Welcome to: The Drinkist

Martini **1/2

1-1/2 ounce gin

1/8 ounce dry vermouth

Pour ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice, and strain.

This is how it all started. During my sophomore year I invited a couple of my physics professors to our dorm for an afternoon social. They graciously came, though I was a poor physics student, and I’m not even sure they knew my name. One of them, the grandson of this guy (which meant little to me at the time, but look back on in awe now) remarked that learning to make a martini was an important part of a collegiate education. 

Well. In this regard, as in several others, my school failed me. When I graduated a couple years later I still had no idea how to make a martini, let alone a good one. I knew enough to know that I needed to learn how to make this drink, and that I’d have to be resourceful enough to learn how to do it myself. I guess these things count as an education.

Currently, it would be pretty simple to do: call up a YouTube video and watch. I’ve used this method to fix my oven and change my car battery. I’m sure it would work for cocktails. Heck, I’d make my own YouTube channel on this if I didn’t think my voice sounded too goofy for the A/V medium. Take note, Bill Simmons, some people should remain in print.

Of course, if you want to learn, you could always do some actual field work. There’s a craft cocktail bar on nearly every street corner: plop yourself down by the rail; ask the ‘keep to make a stiff one; watch; repeat. You may not figure out how it works, but you’ll have a good time.

Way back in 1994, these resources were not readily available. Certainly there was no YouTube. The mixology scene was still 10 years out, and bars that were local to our neighborhood were more along the lines of the alternate universe Martini’s in It’s a Wonderful Life: “we serve hard liquor for men who want to get drunk fast.” Any beverage with more than one ingredient was considered unmanly.

What was left? Books, and the scientific method (I had learned that, after all). Since a cocktail book is a personal item – likely to get sloshed on, at the least – I eschewed the library and selected a sturdy volume, hardcover, thick pages that could absorb both ink and liquor. Robyn Feller’s met these requirements, plus had 1,500 drinks with some indexing in the back. I made my choice.

Would I recommend this book to anyone else? Hard to say. I bought it, I own it, I use it. It predates the cocktail revival movement, though, so it’s missing some of the more interesting drinks that have appeared in the last two decades. And, frankly, it doesn’t much go into technique, as I found out only slowly. If you’re starting out today, there’s probably an app that you can readily use, and perhaps an Otterbox for your phone so you don’t ruin it.

But I’m a member of the last non-digital generation, and aside from liking books, I like to make paper notes. As part of my learning and discovery, I decided to keep notes on each cocktail I made. Again, an app can probably do that for you, and my drinks and notes & comments are not cross-referenced. If I want to find a decent drink that has, say, rum and lime juice, I have to rely on memory (Rum Rickey, if you’re asking). An app would let you look it up in a heartbeat. But an app can easily disappear on you, or fall out of use; you may need an internet connection or a recharged battery. My book, and my notes, I always have, on all 1,500 drinks in the book (well, nearly all – we’ll get to that).

My process was simple: review ingredients available; find a drink I can make; make it; rate it on a four star scale; add a comment or note. I knew well enough that even the worst drink improved by the time you got to the bottom, so I tried to make my rating after the first or second sip. This can lead to the Pepsi fallacy: in small cup taste tests, Pepsi usually beats Coke. People like the sweeter flavor. Over the course of a whole can, though, people will prefer Coke – the Pepsi sweetness gets cloying halfway through. As such, my ratings probably have a bias towards sweeter drinks. 

Or, I may like sweet drinks.

Lastly, my erstwhile drinking buddy, Chris, had the bright/creepy idea of adding a “G” for those drinks he thought would go over well with the ladies.  Back then, finding a cocktail that could reliably loosen female inhibitions was still considered acceptable (not that I would ever do that now); so I went along, for a while, until it became evident that Chris’ G Theory was useless with the ladies.

Anyway, I got the book, breezed through the intro sections on standard liquors and bar ware, noted deficiencies, and began to mix, which brings me to: The Martini. I don’t think it was the first drink I made from the book, but it was one of the first – see above, I knew it was an important drink. 

And…I struggled to give it 2 stars of four. I think I gave it that many because I didn’t want to embarrass myself later on, as having a childish palate, unable to enjoy refinement. Truth is, without guidance, I had made the drink all wrong. Read the directions: shaker and strain. This misses huge chunks of how to make a decent drink. Back then, I think I took a couple of glasses, some thick ice cubes, store brand gin, stale vermouth, kinda swooshed it together for a few seconds, and strained it into “a glass” (read, plastic tumbler). No wonder it was poison.

If I’m asked to make a martini now, I know better: and you should, too. Here’s the step-by-step to a two ingredient cocktail.

1.) The day before, make sure you own:

a. A proper martini glass.

b. Good gin – it doesn’t have to be Bombay, but it can’t be Bartons.

c. Good vermouth: more important than the gin. Don’t use Martini & Rossi.

d. A cocktail shaker. 

e. An ice crusher.

f. Cocktail olives.

2.) The night before, make sure the cocktail glass is in the freezer, with the gin.

3.) When you’re ready: fill the shaker (assuming it’s standard size) about 1/3 with crushed ice. If your fridge has an ice crush function, great; if not, use the manual ice crusher. Crushed ice is vital.

4.) Fill with 3 oz. gin. I hate a weak pour.

5.)  Add ¼ oz. dry vermouth. 

6.) Shake vigorously for about 5 seconds.

7.) Strain into your frosted martini glass.

8.) Drop in a couple of olives, preferably on a tooth pick.

9.) Serve, with a flourish.

Right now, there are some readers who are shaking their heads in disapproval. They have been taught that a martini must be stirred, not shaken, or else it bruises the gin. I used to think this was just a cool think you said when you wanted to sound like you know something – “don’t you dare bruise the gin again, Ferguson. And bring me my spats, I’m having dinner at the club with the Viscount.” Truth is, cold gin has a smooth, almost oily quality that coats the tongue on the way down, and is often sought after by the connoisseurs. If you’re making a craft martini with Broker’s gin, then yes, perhaps you want to keep the full sensation. In this case, you stir the ingredients in a pitcher with a handful of regular ice cubes. You just want to add a little bit of melt water to open up the gin. 

But for every day drinking? You probably have Seagrams or something the like. You can’t bruise Seagrams, it’s got a granite jaw, and what you’re really trying to do is take the harshness of mass-produced gin out of the cocktail. The crushed ice will cool the concoction down, and add maybe 1-1/2 ounces of ice water, mellowing the drink out while filling up the cocktail glass. Most of your guests will appreciate it. 

My High School’s senior class trip was to Cancun, Mexico. Does this still happen? I figured liability issues would have put a serious damper on the “fun” locations, but I grew up in a free-range world. And for us, the moment we arrived at the hotel in Cancun, we teenagers were handed a margarita, and indeed, I thought this must be the happiest place on earth. 

What I was handed was a margarita in only the most generous sense, in so far that it was green, sweet, sour, and had tequila. This is the state of most margaritas, and again, I don’t want to be elitist. I can’t enjoy going to our usual Mexican restaurant without ordering one of these, to go along with the queso “cheese” dip (corn starch and whey byproducts, I assume). It hit the spot with my 17 year old self, and still does. 

It is *not* what I would serve a guest coming to my home for a drink. The margarita, after all, has a noble history that belies its current cheap swill status. Quick history lesson: one of the more popular cocktails of the 20’s was the Daisy: your booze of choice (commonly gin, but it was used with rum, vodka, brandy, and bourbon, too) is mixed with lemon juice and grenadine, with a splash of club soda, perhaps. It’s not a complicated drink, but it works really well, and can be a foundation for further refinement. It follows one of the basic precepts of the cocktail: citrus + sweetener + alcohol. The general idea is that the citrus cuts the worst of the alcohol flavor (what my wife calls “jet fuel” experience). But unless you add a sweetener, you could be left with just tartness. 

Plain sugar can work here, and indeed some drinks call for a sugar cube, but sugar does not dissolve well in cold liquids. At best, you’re muddling it with some citrus (and now you’re in a more advanced class). Sugar syrup is easy to make and keep, and you should always have some handy. There are other sweeteners (agave syrup is trendy), but grenadine is still the most commonly used. It mixes well, adds a hint of cherry and pomegranate, and gives a nice color.  I think there’s enough going on in a plain old Daisy to qualify as a go-to cocktail, though this is where I differ from modern mixology: that’s a different topic.  

Back to our friendly little Daisy. Mixed with differing quantities of club soda, and it can vary from a refreshing summer cooler (rum daisy) to a warming sipper on a chilly day (brandy). Who wouldn’t love these? For one, those dour busybodies in the old Temperance movement. Almost 100 years later and I still shudder at the inexplicable hysteria that overcame us, for a remarkably long period. Just shows you what can happen when blue-light religious conservatives team up with self-serious progressives. A dangerous combination. 

