From The Boys' and Girls' Little Book of Alcohol, available at amazon, iTunes, and soon on barnesandnoble.com:
Straight gin has
such a degenerate reputation that to drink it without mixing in some other
ingredient is to invite either derision or an intervention. I have no idea why.
Straight up, on the rocks, or neat, asking for nothing but gin simply isn’t done in public, and pouring a
glass at home makes many people so self-conscious that they begin to think they
can actually feel the cirrhosis nodules beginning to grow in their livers.
Drinking straight gin is the kind
of thing folks do with the blinds drawn.
This is sad and
quite needless. Juniper-flavored alcohol has a long, formerly proud history as
a tonic. Monks made it, for God’s sake–literally. People in the Dark Ages made
that drab era a little lighter with it; they drank it as a way of warding off
the Plague. Of course it didn’t really work to that end, but gin did make one’s
buboes seem a great deal less repulsive for the brief period between their
onset and the drinker’s unpleasant and smelly demise. Buboes are best
experienced through a gin haze–on that I think we can all agree.
The 17th
century, when gin was flavored with turpentine, will not be elaborated upon
here except to note that the phase didn’t last long.
Juniper berries
returned as the primary flavoring soon thereafter, though today’s premium
brands often feature such an array of secondary essences that the roster
resembles the ingredients in high-end organic shampoo. Beefeater gin, for
example, features not
only juniper but also eight other botanicals: the seeds and root of angelica,
licorice, almonds, oranges, lemon peel, and everybody’s favorite, orris root.
What the fuck is Orris root? Orris happens to be one of
the “notes” in Yves Saint Laurent’s perfume Opium. It’s flowery and heavily so
when sniffed on its own. And apparently witches use it to pry into other
people’s subconscious. So the next time a business colleague buys you a
Beefeater martini, throw a burning candle at him or her immediately. If the
person is merely flabbergasted by the unexpected gesture, you can safely
proceed with the meeting. But if he or she burns to a crisp within seconds,
you’ve ridded the world of a witch, an act Martha Stewart would call a Good Thing.
If some uppity restaurant manager rushes over, just explain matter-of-factly
that you simply revealed your late business colleague to be a wicked witch and
that you’ve done the world a public service. Then threaten to call the board of
health, if for no other reason than to change the subject.
