Cocktail Hour

Hello, friends.

I have logged out of my personal email account and logged into my burner email account so that I can regale you with tales of cocktailery.  Please, save your puns for the end.

Like so many people, I have taken up home cocktailing during the various "lockdowns," "quarantines," and other restrictions on liberties undertaken during this pandemic.   During the first COVID spring/summer, I was primarily relying upon wine, often daydrinking whilst closing 8-to-10-figure restructuring transactions (and without committing any malpractice!).  As the leaves fell and fall turned to winter, I began craving something more.  Partly, the inspiration was a local distillery that had started offering extremely high quality to-go cocktails to cope with the pandemic.  But I think the bigger inspiration was the discovery of the Cocktails with Suderman Substack.  More on that in a moment.

Peter Suderman, for those who are unaware, is an editor at the small-l libertarian publication Reason, who cohabitates with the lone sane WaPo columnist, Megan McArdle.

Peter is also a bit cocktail obsessed. 

I don't recall exactly when I got wind of Cocktails with Suderman, but boy has it improved my quality of life (and that of the limited few around me).  The thing that really got me going--and pardon my former ignorance--was the discovery of the range of sweet vermouth that exists out there.  I had thought that I didn't like Manhattans.  It turns out that I just didn't like whatever vermouth was going into the Manhattans I'd had before.  This post from Suderman set me straight.  Now, the Manhattan may be my second favorite cocktail, only after the Manhattan variant, the Bushwick.

So now I have better equipment, better materials, and better cocktailing experiences.  The only things that aren't better are my waistline and my liver.

Unfortunately, I'm quite susceptible to influence when it comes to cocktail making (within reason, at least).   So I've ended up going down the following paths of doom and deliciousness:

• Manhattans, and variants thereof
• Negronis
• Sours
• Old Fashioneds (including this surprisingly tasty pumpkin spice old fashioned)
• Tiki punches
• Daiquiris
• Barrel aging (the biggest capital and counter-space commitment), pursuant to which I've made a wide variety of Negroni and Manhattan variations

Anyway, now that we're two years in, what have your coping mechanisms pandemic hobbies been?

Cheers!