In any case, sensible drinkers were forced to flee to more friendly shores; in this case, Mexico. Not far across the border, right on the Pacific, a few enterprising and civic minded individuals set up drinking establishments for those who wanted to exercise their natural right to have a cocktail in public without fear of Elliott Ness swooping down on them. Sensible drinkers would frequently ask for a Daisy, since that’s what was popular at the time. Sensible proprietors did their best to keep their customers happy, but the supply chain infrastructure in Mexico had a lot of gaps. Shipments of brandy and lemons were unreliable. If you were bartending, and continuity was your goal, your best bet was to source locally. 

Western Mexico may not have had brandy or lemons, but it did have tequila and limes. You could mix those perfectly well with grenadine, or whatever sweetener you had handy. Grenadine is great, except it requires refrigeration. That may not be readily available south of the border, so you go with sweetened liquor substitutes. Maybe Peach Schnapps, if you have it. Regardless, the tequila + lime + sweetener combo proved quite popular, and once prohibition ended, exiled drunks brought it back with them across the line. 

There’s early mention of a Tequila Sunrise – 1936, in Arizona – where crème de cassis was used as the sweetener. Around then, people were also referring to a “Tequila Daisy”, and it would have been a natural thing for bartenders to make this with, say, triple sec, which is quite sweet. Eventually a clever wag put two-and-two together and realized the Tequila Daisy was indeed a Margarita (= “Daisy” in Spanish) and our May 5th quaff was born.

What is this, a history lesson, or am I finally going to get around to how to make this drink? Well, like the martini, this is another one of those cocktails where the quality of the ingredients matters. You’re only using three for a basic margarita, so make them count. 

First off: bad tequila is a terrible thing. The problem is, even bargain tequila is expensive relative to, say, vodka. And unlike vodka, there are no cheap tricks to improving the quality (e.g., running it through a Brita filter a few times). In our area, Montezuma is the cheapest generally available, and it’s not fit for a proper drink. I try to aim higher, and that becomes a game of whack-a-mole. I’ll find a decent bottle – smooth & smoky – for $35/1.75L, only to see it climb to $45 once everyone catches on to how good it is. Then I search for the next hidden gem. I also tend to ask for Patron for Christmas and Birthdays. I find it’s the best, though I won’t turn down Don Julio or Cabo Wabo. 

The quality should be on par with, say, Cuervo, which is perfectly good but not worth the price. For my margaritas, I prefer blanco (silver/clear) as opposed to reposado (brown). I recognize that reposado has more flavor and complexity, which is great if I’m doing shots. That’s all lost against a few shots of lime juice, though. Plus the color of a margarita should be a very nice clear pale green, brown tequila looks unpleasant in the mix.

You’ll need fresh limes. Some recipes call for Roses, but I hate that stuff. It’s useful in, say, an upside-down margarita, but I’ll assume my readership is long past college years and doesn’t need to know about this drink. Use fresh limes, please, and if needed, add a light touch of sugar syrup. It will taste better.

One place where I economize is on the orange portion of this drink. High-end margaritas call for Grand Marnier, but I don’t think it’s sweet enough. Neither is Cointreau. If you’re only using tequila, lime juice, and an orange liqueur, the orange needs to do some heavy lifting. Triple Sec does that for me, and even cheap stuff – Montezuma – works. Anything else, and a.) you get in the way of the tequila, and b.) you have to add sugar. You can be fancy and buy agave syrup at the grocery store, that works too.

Margaritas are extremely popular, so when I make them, I make 2-3 at a time. Your standard cocktail shaker will fit:

1/3 shaker crushed ice

Five shots of tequila (1.75 oz each)

Five shots of triple sec

The juice of two limes (juicy limes, please – find ones that have smooth, thin skin, and are spheroid, rather than oval)

Combine shake pour straight up into a chilled martini glass – skip the useless tequila glasses and salt rim.

You should get three drinks out of that; two, in my household, but I’m a strong pour. I also have a large shaker that lets me scale up: seven ½ shots each of the booze, three limes. If I’m having a get-together, I’ll make several shakers in advance.

This is a strong beverage – a true cocktail. Your guests may do a double-take on the first sip, they’ll be expecting the da-glo cheap stuff that barely has a shot in it. After a short while they’ll be used to this version, though, and want another. As always, serve responsibly.

If you’re feeling frisky, you can start adding things to this cocktail, like freshly squeezed OJ, or muddled watermelon. The former is an excellent addition regardless – keeps it in the class of a regular margarita, but please only use fresh squeeze OJ. The latter is a joy for summer, but you have to strain the muddled watermelon juice before adding it to the shaker – the pulp will otherwise clog the drink strainer in a hurry.

Oh, and the aforementioned Tequila Sunrise? It got reinvented in the 70’s, with orange juice and grenadine. Perfectly fine drink.

I saw a photo of Prince Philip in the news, out and about, with the caption that he now looks “decades younger.” Twitter had larf at this, as in, decades younger than Stonehenge? You go, Twitter.

But he looks younger than some of the more recent photos where he looked pretty rough. And, frankly, for a guy in his 100th year on the planet, I’d say he’s doing pretty well – trim, upright, and still with a little mischief in his eye. The back-handed compliment “spry” applies.

All this struck me because, like Prince Phil, I have a round number birthday on the horizon. I wonder if, when Philly closed in on his 50th, he thought to himself, jolly well, I’m not even half-way done with my run on this planet. Pip-pip and all that! Personally if I thought I had another 50 left in my itinerary I don’t know if I’d be delighted or horrified.

*But* I do know that I’d like to reel in another 30 or so, that seems fair. And I want to make those 30 relatively healthy. I don’t want to look like 100 year old Phillip when I’m 64. So, it’s time to face the music: a little bit of healthier living is going to have to creep into my routine.

Yeah yeah, it’s not rocket science; there was a great throw-away line in classic Star Trek where Bones tells a patient who’s found some elixir of longevity that he’s better off if he would just eat right and exercise. Though I’d still try the elixir, cuz, hey, I like cake and I hate jogging.

However – common sense also tells me that the healthier lifestyle includes – gasp! – a reduction in alcohol. Not just common sense: I definitely feel the effects of overindulgence more severely than my younger self did. The corollary is that my tolerance is higher, so I find I have to drink more than that stripling lad of yore. Or, I tell myself as much.

OK, so, drink less. Easy. Ahh, if only…

…first, know thyself, and on this I have myself sized up pretty well. Nursing isn’t in my make-up. Indeed, when it comes to the cocktail, my bedside manner is tough love: no malingering, you’re taking up useful space in that glass, mister. Once I start with a cocktail, I am *far* more likely to have four drinks than one. 

So, that’s the set-up. Drink less by not having that first drink. Oh, boy, you see where that’s going though. It’s a long day in a long week in a series of long weeks, months, and you make your way down the stairs of the attic (that’s my WFH rig – dedicated office space in the attic) and you reach for your trusty cocktail book and flip to…the non-alcoholic drink section.

Yes, seriously, my book has this, because they chirpily add that hey, it’s the 90’s, and people are drinking less. Ha. The 90’s were as lush as ever. Kids – we drank. But anyway you can flip through this section and you’ll find it to be totally useless to a guy trying to cut back on drinking. I mean…OK, maybe you like making the drink, just on its own. Hey, that’s me, too, I also like making the drink. If the end result for me is a Virgin Mary, or Shirley Temple? After this long day, you spend 5 minutes making your Virgin Colada, you take that first sip…well, you know what’s missing. The absence of alcohol just makes most virgin drinks worse. Might as well just have a soda.

Which was my strategy for a while. No, not a coke, but club soda with a little bitters in it. I still get to shake something into a glass, and the drink isn’t sweet, so you don’t gulp it down…it works. Mostly. Plus, if you’re going to a restaurant and you don’t want to drink, but you want to retain an air of sophistication, it’s a good order. Much better than a diet coke or (cough) iced tea. God I hate iced tea. Or ice tea. I don’t know, call it what you want, I hate it. Don’t @ me.

What else is left? Despair? Shake it off, eventually we’ll get out of this COVID crap, or we won’t, you gotta keep trying, no matter what. So, I tried. 

I tried with something that I’d never seen before, it popped into one of my social media feeds – ok aside, I didn’t do any searches for this type of product, it just showed up, so I guess it knows that I’m nearing the end of the coveted 18-49 demographic and this product is made for those of us facing the 50 carousel – anyway, it showed up, so I looked at it. 

It’s calling itself, as a category, Zero-Proof Alcohol.

