This time, one might say, the Scientific American has gone too far. But actually, that’s been going on for years. It’s just one absurd outrage after another, a persistent tendency to justify every awful policy with some pseudo-science defense.
We know what “go light” means: they want it gone. It’s the same with fossil fuels and how quickly the conservation movement turned into the banning movement.
You know the drill. Find anything wonderful, anything innovative, anything that is a product of human ingenuity, target it, condemn it, and then use the government to get rid of it.
And to what end? To drive us back and back in time. To the 19th century. To the 16th century. To the 14th century. Actually, Anthony Fauci and his supposedly scientific friends are convinced that the world went wrong 12,000 years ago.
So forget cocktails and air conditioning. These people have serious problems with the wheel and boat. They would end them all in the name of science.
We should all despise them and resist them with every ounce of our being. But still, their maledictory posturing toward all modern conveniences provides a good opportunity to reflect on and appreciate the good things in life, and fight for their right to exist. Among which: cocktails.
I admit to being a fan of the cocktail. A huge fan. My domestic bar is like a grownup’s version of the chemistry set I played with as a kid. I collect syrups, mixers, and bitters of all sorts, and never stop playing with various combinations both complex and very simple. Long ago did I give up on giving names to the results.
For example, last evening’s mix was a white rum, lemon syrup, lots of crushed ice, with fresh sage muddled throughout. It is then strained and served as is. It was extremely simple, effervescent, and light, just right for the summer.
It’s also impossible to make without ice. Which is the whole point of these techno-primitivists. They want you languishing in misery all the time. Sometimes it seems like they spend their days reading back on the history of culture and technology looking for things to ban. For whatever reason, ice has become the new target.
Let’s briefly consider the modern history of the democratization of the cocktail. Before the 1920s, most libations in the history of humanity were one of three: wine, beer, or distilled liquors. That’s it. To be sure, there were monasteries that made fancier things with complex flavors but unless you lived close by you couldn’t get to them.
With prosperity came more availability but part of that prosperity was the advent of ice. Think about one of the most intriguing enthusiasms of Victorian England and France: absinthe. There is nothing hallucinogenic about it but plenty of people wanted to believe there was. It used ice but not in every glass.
A lovely vessel of ice water dripped over a sugar cube into a glass as a method of getting as much out of the ice as possible. Plus, it created a kind of ritual that added to the mystique. This eventually led to its banning throughout Europe.
After the Great War, three factors combined to give huge life to the mixed cocktail. Travel around the world meant global distribution of new flavors and ingredients. Ice became possible for every home and business and not as scarce and in all seasons. Then Prohibition came and made mixed liquor truly essential simply because the quality of bootleg production required it.
The martinis from this period used a good amount of vermouth (a fortified Italian wine) simply to cover up the nastiness of the strong juniper flavor of the gin. These days, gins are much better and this is one reason that since World War II people have come to order the martinis very dry, which is to say with little or no vermouth. So making an interwar-style martini requires that you fall back on a rugged English gin with a good amount of white vermouth plus olive, lemon, or onion.
The point here is that none of this would have happened but for the advent of year-round availability of ice for the shakers. This is what made cocktails popular, eventually coming to compete directly with wine and beer. The liquors that people drink straight today (“neat”) are mostly only fine scotch and tequila (which has its own fascinating story).
In other words, a cocktail is not just a fun drink. It is a civilizational marker, a sign and symbol of man’s progress in combining technology, innovation, and leisure. It is not something to abolish lightly. If we get rid of ice, we’ll be reduced to drinking hot medicinal mixes such as the toddy that was common in the 19th century and before.
This is not the habit of a high civilization.
By way of review, most cocktails consist of a base liquor, a wine or water to cut the strength, a distinguished flavor to mark its character, and a bit of bitters to grant that final element of complexity. Garnishes are optional but always fun. Once you understand this essential structure, you can make just about anything.
A simple version would be an Old Fashioned, which is bourbon, ice, some sugar, and orange bitters. Something more complex would be an Aviation (named to honor Lindbergh), which is gin with some vermouth, lemon juice, violet liqueur, and cherry liqueur, garnished with a cherry. Going even further, the Last Word requires Chartreuse, one of the few liqueurs in the world with a flavor impossible to recreate with syrups.
(The monks who make Chartreuse were this year forced by their superiors into a more demanding prayer schedule, thus cutting production and driving up the price all over the world.)
I will close this absurd rant with a little secret. Nearly every expensive liqueur on the market can be replaced with a syrup from the same flavor but at a tiny fraction of the price. Hence, your Amaretto can be replaced by almond syrup and Cointreau with orange syrup. So on down the line it goes: violet, cacao, lemon, mint, pomegranate, cherry, blackberry, and so on.
Once you get the hang of it, you can replace nearly every high-priced bottle on your shelf with a syrup that is far cheaper and lasts 20 times longer. (That sentence that you just read could be the most valuable in your entire adult life.)
As you mix, keep in mind the aesthetics. Color turns out to be just as important as flavor. Consider the look of the “Monkey Gland.” It consists of gin, orange juice, grenadine, absinthe, and orange garnish.
One final secret: cocktails do not require fine liquors such as expensive brandies, gins, and whiskeys, much less rums and so on. The low-priced option is always better for mixtures because the subtleties of the finer product are completely lost anyway once you start mixing cocktails. Indeed, that was one of the points of the cocktail: to cover up the flavor of undrinkable spirits.
Is there any chance that these ice banners will get away with this? Back in November 2020, several high officials at the National Institutes of Health proposed in private memos to force every American into a N95 respirator. They figured it was legal because, after all, there was a time when the United States made the production and distribution of all alcohol illegal, including beer and wine. This, they argued, is precedent: they can do whatever they want to us and with us.
We should take these silly articles in Scientific American very seriously. The editorial policies demonstrate the real point: use state power to impose and spread as much misery as possible. It’s enough to drive one to drink, so long as it’s legal.
