Schnakenberg - Old Man Drinks : Recipes, Advice, and Barstool Wisdom

Copyright 2010 by Quirk Productions, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2009941370

eBook ISBN: 978-1-59474-700-7
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59474-450-1

Edited by Sarah OBrien
Hardcover designed by Doogie Horner
Photography by Michael E. Reali
Hardcover production management by John J. McGurk

Quirk Books
215 Church Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
www.quirkbooks.com

v3.1

S O YOUVE MADE THE DECISION to start drinking like an old man. Congratulations on a great call! Youre about to enter the final frontier of cocktail culture, a vast badlands where antique ingredients and fanciful names combine to create a drinking experience unlike any otheror at least unlike anything that anyones experienced since at least the final months of the Eisenhower administration. In some cases, the recipes youll find in this book date back to the nineteenth centuryor even earlier. Call them really old man drinks. These are cocktails your great-grandfather would have remembered fondly from his early drinking daysa time of zoot suits and snap-brimmed hats and vendors selling pickles out of open barrels on the sidewalk. A time when a fella could saunter into his local tavern, slap his hand on the bar, and say, Barkeep, fix me up a Sidecar!and not get himself laughed out of the room.

Fortunately, that time may be on its way back. Retro is in and everything old is new againor at least new in the eyes of discriminating drinkers eager to take their style cues from 1960s advertising executives, hardboiled private eyes, Jazz-era night-club denizens, and other icons of our distant past. The one thing all these men had in common was a fondness for liquorand lots of it. And were talkin the hard stuff: gin, Scotch, bourbon, and, of course, rye, the quintessential old-school whiskey whose very odor on the breath calls to mind your grandpa passed out on the couch at 2 A.M. on Christmas Eve. You wont find too many frou-frou girly drinks listed here. (Okay, you might find one or two, but even the hardest-drinking old man likes a change of pace every now and then.) Save your Woo Woos and your Cosmopolitans for the next meeting of the Ladies Auxiliary. These are tough drinks, manly drinks, the kind the bartender has to check his cheat sheet to remember how to make. They take you back to another place and a distant timeand not just because of the high alcohol content. You can almost smell the wood paneling and cigar smoke as you inhale their names: the Whiskey Sour, the Boilermaker, the Old Fashioned, and on and on.

To evoke the experience of drinking like an old man even more fully, weve included quotations from honest-to-goodness genuine old men, overheard in bar settings and reprinted with the permission of the utterer. In this way, you may drink in the observations of the old man you wish to emulate, even as you drink down the type of beverage that inspired his insight in the first place. As you make these drinks at home, or order them from a bewildered bartender, imagine yourself pulling up a stool next to some garrulous old-timer and engaging him in the most felicitous of conversations: one fueled by alcohol and good fellowship and brimming with intergenerational wisdom. At that moment, you will not merely be drinking like an old man. You will become one.

Rye is the whiskey in this drink, which is named after the celebrated New York City hotel where literary luminaries once gathered. And wry was the type of wit dispensed around the hotels fabled round table by Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and their highfalutin friends. But none of them ever drank an Algonquin at the Algonquin, because it was invented long after most of them had moved on to the Great Round Table in the sky. Too bad. This tart cocktail would have been right up Dorothys alley.

Combine liquid ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Shake vigorously with ice. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a Maraschino cherry.

Arnold Palmer was a helluva golferand an even better bartender. He knew that the best way to cool down after a rough back nine was with an ice-cold mix of iced tea and lemonade. Add a splash of vodka and youve got yourself the perfect remedy for a bad day on the links. Fore!

Combine ingredients in a tall glass filled with ice. Stir and enjoy.

This was one of the most popular cocktails of the 1930s, the era of Lucky Lindy, Amelia Earhart, and the Hindenburg disaster. The stock market may have been crashing, but a couple glasses of this brew kept you in the clouds all night.

Combine liquid ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake well and then strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a Maraschino cherry.

Of all the great masterpieces to come out of the Italian Renaissance, this drinknamed for the fifteenth-century Venetian painter Giovanni Bellinimay be the tastiest. (Try biting into a Titian some time and see what I mean.) Giuseppe Cipriani, the head bartender at Harrys Bar in Venice, is credited with inventing the Bellini sometime between 1934 and 1948. The pink color, he said, reminded him of a hue used by Bellini in one of his paintings. Drink a couple of these fizzy beauties and youll be in the pink, too.