Jesus Christ & General Jackson. Is that where we are? Fake hooch? Might as well have fake milk or fake boobs. OK, we have those, so yeah…I shopped around, read the reviews (the bad ones – good reviews are 90% worthless) and dropped a few sawbacks on a bottle of non-gin gin. 

The manufacturers of this, ah, product recommend you simply substitute theirs in where ever you would use the real stuff. So, if you’ve been an attentive reader, you know what I was going to start with. Yes, we’ll load up a non-alcoholic Martini. Fine, technically a low-alcohol Martini, since I’m still using a splash of vermouth. Don’t be pedantic. 

My first effort in this was a failure. That same attentive reader will note that I like my martinis to contain about a third melted icewater, to cool the booze and round it out. So, although some will scoff at me, I like to shake my martinis. Yes, I’m a bruiser. Regardless, this is definitely not recommended here; since zero-proof gin is already pretty much only water, more water just gets you…water. 

But! Since it’s mostly just water, you can’t freeze this either. So, my second effort involved a more gentle stir of the martini, and this got closer to the mark. What you get clearly isn’t a gin martini, but you certainly get the gin botanicals – juniper and citrus plus a few more. That part may be the easy part, but they got it right. It is gin without the alcohol.

To be totally fair, it’s more than that. The makers gamely try to replicate that alcohol burn with some added acids. After your first sip, you definitely get a burn…of some kind. I can’t say it replicates a martini to any great fashion, but at least it’s different than simple juniper-flavored water.

Deep down, though, I knew this was not likely to be my drinking choice. The better use for this “gin” was always going to be in a Gin and Tonic. So, pour-pour-stir, and enjoy! Truth was, this was a perfectly fine Gin & Tonic, for what it was. To some small degree I could almost, almost pretend I was sipping a summer cooler. If nothing else, this $40 bottle will eventually be used in this fashion.

And after that? I don’t see a reorder on the horizon. None of this is any better, really, than my above soda and bitters strategy. Or, for that matter, tonic and bitters, which is as useful as this at a fraction of the price. And, again, you can order it at a bar, with a straight face.

Now, for my real alcohol substitute, my go-to remains non-alcoholic beer. Yeah, laugh, but I find a few of them – notably Kaliber and St. Pauli Girl NA, to be drinkable on their own terms. Since beer is low in alcohol to begin with, it’s not missed quite as much. And taking a pull from a bottle on a warm evening gives me a remarkable placebo effect. With, the noted drawback, that fake beer has more carbs and calories that I can reasonably justify on a soft drink. And after 4 months of COVID-inspired baked goods, carbs are something I can’t have right now. Pooh.

Alright, but is *any* of this worth it? Well, yeah…I mean, cutting back on the drink has definitely made me feel better. With the unfortunate caveat that the 48 year old low-alcohol Drinkist feels as healthy and energetic as the 28 year old high-proof Drinkist. 

So – "decades younger". Here’s to you, Prince Philip. 

Screwdriver

1-1/2 oz. Vodka

orange juice

fill highball glass with ice, add ingredients, and stir

Greyhound

1-1/2 oz. Vodka

grapefruit juice
fill highball glass with ice, add ingredients, and stir 

The very first alcoholic drink I ever made was a Screwdriver. I was 10, I think, maybe 11, can’t quite recall, obviously way too young to be making the drink for myself, even in my father’s liberal “parenting” environment. In this case, it was made at my father’s request – he was playing a chess match against his friend Bill, and didn’t want to get up from the board. 

I was bemused by this task: how do you make a Screwdriver? Surely the alchemy here was something you can’t conjure as a ten-year-old. Dad explained that I should fill a tall glass with ice, fill that 1/3 with vodka, and top off with OJ. Easy.

Well I could hardly muss that up, so I gave it a go; and after my plea for his approval he confirmed that I’d made a good drink. Though he never did ask me to make another one for him, perhaps it wasn’t very good. Or perhaps he knew this was crossing a line, having your tots mix up cocktails for you (that line, btw, is somewhere just beyond “kid, fetch me a beer.”) 

But how can you possibly screw up a Screwdriver? It’s got two ingredients, garnishes are optional, and you don’t have to do any shaking or anything like that. If it’s too weak, shucks, you have a glass of OJ to enjoy. Too strong and – well, that’s never been a problem as far as I’m concerned. But I suppose you can just nurse it while the ice melts. 

The real way to botch a Screwdriver is by forking up the ingredients themselves. Heck, even that’s not easy to do with vodka; no need to use Grey Goose on this, Barton’s is perfectly good at $15/1.75 Liter.  Cossack or Popov will do in a pinch, just go heavier on the OJ.

That leaves the juice, and this is definitely a place where you can go wrong. My father stuck with Tropicana, though I’m not certain this was by choice; we did all our shopping at the corner market, with its meager 800 different products. There were no competing brands for sale: the only bread they carried was Pepperidge Farm; the only pasta was Muellers. And so on. You wanted OJ, you got Tropicana. With pulp, you say? Dream on, It's OJ, take it or leave it. On the plus side, man, that corner market had a tremendous butcher and, every now and then, really good fresh fish, even the occasional sole. Take that Publix.

Anyway, if you’re in your late teens, on a budget, Tropicana is a premium beverage you may not be able to afford. So you debase yourself with “orange flavored drink” – I picked up this bad habit (and luckily nothing else) on my High School class trip to Cancun, where I learned to mix tequila with Mexican Tang, the only thing readily available to me down there. “Does it really matter?” I asked myself as a teenager, and I answered, “no.” So poor had been my education up to this point that I cared not between Orange Kool-Aid or Tropicana as a mixer; I could neither have told you the difference between velvet and velveteen, for that matter. 

This particular bad habit lasted me through my college years, where you could, on any given night, find me in my bathrobe sipping vodka and Kool-Aid from the coffee mug I’d gotten in August 1979 (engraved with my name and the date, it remains one of my oldest possessions). Though at this point it wasn’t even Kool-Aid, since that drink was an outrageous 79 cents per packet, and the store-brand Flavor-Ade packets at the Co-op could often be had for 5 for a dollar. You really can’t tell where the 59 cents go.

A few years later my trusty bartender guidebook, plus a more regular paycheck, would bring me to my senses – specifically, to one: taste. Out went the artificial mix, in went actual juice. What I found, though, was that my assessment of the matter may not have been that far off. As much as Big OJ would want you to believe that their products are just like fresh squeezed, they’re not. The pasteurization process fundamentally changes the product, regardless of what you do or do not add to it. We know this, and it’s especially notable in the “Real Lemon” stuff you’ll see in the supermarket, which bears only a passing resemblance to fresh lemon juice, in so far that it once came from lemons. 

So I pretty much skipped over the Tropicana part of the progression, and went right from powder mix to fresh squeezed. One of my favorite bits of advice I’ve read comes from Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, where Charles Ryder, newly arrived at Oxford, is told by his older cousin, paraphrasing, to either get an A or a Gentleman’s C. Time spent on a B+ is time wasted.

This is otherwise terrible advice given by an unreliable advisor, and I’ve occasionally followed it with disastrous results (apparently nobody asked you your GPA after graduating from Oxford). But on the humble Screwdriver? It’s pretty accurate. There’s nothing like fresh squeezed juice, and if you’re not going to make that effort, stop pretending you’re not just trying to get drunk. So, yes, quickly leapt from da-glo powder to fresh, and a humble juicer became an indispensable bar tool. 

Interesting to me was that a parallel development was happening a few hundred miles away, with my father. I’d go visit him from time to time and noticed real, honest to goodness oranges in his apartment; hmmm, we never had fresh fruit in our household in my teens. As he progressed in life (and fell into a decent inheritance) his standards jumped a couple notches, too. Fresh fruit, decent socks, a handful of other upscale touches – dad stopped taking the Gentleman’s C on a few things himself. May we all be so lucky, I've seen it go the other way.

Final note: you don’t really want a Screwdriver anyway. Ditch the orange and go for grapefruit. Store-bought grapefruit juice is a miserable failure of a product, but fresh is the right balance of sweet and tart, which is (if you’ve been paying attention to previous posts) exactly what you want to disguise the alcohol burn. A grapefruit gives you more juice, and you can keep the other half around for breakfast, if that’s your thing. And and, if you’re at a fancy restaurant or bar and order a Greyhound, you’ll get an appreciative nod. Easy for them to make plus it lets them know that you know what you’re doing.

The vodka problem aside (that one is particular to me – I understand that there are masses of folk out there who love vodka), I have one glaring problem with my new bar rule, keep only bottles that are good enough to drink by themselves. The exception that proves the rule in this case is my giant plastic jug of triple sec. 

