things flow”-and that hasn’t changed an iota in the 2,500-odd years since he said it. Histories of cocktails, biographies of famous bartenders, appreciations of classic bars, all kinds of stuff. Anything from the crucial role African American bartenders played in the development of the American way of mixing drinks to the history of America’s oldest whiskey brand, Old Overholt to the difference between Aristotelian bartending and Platonic bartending to the epic, or at least epically long, story of New Orleans’ oldest bar (in four parts, no less) and a whole lot of other things besides. Over the past five-and-a-half years, I’ve been lucky enough to write a great number of them here, on any topic I found interesting.
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