By all rights it should not be there. Most triple sec is no more than grain alcohol, water, corn syrup, and artificial orange flavor. It ought not to have a place in any bar, frankly, much less my elevated one. Yet I can’t seem to live without it. 

Why not, you ask? For start it’s a key ingredient in some of my bartending Greatest Hits, especially and including my perennially popular Margarita. This need not be the case; I own a high-end Margarita recipe cocktail book, and triple sec gets barely a mention in it. Most any orange flavor liqueur can be used in a margarita: curacao and Grand Marnier are popular, though triple sec’s immediate quality replacement is Cointreau, and indeed I very much enjoy a straight glass of Cointreau as an aperitif or more likely digestif. 

The issue with those are that they’re not quite sweet enough to stand up to the lime by themselves. A margarita using only Cointreau will usually call for an extra sweetener – agave syrup being the classy choice, though plain sugar syrup will work, too. Careful, though, since it’s easy at that point to oversweeten the drink. Or not have it mix properly and have an inconsistent sweetness level. 

Plus, now you’re just adding sugar syrup, and you were trying to get away from that by dropping the triple sec. 

So, I tend to use the proportion of triple sec in the Margarita to control the sweetness – sometimes 100%, but often a 50/50 mix of triple sec and Cointreau or Grand Marnier. Especially the Grand Marnier – you don’t need a lot of it to get its smoky flavor to show up.

Plus plus, while I earn more than you do…and you…yeah, and you too…ok, less than you…yup, more than you…’n’ you…whoa, *way* less than you, don’t rub it in…wait, are you counting benefits…nope, still more…ok, you get the picture, I earn more than many, less than some, regardless I’m not made of money. Cointreau is crazy expensive for what it is.

The same math holds true for several other cocktails. Early in our relationship, my Better Half’s drink of choice was the humble cranberry vodka – technically a cranberry smash, my book calls a cranberry vodka as a soaked fruit drink, which is a whole different topic – but make a note of it for later. Anyway, because it was the late 90’s, the cranberry splash migrated itself quite organically to the ubiquitous Cosmopolitan. For those of you who don’t remember, the Cosmopolitan was the Pesto of the 90’s, which itself was the Quiche of the 80’s. 

The ingredient list for the splash is pretty simple, cranberry and vodka, but it’s typically also served with a wedge-squeeze of lime. Throw in a bit of orange liqueur, and, hey! You got your Cosmo. Organic, as I said:

2 oz. vodka

2 oz. cranberry juice

1 oz. lime juice

1 oz. triple sec

Combine ingredients in a shaker, shake and service straight up

It’s not *that* simple, of course. The ratios are different, as you can see. In particular, the Cosmo has a good deal of lime, not just a spritz. That much acid and booze needs a cutter, which is where the sweetness comes in. The triple sec to lime juice ratio (1:1) is the same that I use in my base Margarita recipe, so yeah, it checks out. The added cranberry makes this drink all the sweeter (what my erstwhile drinking partner CD would have marked with a G.)

This was fine for the 90’s. But we’ve grown up, haven’t we? I hope we have (though the evidence to the contrary is compelling.) Look, Sex & The City was a perfectly good show, if Better Half turns on a rerun I’m just as likely to stay in the room. It turns out, though, that SATC isn’t a good blueprint for how to run your life. One suspects that more than a few would-be Carries or Samanthas woke up one day and said, shoot, this isn’t working out, everything is heck in a handbasket. Maybe it’s the Cosmo? I need to find a new drink.

We at Drinkist never blame a cocktail; we suggest being more realistic in shoe budgets and relationship expectations. The Cosmo was never a bad little drink, it just needed a little love. Or a minor updating. This is where my liquor cabinet manifesto comes into play; a simple, beneficial change to the Cosmo is to swap in the more expensive, less sweet Cointreau; this is already a common approach you’ll see in many current Cosmo recipes.

There remains the problem that this updated Cosmo is still aggressively pink; Better Half loves her pink colors, but I’m guessing the new SATC reboot coming out will favor more muted hues for more distressing times. No problem! The supermarket carries something called white cranberry juice, pop that guy in there instead of the regular red. This stuff is definitely sweeter so perhaps use less, and up the lime content. But you should get a drink that looks like a straight up martini or the like, though I do not recommend adding an olive. Or, well, you be you, perhaps add the olive. Though balling up a lime rind on a toothpick would be a solid play here.

And if people press you on it, tell them you’re drinking a Cosmos, and contemplating the inevitable heat death of the universe. Trust me: nothing says “I have a grown up, sophisticated bar” like somberly considering the second law of thermodynamics

Fine, I’ve heard the clamor from the teeming masses: Just how did I end up with not one, but two bottles of cheap cherry brandy? Oh please sir, tell us the tale, please?

The tale starts a hundred years ago; it was a warm summer night on the South Pacific 

OK fine let’s fast forward just a bit. 

It was a warm summer night in Birmingham, sometime in the mid-to-late-Aughts, and my better half needed a new drink. We’d been together a decade or so, and progressed through a selection of go-to cocktails. Cranberry & vodka (simple, but we can do better); Long Island Iced Tea (not recommended past 35); Cosmopolitan (remember when those were hip?); Sidecar (without the black coffee); Margarita (still in use but tough as an every-day). I don’t know how or why but I guess I consulted the book and produced a Singapore Sling; it was pronounced an instant success, and has been A’s default mode for the last decade plus. 

That was a fast-forward indeed: 100 years in a paragraph, in theory. But there’s more to this, a pretty meandering path from here out. And, if you want to just skip though that – well I’ve indicated the next stopping point below. I won’t say this tale is specifically interesting though I think there was a point to it all. Anyway, if you’re still with me:

The Sling has an interesting history, and makes regular appearances in Drinks Around the World type articles in your fashionable travel, food, and leisure publications. Sure, I’d love to check in at the Raffles and order one, though I imagine that experience has been Disneyfied long since; no small part of the charm of fruity drinks in exotic locales is the hint of danger and adventure just a table over. A chance meeting; a mysterious man in a Panama hat; a wild scheme to raise a lost ship; an alluring grand-daughter of a former colonial magistrate. Perhaps you’ve made a fortune; perhaps you’ve been swindled; perhaps you just walked away. It was all bound up in that fruity drink.

Also: the Sling has a thousand different versions – thousand and one, mine included – but it follows that basic formula of a sour (citrus/pineapple); a sweet (grenadine usually); and a spirit (always gin). Herbal and bitters components may or may not be included, but it’s generally the addition of a cherry liqueur that differentiates the Sling from, say, a Daisy. Except not always, perhaps.

The recipe I used for my sling, from my book:

1 oz. gin

2 oz. sour mix

½ oz. grenadine

Club soda

1 dash cherry brandy

Mix gin, sour mix, grenadine in a cocktail shaker with ice, pour into a tall glass, top with club soda and a splash of cherry brandy

A particular reason for making this was that, at the time, I had a bottle of (overpriced for what it is) Peter Heering cherry liqueur open and needing a use. Peter Heering shows up in a couple of other drinks in my book – the Black-cherry Rum Punch, 2.5 stars, and the Great Dane, 3 stars – and completionist that I was at the time I had the bottle specifically to knock these out, which left me with the rest with which to experiment. Hence the Sling. I think the original Raffles recipe calls for Peter Heering explicitly; in any case it really goes well with it.

But the drink itself does have a major problem. It is The Sour Mix Problem.

Commercial sour mix, what you get in the store, is (to me at least) an awful product. I taste only artificial components when I use it, overpoweringly so. It has about as much a relation to real sour mix as those pasteurized lemon squeezy juices have to fresh lemon; I’d just as soon not make a drink if I had to use the commercial sour mix. Hey, you may like it, or at least find it inoffensive – see above in my previous post, I have no problem with that. I’m just not a fan.

The solution is to make your own, and conceptually this is easy. It’s just lemon juice, water, sugar, and egg white. Take care not to “cook” your egg whites in the lemon juice, but otherwise, combine it all in a jar and shake. 

Conceptually easy. Practically, you’re going to want a commercial juicer. I would find myself slogging through an entire bag of lemons (and that’s a whole other topic, the pre-bagged lemons at the grocery store are of limited quality, with thick rinds and little juice) just to get enough for a pint of sour mix, which, if you notice the ratio in the recipe above, would be used up in 3-4 days. It got a little tiring. And the same follows with every other sour mix drink, so, I tended to avoid them myself.

But I couldn’t avoid the Sling: It was too popular in the Gray household, and I can ill-afford a dip in my approval ratings. So I tinkered.

The obvious solution is to break down the sour mix into its components. When I make the Sling now, I juice a fresh lemon, and up the club soda to manage the extra water from the sour mix. The egg I just leave out – yes you lose body but A didn’t seem to mind. That only leaves a gap in sweetness, which initially I addressed either with simple syrup (I almost always have some of that handy), or with extra grenadine.

That all helped – not the least that I could hand-select ripe and juicy lemons in smaller quantities, and maximize the output of the juicing effort. And for a while peace and happiness reigned; eventually though I ran out of Peter Heering and needed a substitute. And that’s where the plain cherry brandy comes in. I did a straight swap, with DeKruyper cherry brandy, and things seemed fine for a while. Then, the dreaded New Problem: my local ABC store only intermittently carries this stuff, and soon I ran out of the bottle I purchased, and needed a substitute for that. I further experimented: plain brandy, other fruit brandies, crème de Noyeaux (for the color mostly). One night in desperation, with nothing else to add, I grabbed my amaretto and floated that in; it really seems to work, with the added benefit that the extra sweetness of the amaretto lets me skip sugar syrup. So my current version of the Singapore Sling:

1-1/2 oz. gin

Juice of ½ lemon

½ oz. grenadine

Club Soda

½ oz. amaretto

But how exactly did I end up with the two bottles of cherry brandy? Well, I’d been making this ersatz version for a while, when suddenly I saw that my ABC store had some cherry brandy in stock. Not knowing if it was permanent, I went ahead and grabbed a couple. 

And then a funny thing happened: when I made the Sling with the cherry b, I got the crinkled nose reaction from A. “Did you make this different?” Not in a good way. Turns out that my trialing and erroring had stumbled into a formula that really seemed to work for A – and for me. Not bad.

If you want to skipped my history/narrative, then come to here. I swear there was kind of a point to that loooong set-up. And no, I’m not being paid by the word. The point is, over a long period, in discreet increments, stuff happens, things change. The original Singapore Sling I make for A has since morphed, by soft degrees, into something…else? I’m not sure. Is it still a Singapore Sling? It may be better, who knows – maybe it fits A’s flavor profile more closely, and certainly is easier for me to make. We make efficiency gains all time in life (I don’t like the term short cut); it’s the greater benefit of experience that you learn where you can focus your energies, because, yes, you have less vigor as you go on. I’ve been telling people that I feel more effective now, in my 50thdecade, than ever, because while I don’t have the same energy and concentration of my 20 year old self, I know how to better direct what I have. The curve will eventually catch up with me but there’s a reason that many people’s most productive years are between 40 and 60.

Or maybe that’s all just sophistry. I’m in an odd position where people are asking me for my wisdom (how’s that for a sign of ageing); as often as not, the last result of my wisdom is, “you know what you should do, don’t try to talk yourself out of it.” I think my current version of the Sling is a good drink – maybe even better: But it’s not the same drink that A fell in love with on that warm summer night those years ago. 

Which means that it’s time to return to the craft that I practiced way back then, maybe if only to make sure I haven’t forgotten a key step or critical ingredient. Maybe to remind myself (and A) that hey, yeah, I can still do this. Bring back some inefficiencies; slow it down a bit; put in the full effort again; show the work. 

Remember. 

Rededicate. 

Rusty Nail

2 oz. scotch

1 oz. Drambuie

1.) Fill rocks glass with ice

2.) Add scotch & Drambuie

3.) Stir 

I was introduced to this drink in my college years – it was a favorite of a female friend of a close friend – she did not qualify as “girlfriend,” the affections in this case running mostly in one direction, from her to him. Why there was less reciprocation isn’t my business, though I always suspected politics came into play; this girl was left of Trotsky, decidedly on the other end of the spectrum as the object of her affection. Her attraction to him being so great that she was willing to overlook the difference in his case. Less so in mine, she tolerated me only in so far as needed, given my relative proximity. But one finds common ground where one can, and cocktails have served me well in that regard over the years. My philosophy has always hewn closer to the Hard Rock Café “Love All, Serve All” ideal. Then, as now, you may knock on my door and expect that mi bar es su bar. I find few political divides that can’t be bridged by a good stiff belt. And though I would not say that Miss Marxist and I ever “bonded”, I appreciated her taste for the Rusty Nail, as I appreciate the drink itself – with its Scotsman economy belying hidden depths. I daresay the only problem with the drink is maintaining the stock of ingredients – I mean, I always have scotch on hand, but…

…Drambuie is a cheeky after-dinner drink, somewhere in the honey-spiced family, and on its own makes a worthy though mildly expensive addition to the home bar. But it lacks in versatility and does not serve particularly well as a mixer; it clashes with most other alcohols and blends best only with itself, i.e., more scotch. Hence the Rusty Nail, which splits the diff between a scotch and a Drambuie, and works straight up or on the rocks. And makes a good use for indifferent, daily consumption-level scotch (I hope I don’t have to tell you to use a single malt here). In the plus column – Drambuie uncommon as a home drink (and I like uncommon), it’s somewhat sophisticated, and it’s a fun word to say, especially after a well-lubricated meal.

Which was my first Drambuie experience: my father offered to take me out to a fancy restaurant for my 18th birthday. He made no venue suggestions (his meals out were exclusively at the Cosmos Club) and left it to me to choose. C’mon, man: Yelp was still a couple decades away, what did I know? Besides, it was yet a few years before Citronelle would make DC a viable fine dining destination. Choices were meager at best. I ended up selecting Au Pied de Cochon, because I’d walked by it (Wisconsin & Dumbarton) like a billion times and it seemed like the kind of place grown-ups went to. Turns out they did, but not for the food – Cochon was hospitable mostly to late evening diners and the occasional Cold War spy drama. My father knew this, and I picked up a mild and passing expression of disappointment on his brow but he insisted it was a fine choice even after I tried to back out of it. I don’t remember what I had but it wasn’t particularly good. 

Save for the introduction to Drambuie: my father suggested we cap the evening with a digestif, and I ordered based off pretend sophistication and, again, how fun the word sounded. Like you haven’t bought a bottle of wine for the same or worse reasons. A note here, some of you might be wondering on the math: by the time my 18th had rolled around, the national drinking age was 21, what gives? Consider though that the limit had only recently been raised, and restaurants – and people in general -- were more relaxed about the whole thing. You see a possibly too young kid with his father, and his father is OK with the choice, then heck, what’s the harm? That’s between the kid and his dad. 

My dad ordered wine for me habitually and we only got guff once, when a waitress refused to serve me a glass (“you want two glasses of wine for yourself?”) and my father nearly had a conniption. I saved the day by pulling out my fake ID – really, a clownish piece of paper with exactly zero security features, that claimed I was a student at the Max Planck Gymnasium (not even Institute, like I could get in there), and a tender-faced 22 year old at that. A tougher hostess would have confiscated the risible document and notified the proper authorities, but I rolled my eyes and threw some sharp German at my non-plussed father. This much I know is true: when in a sticky situation, sudden and loud Teutonic commands go a very long way. The waitress backed down and fetched my Pinot Grigio with a lively step.

My family relationship with drink predates that 18thbirthday and my fake ID’s, in the matter of alcohol, ours was a household that straddled the line between “European” and “Child Abuse.” Sips of uncut wine were encouraged at a young age. My first shot of hard stuff was proffered at 11 or 12; it was a thimble of 100 year old brandy so I regret not having tried it just to say I have (the chance won’t come again I fear) but otherwise it would have been lost on me. And even younger, we were acquainted with the trappings of drink, if not the actual stuff: Summers on the Massachusetts coast were liquid affairs for the adults, resulting in cases and cases of empty bottles for our use and disposal. 

The ingredients for sea glass are: time, tides, salt water, broken glass, and hope. Looking back, I can’t grasp or describe my childhood concept of time, but of the latter four items I know we had aplenty. Certainly cases of wine bottles to be gleefully smashed on the harbor rocks below the house, and woe unto those who missed the rocks – you were going in the water. We made due with green glass, better than white or brown; blue was especially prized though rare: you might commonly find a blue bottle for a German Riesling like, say, Schlinkhaus, but the spirit of Red Roof was decidedly French, as were the wines. Though I’ll be darned if we didn’t find an occasional blue sea glass piece amongst the pebbles, so someone had been sneaking the stuff in at some point.

Not to be smashed were the beer bottles – most of our guests were not beer drinkers, but one or two did and one in particular had the foresight to bring Grolsch, with the ceramic flip-top stoppers. There were perfect vessels for messages in bottles, and we devised what notes we could, usually with the “contact us at …” coda. There was always the hope and excitement that *this year* someone will find one, or maybe the one from last year is still on its way to Portugal? Obviously we were never contacted and likely all we were doing was littering, but that hope was always there, that someone might just read our note.

So this blog post has now meandered into that most self-serving genre, the childhood memoir (if I go back any further I’ll have to start inventing past lives). A horse could count the likely number of interested readers – stamp stamp stamp – but I’m not the first to succumb to this simple desire, to write something down only because you don’t like the idea that it will be forgotten. Luckily, future generations will be spared this compulsion, there’s already enough digital data on my kids in IG and FG to recreate 80% of their childhood. The remaining twenty? Well, there’s always pen and paper, and if need be, I can find an empty bottle to put it in.

3 oz. Orange Juice    

3 oz. Grapefruit Juice

2 oz. Vodka

Combine in shaker with ice, shake, strain into a Collins glass with ice.

Hello, and welcome to our Podcast, “The History of Left-Handed Objects”. Today’s Podcast: Season 1, Episode 4: The Left-Handed Screwdriver.

As always, thank you for listening, and if you like us, please consider giving to our Patreon account. $35 per month – less than a dollar a day after inflation – gets you membership into our Sinister Circle, with access to outtakes, bonus content, and our special “Left-Handed: After Dark” series. But now: on to our show.

We can’t talk intelligibly about the screwdriver, right- or left-handed versions, without first covering the screw. So, as we do will all such matters, let’s transport ourselves back to ancient Greece…

…where a young Greek named Archimedes was working out the properties of five Simple Machines. Yes, we know there are six Simple Machines, but the Greeks really only bothered with five: Greek experience fighting against Persian chariots had convinced them that the Wheel & Axle were an obsolete technology. Anyway, Archimedes’ father-in-law had been pressuring him to give up his flailing career as an inventor, and join in with the family dry-goods business. That thought made Archimedes’ knees wobble like warm aspic. So, as legend has it, one night Archimedes was monkeying around with a pulley and an inclined plane, and accidentally knocked over an amphora of wine, spilling its content all over the floor. Golly, he thought, how am I going to get all that wine back in the amphora before my wife finds out I’m drunk again?

His Archimedes Screw, designed to lift liquidthrough a pipe via a turning motion, proved to be his first great engineering success, and put Archimedes on the proverbial map. This was the big turning point for Archimedes: he quickly became independently wealthy by franchising his screw company across the Greek Mediterranean world, and indirectly put his father-in-law out of business (now that water could be piped up from sea level, dry goods went well out of fashion – moist goods became all the rage). Fairly soon you could go to Syracuse, or Corinth, or any number of towns, and for a small free turn a crank and have water flow out of a tube. The locals went wild over it.

Great for Archimedes, and his invention kept the screw in people’s minds for many years, but truthfully it remained a bit of a sea-side curiosity, like salt-water taffy. Why is it there? Who knows, just enjoy it. The next phase in its evolution would have to wait for the Romans. Those brilliant engineers recognized the need for public sanitation, what with throwing up every other meal, and so built gutters and channels to lead city sewage water out of town and into giant undergrown cisterns. The problem was: what to do with it from there? 

The year is 56 AD, and along comes our next hero, Severus Tinctus Maximus. This enterprising plebian, from humble Sicilian parentage, recognized the Archimedes Screw as the perfect tool for pumping out the overburdened sewage cisterns: effective waste management was born.

S. Tinctus Maximus sold a few local Waste Management contracts, but business really got a push when his brother Brutus Maximus joined the partnership. It was Brutus who came up with a miniaturized screw, thumb-sized, set between two plates: Scholars have puzzled over the purpose of creation for years, but now believe it was the first example of the “Promotional Giveaway” item. Just as we have mugs and pens as promo swag today, these little thumb-sized screws proved to be a big hit in the Roman world, and the soon Maximus brothers secured exclusive Waste Management agreements, on surprisingly generous terms, across the whole of the Empire. 

The downside? This family business proved resistant to competition and innovation. Screw technology stagnated, and declined, and might have died out all-together with the fall of the Roman empire: The invading barbarians had little use or interest in public sanitation, after all. Toilets made one “soft” was their view.

Might have died out; but did not. We know the tale by now, we can thank the Islamic scholars whose collected effort preserved and even expanded on the works of the classical thinkers. Indeed, it was a tenth century Egyptian, Ibn Al Farazon, who would combine Arabic numerals to Archimedes’ geometric approach to screw theory: his treatise, On Thread Count, was the first effort to quantify the optimal number of threads per inch relative to cost variables; his “Farazon Limit” is still used today to determine the maximum number of threads per inch that can be marketed before a buyer says “this is all BS, isn’t it?”

It was also Ibn Al Farazon who first worked out the “Lefty-Loosey, Righty-Tighty” principle. You can follow this along at home: take a standard right-handed screwdriver, in your right hand. Twist it clockwise, and then counter-clockwise. You should be able to readily tell: you get more torque from your grip on the counter-clockwise motion. Feel that? Farazon was the first to reason that you did not want to tighten a screw further than you could loosen it, so he deemed it more practical to have the tightening go in the weaker, clockwise direction. Clever, eh?

And it is at this point that I have to address my obvious scholastic shortcomings. No doubt several of you more attentive and learned readers are throwing your inkpots at the screen, shouting at me that I have no business crediting Farazon with LL-RT theory, he lifted it from sub-Saharan engineers and Chinese philosophers. Duly noted – unfortunately, back when I was studying the topic, the curriculum was still severely Euro-centric. I shall try to expand on the global aspect of left-handed screwdrivers as I resume my reading, perhaps in a supplemental podcast, available as always to the members of my Sinister Circle. But for now, back to the topic as I understand it: incomplete though accurate.

Ibn Al Farazon’s work was a revelation to renaissance scholars, once his books were reintroduced to the West in the fourteenth century. His translated works first appeared on the Italian peninsula, and jealously guarded screw theory technology is credited with giving Venice the upper hand against Pisa and Genoa for domination of the Mediterranean trade routes. But even so, production of screws as fasteners remained more artisanal than scientific: small shop workers on the Venetian island of Fusili (now under water) churning out bespoke screws that would only fit bespoke sockets, each size and threading unique – some even threaded “lefty-tighty” to throw off industrial espionage. And screws remained largely unknown north of the Alps; access to large fir trees from Norway allowed Germanic artisans to forgo fasteners entirely, often carving their houses & ships out of one whole piece of wood. 

It was left to the great genius Leonardo Da Vinci to improve and spread screw technology across the breadth of Europe. Armed with powerful new mathematics, and invited to France by King Francis I, Da Vinci demonstrated the utility of the screw far and wide. His “flying machines” may amuse modern tourists in his Chateau, Clos Luce, but what they don’t realize is that those illustrations are really part of a remarkably modern guerilla marketing campaign, one designed to capture the imagination of the teeming masses of his day. In this, he was wildly successful: working off of a shoestring budget (that is, budget left over from his previous marketing campaign, “Shoestrings: So Your Slippers Don’t Fall Off”) screw sales took off (unlike the flying machines) to the point where artisanal shops were simply unable to meet demand. Something had to be done: and that was standardization.

Da Vinci set to codify screw nomenclature and design, so that different manufacturer screws would work interchangeably. His volume De Introvert et Extrovert became the screwmakers bible (aside -- the English name foe a screwmaker is “scrooyer” – if you ever meet someone with Scrooyer as a last name, you know what his family heritage is) for nearly 300 years. The first print edition included specifications for only right-handed screws and screwdrivers, as originally propounded by Ibn Al Farazon. However, researchers have discovered one of Da Vinci’s original manuscripts, wherein the margin he claims to have discovered a Universal Screw – one that would work both right- and left-handed – with the exclamation “So Simple! Why has no one else thought of this?”. His notes indicate that he intended to publish this version in a future update, once sales of the original volume started to falter. Alas, he died before this second volume was ever needed, and researchers have yet to locate the design for his Universal Screw, and many scholars now believe the writing was referring to a method for getting wine stains out of tapestries.

To the dismay of the left-handed population of Europe, Da Vinci’s right-handed screw design remained the standard of Europe until the end of the 18th Century. 1789, specifically: It is then that Europe experienced one of her periodic convulsions. The excesses of the French Revolution are well-documented, but one must give the Danton credit for recognizing an opportunity to redress past wrongs. In their Droite d’Homme treatise, the French Revolutionaries sought to revive the dream of equality for right and left handed screw users. Without an obvious technical solution, they mandated that any point needing one screw as a connector must now use two screws: a right hand screw would always need a left hand screw in a hole next to it. Thus, right handed and left handed persons would both be equally inconvenienced, which is, after all, the point of justice. And to this day, keen-eyed antiques experts use the “two-screw” method to distinguish actual revolutionary era guillotines from latter reproductions and counterfeits. 

Hark! Now into the pages of our story, bestriding as a Titan, steps none other than Napoleon Buonaparte. Having tamed the revolutionary fervor for his own purposes, he set about codifying the best of the Thermidorian ideas and jettisoning the worst. Eventually, his gaze fell upon the screw. 

Napoleon was at first inclined to leave the two-screw solution as written. Having failed to subdue the British, he did not feel secure enough in his position to make permanent decrees on this sensitive topic. Alas, he would eventually succumb to his own complexes and megalomania: well known is Napoleon’s disgust for his own right hand, having been mercilessly teased as a boy for an unnaturally elongated pinky finger (deemed “effete” by his classmates). He made constant efforts to hide this deformity, but his natural self-loathing would eventually get the better of him. In 1810, he declared that right-handed screws and screwdrivers were, henceforth, abolished from the Continental System. 

By then his hold on his Empire was nearly absolute, and any dissent was crushed by a secret task force lead by Napoleon’s brother, the newly installed King of Naples. For a while, it looked as though the left-handed screw would carry the day. Half-hearted public outcry was squashed, or assuaged by a friendly promotional swag thumb-sized screw (left-handed now, but still popular); many were simply happy to see the end of the cumbersome two-screw system. 

Many; nearly all. But not all. Resistance to Napoleon came, quite unexpectedly, in the form of one of those men – those stubborn individuals who change the course of history simply by refusing to accept any other outcome. In this case, it was an unassuming, workaday (though reputably quite handsome) member of the Pomeranian Brotherhood of Freemasons, Karl Flackhopf. He who, during the expectedly pro-forma meeting to approve the left-handed screw conversion, rose from his bench and cried “Halt! This abomination Shall! Not! Pass!”

Little is known about Herr Meister Flackhopf, who would appear the world stage from out of nowhere, and disappear back into nowhere not much long after, but long enough after to have seen that world stage altered irreparably. Abandoned by their leaders, the Freemasons discovered themselves. When threatened with violence for his insolence, Flackhopf exclaimed:

“Here I stand, I can turn no more.”

“No, seriously, this crappy left-handed screw won’t turn anymore. Look how stripped it is. Does anyone have a rubber band? I can try that rubber band in the groove hack, but honestly, it’s never worked for me.” 

His brethren rallied to his cause; street fighting; disguises and darkness; safehouses and passwords; a desperate race to the border. Flackhopf would reach Russian-controlled Curland only an hour ahead of Napoleon’s goons, but that hour was enough. He immediately searched out the nearest Freemason chapter and applied for asylum. Given the sensitive nature of this request, the case would go all the way to the top of the Russian authority: the decision was made, and henceforth, Karl Flackhopf, Master Freemason, would be under the protection of Czar Alexander I himself. 

Desperate French diplomatic attempts were made to secure a hand-over, all ended in failure. Meanwhile Flackhopf, relocated to Moscow, published pamphlets and polemics attacking the left-handed screw system – contraband literature that came with the death penalty if found in France, but popular none-the-less. Resistance grew. Napoleon seethed.

Eventually he had enough. By 1812 Napoleon had gathered his Grande Armee, and invaded Russia in an attempt to recapture this implacable critic. And thus it must sometimes be in history: the great questions demand nothing short of colossal sacrifice and catastrophic bloodshed. The issue of left or right handed screws, simmering for perhaps a thousand years, would finally be settled on the steppes of Russia, and the fields of Waterloo. 

Flackhopf would vanish in the confusion around Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow. His ultimate fate is one of the mysteries of our age. More than a few imposters would come along, every few years, claiming they were the long-lost Freemason, and though these charlatans were often humored, sometimes indulged – the best were able to embellish their credentials with tales that were too outlandish to be fictitious – none of them were ever believed. 

Since 1815 there has never been a credible movement to take up the left-handed screw cause. Even the revolutionaries of 1848 avoided the question. It briefly surfaced in 1917, with a Menshevik sub-faction proposing a screw-and-sickle flag design. The problems of this were obvious – back to the two-screw solution? So instead, Lenin put his weight behind the well-known hammer-and-sickle design, since we all know there’s no such think as a left or right handed hammer – what an absurd notion!

It would take one more convulsion to have someone take up the case again. Isabella di Philippi was the third daughter of a minor noble in a distant branch – a twig, really – of the sprawling Hapsburg family. Born in Balboa but educated in pan-European fashion (summers in Olso, fall in Bled, Swiss finishing school) she showed tremendous intellectual promise (a true polymath, in the Da Vinci model) and uncommon beauty (for a Hapsburg, at least: 10 fingers and toes!) But she rejected the usual path – matron and baroness were within her grasp – and signed up for medical duties in a Carpathian field hospital in WWI. Her nursing experience would, as it did for so many, shatter her faith in the Old World. 

She drifted for a few years after the war, unsure of anything, even of herself. But eventually her gestating artistic talent, too great to be contained, burst forth and by 1926 she had become a highly regarded member of the Viennese Dadaist circle. 

Alas: her mercurial Spanish temperament kept her from true leadership positions within the group. But her sheer genius would not accept being just a member of the society. The tensions were constant and she was known to bristle at criticisms from what she considered “inferior minds”. 

She was eventually expelled from the group for being too incoherent in her poetry. “Everyone said ‘don’t be so coherent’ so what happens when I stop being coherent?” It was an open breech, and an ugly one, some words when spoken can’t be taken back. “Mi me mi/Po ta to fri ta ta/Ko ka ko la” were the last acidic syllables she spat at her former Dadaist friends, and she stormed off.

But the episode had left an evident toll on her psyche, and by 1932 she was in a complete nervous breakdown. To recover, she cloistered herself away in a small cabin by the Titisee, deep in the Black Forest. The ascetic life there actually helped her regain much balance and vigor, but perhaps most interestingly, she fell in with a group of artisan coo-coo clock makers, and to occupy her hands and mind, began to learn their craft.

Interesting to our topic: for whatever reason – perhaps they were simply isolated, perhaps they were stubborn in their ways – these clock makers used traditional methods that predated Da Vinci’s screw revolution. Theirs was a more basic, more pure screw artistry: left handed screws, right handed screws, used Willy-Nilly. 

After the rigidity of Dadaism, di Philippi was enchanted by the freedom these artisans held so dear. She threw herself into the craft, and now, dormant under years of artistic labor, her scientific and engineering talents shone through. In one of those remarkable bursts of creativity we see from real genius, within less than a year, di Philippi had worked out the engineering behind the true Left-Handed Screwdriver. That is: through a brilliant combination of gears and levers she had created a screwdriver that a left-handed person could use on a right-handed screw. The first of its kind. 

The saddest words are often, what might have been? While she was isolated in the deep forest, other forces were busily at work. By the time she emerged to show the world the fruit of mighty labor, the world was already a darker place. The new regime in Berlin had scores to settle, including grievances with the Viennese Dadaists. And though di Philippi had officially broken with them years before, her mere association was enough to put her on the enemies list.

The Left-Handed Screwdriver was immediately denounced as “degenerate.” Samples were gathered and thrown into an open fire (collected later to be sold on the black market – they were metal, after all, and didn’t burn). A few brave individuals took up the manufacture and sale of the Left-Handed Screwdriver, but not enough. 

Undaunted, di Philippi returned to her Titisee encampment, and in in effort to reach a broader market, altered her Left-Handed Screwdriver to work as an adapter to a regular Right-Handed Screwdriver. She saw this as having more universal appeal (though she was never fully satisfied with the flywheel arrangement she had devised for this new apparatus). 

Once again she offered her work to the judgment of her fellow man; this time, though, the product was met with neither praise nor scorn, but indifference. Troubled times were brewing, and the populace had other pressing cares, and did not want to involve themselves in further passions and controversies. Even spiteful Berlin shrugged and ignored her.

Di Philippi would not give up. Perhaps inspired by Da Vinci – great minds think alike – she set upon the task of creating a Universal Screwdriver – one that worked both left-handed and right-handed screws: approach Da Vinci’s theory from the other side! But this task proved too far a reach for even her formidable grasp; after three years of failure, she left Titisee, and crossed the Atlantic. She talked her way into a convent in El Salvador, run by expat Walloons, where she swept the floors and drained the cisterns in exchange for room and board. Di Philippi would succumb to malaria before her 46th birthday, all but forgotten. With her died the last dream of the Left-Handed Screwdriver.

Modern scholars have somewhat restored her reputation, though they note that her research is misguided. Current theory holds that there is no such thing as left- or right-handed screws: these are just artificial constructs designed by power structures to perpetuate oppression. And as for a Universal Screwdriver? Crackpots across the internet will show obviously doctored videos of such a creation, along with “engines that run on water” or “pillows that help ease neck pain”. Pure fantasy for the gullible. 

Except! An unlikely garden for di Philippi’s germinating theories has appeared. Quantum Theory has long puzzled at the apparent asymmetries in certain right-and left-handed particle reactions. Researchers in Geneva are turning to her notes on the Universal Screwdriver to act as a roadmap for solving inherent contradictions in particle physics theory and experimental observation. That is, though, a tale for another podcast. 

As always, check out our Facebook page and, if you’re entertained by what we’re doing, consider giving via our Patreon account. And if you can, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, that really helps get the word out.

Next on History of Left-Handed Objects: The Steak Knife. 

Bloody Mary 

3 oz. tomato juice 

1.5 oz. vodka

1/2 oz. Lemon juice

dab horseradish

2 dashes Worcestershire sauce

1 dash hot pepper sauce 

salt and ground black pepper to taste

1 stalk celery

2 green olives, threaded onto a toothpick

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice cubes; add tomato juice, vodka, lemon juice, horseradish, Worcestershire sauce, hot pepper sauce, salt, and pepper. Shake & strain into highball glass and garnish with celery stalk and olives.

I won’t say the Blood Mary is my favorite drink – frankly, on its own, it barely cracks my top 30. But it deserves a place in my lineup because it has some extremely useful qualities.

Starting with – it’s easily customizable, the recipe I have listed works fine but frankly you can just chuck a whole bunch of whatever is in your pantry or fridge condiment shelf into your vodka and tomato juice and voila, you have a drink. It also doesn’t have to be vodka, use gin if you have it, or tequila (though now that’s a different drink, technically); or go nuts and use Clamato and get yourself a Bloody Caesar, the National Drink of Canada and if there’s ever a reason to be suspicious of our Canadian friends I’d say this is Exhibit A. 

But none of that is even necessary, since the Bloody Mary is one of those few drinks where a pre-made mix is as good as a self-made one. You already know The Drinkist’s views on pre-made mixers, they are to be avoided if at all possible. Especially Sour Mix or Margarita Mix, you’re just so much better off squeezing a fresh fruit.

This is not true with Bloody Mary mixes, they aren’t as badly tainted by pasteurization. I don’t think I can do any better than bottled Zing-Zang, though I am always free to doctor it up further, especially if I want to tinker with the heat level. Or not – sometimes you just don’t want to make additional effort.

These are generous virtues of the drink, though not the chief one. The core value of a Bloody Mary is that it’s one of the few acceptable drinks that you can have in the morning. This, and its brunch-themed partner, the Mimosa. Take your pick.

Oh, I hear a few of you right now – “I drink when I want! Don’t need some clock telling me when I can have a snort.” Fine. But you’re being judged, and as long as you can live with that, go for it. It’s not my bag – perpetually weak stomach means I’m usually not in a good state for drink the first thing, if I’ve been drinking the night before. But we’ve all seen – or even been – that person who rolls out of bed at 7:30 after a hard night, cracks open a beer, and says “hair of the dog.” 

The thing is, that’s great if you’re 25 and crashing on the couch of your friend’s lake house. “Hey, look at Larry, he’s the life of the party!” But try it at 35? “Hey, look at Larry, he needs a job.”

Same goes for just about anything else you decide to chug before 11:00. Pour a whiskey at 9:00 and you’re a confirmed drunk. Have a glass of chardonnay at dawn and you’re just pathetic. We judge these choices. But we leave room for the Bloody Mary.

So it was without much of a shrug from anyone at the Birmingham Airport bar earlier this year when, shortly before 10:00 am, I sidled up and asked for a double Bloody Mary. My instinct was that, settling into a long and bumpy pair of flights, I needed to prime myself for the experience. 

Wait, whaaaaat? Is this…? BOOM! It’s a Drinkist-BHMTravelDad crossover event! Didn’t see that coming, did you? Well, our writers are getting lazy, and our ratings are flagging a bit: The Left-Handed Screwdriver was one of our favorite posts, but it turned out to be a bit of a cult classic, and the sequel was rushed and obvious. We needed something to pull in a larger audience; it was either this, or a “crazy wedding” episode.

TravelDad was traveling as TravelDude once again, senza familia – this was a reboot of the classic but put-on-hiatus-for-retooling Mancation. Golf and drinking and masculine hijinx. So a little morning toot was on the table. It was instinctually correct: this turned out to be a long travel day, and best not faced without liquid courage.

Simple itinerary, selected by me as the best mix of cost & convenience: BHM to LGA via a short layover, same plane, in BWI. Flying good-old SWA, whose added benefit is that my golf bag would fly for free. And despite concerns over summer thunderstorms, my BHM-BWI ride was smooth and relaxing, so much that I was able to pass on an in-flight cocktail. So far, so good.

From there on it was a stream of cancelled flights, disinterested agents, useless options, frustration, tears and recrimination. Plus airport bar drinking. Yes, I eventually made it to NYC (by rail); yes, my golf clubs eventually made it, too (next day); no, this not the way air travel should work, and don’t even try to give me that “weather issues” horsepucky. We have summer thunderstorms all the time. I’ve flown around them and, when needed, through them. Once had a Cincinnati to Birmingham flight that went around a storm by flying up to Cleveland before turning south. Took an extra hour but I got home.

No, what’s really happened is that airlines are stretched thin – thin on crews, thin on backup, thin on customer service. Greedy airlines! Well, yeah, they’re out to maximize profits by delivering what the customer wants. And they’re doing exactly what we’ve told them to do.

Not in so many words – no one is telling them to understaff – but we’ve signaled to them that the first, second, and third most important thing to us is Price, Price, Price. While it’s true that some flyers are loyal to a brand (for rewards reasons), the rest of us who do regular coach travel have shown that we’ll consistently choose the cheapest flight available that fits our schedule – loyalty or perceived customer service won’t move even a $10 needle.

Spirit Airways even built their entire business model around this, and they’re doing well enough that legacy airlines are rushing to emulate them, and not the other way around. In fact, regular airlines have been at this for a while – initially by putting out low-cost versions of their airlines (remember TED?) They didn’t want to devalue their main brand, except they realized nobody cared. So now United is simply TED with a few extra options for high-end flyers. 

How did we reach this sorry state? Democracy, of course, and one of the many flavors of The Tragedy of the Commons. I was a relatively early adopter of Google Flights and Kayak and such, and I look back wistfully at some of my old TravelDad posts where I explain how to score a cheap ticket to here or there. I could score those cheap tickets because I was leveraging information that others weren’t: basically, I could hunt for the bargain flight that hit me specifically, while I let other travelers pay extra for the customer service that airlines assumed people wanted. I was a bit of a free rider.

Since then, everyone uses the data. We know what airlines charge, and airlines know all about our travel habits. It’s lead to one big ol’ race to the bottom. And if that ain’t a metaphor for our Democracy, I don’t know what is: voters and parties have access to gigabytes of information about each other, and what it’s shown the parties is that core voters really just care about stickin’ it to the other side. It’s not that my side needs to win – the other side needs to lose, and suffer for their incorrect opinions. 

Fine, arguably that’s been going on forever. Cancel-Culture isn’t new – there’s always been a time when you could get booted from society, polite or otherwise, for expressing yourself against prevailing sentiment. Heck, it wasn’t too long ago that having visible tattoos would keep you from most office jobs. The activists that advocate canceling today come from a long line of scolds and censors. Only the targets have changed, the song remains the same. 

Which is why I’m not overly concerned about how shabby our democracy has become. Our differences aren’t quite as irreconcilable as we sometimes make them out to be. And those canceled today can be reinstated tomorrow; as any schoolkid with an ounce of sense will tell you, a “permanent record” threat is a total bluff. 

Despite what the Bible asks of us, we judge all the time, somehow unconcerned that we’re being judged, too. It’s a trade-off we’re usually happy to make. You can judge 35 year-old Larry for pouring beer on his breakfast Wheaties, but know that Larry is judging you for your tacky 2002 Martha Stewart Lakehouse décor and the complete mess you’ve made of your middle child. We judge, we take it in, we deal with consequences, we move on. 

Heck, as A. pointed out to me the other day, even Queen Mary had her dismal reign and reputation rebranded into a perennially popular potable – and not just any potable, but one you can safely drink before noon. 

This is a legacy we at The Drinkist consider to be quite enviable. In fact, we at Drinkist are asking ourselves, how horrible do we need to be to get a cocktail named after us? On second thought scratch that – The Universe would probably turn it into some ironic twist deal, perhaps a non-alcoholic “mocktail”. Ugh. Though if that’s your thing, go for it. We’ll just be sitting here, in our little corner, doing our level best not to judge you for it.