Gaston Sami - Drinking distilled: a users manual

I didnt learn too much about how to drink from my parents, save for some seasonal considerations (pia coladas in the summer, Baileys and coffee in the winter). Theres such a taboo regarding drinking in the United States that, most of the time, alcohol is hidden from children. European youth, on the other hand, are taught to appreciate wine at an early age, and though their overall alcohol consumption may be greater than ours, their incidents of binge drinking are far less. One possible reason is that alcohol is inextricably tied to dining culture on that continent, whereas its connected to party culture on ours. Rates of alcohol-related deaths are far lower in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Italy than in the U.S., where drinking well is something of a lost art. And, while customs and mores are always bound by change, there are some traditions that still bear following. I firmly believe that if we could take a little more time to celebrate the ritual of sharing a drink in this country, and spend less energy focusing on being drunk, we all might be able to enjoy life a little more. And thats a side effect worth having.

GUIDELINES TO HEED

If you ever begin to look around for advice on drinking, youre guaranteed to discover a whole world of garbage guidelines from current or former bartenders who are so beyond the point of burnout that they have no right to be proffering advice to anyone. Stand at attention. Have your money ready. Tip a certain number of dollars per drink.

Ive always found such advice to be in poor taste. What really helps people? Drinking advice you can actually use. So heres my attempt to mitigate all the ill-advised, self-serving bullshit advice youre going to get elsewhere.

Toasting

If you ordered and paid for the round, its your right and responsibility to make a toast. And before I go on, let me just remind you that toasting or making a toast is how you say that. Cheers is not a verb, its a type of toast. So you might be saying cheers when you toast, but youre not cheersing. Please stop demanding that people cheers you. Ask your friend if theyll raise a glass with you or allow you to make a toast.

Whew. Now that Ive gotten that little pet peeve off my chest, lets continue.

Everyone has their tradition. Some people insist on tapping the glass to the table after clinking glasses. Others say that you need to make eye contact with everyone toasting in order to preserve your luck and integrity. While I believe in making eye contact with my friends, I cant stand it when someone thinks they need to go around the circle enforcing it. Nobody needs a compliance officer watching their every move while theyre drinking.

Its always good to have a simple toast in your back pocket for occasions when youre in charge of speaking before the drink. And really, it doesnt matter what it is. It could be as simple as Heres to you! or as complex as an Irish soliloquy, but I find that these are little more than stand-ins when you have little to nothing good to say. If you can, speak from the heart, say something nice about how much you enjoy the company, and, for the love of alcohol, keep it short. Nobody wants to listen to you drone on with their glass in the air, mere inches from their mouth.

Gendered Drinking

Night after night, bartenders and drinkers everywhere are forced to listen to men sharing their bullshit opinions of everyone elses drink order. Someone in their party ordered their whiskey on the rocks? Time to let them know theyre drinking whiskey the wrong way. A man having a glass of ros wine? Time to freak out because its pink.

This idea that certain drinks are for men and others are for women is so tired. A chilled glass of ros, with its slightly more tannic character (which comes from grape skin contact during the fermentation process) is a killer drink on a warm spring or summer day. I put ice in my whiskey about half the time. It doesnt make me any less tough or show I know any less about whiskey. I know more about whiskey than most guys, but I dont consider that a gender identity statement.

Whats really sad to me is the idea that using a stemmed glass is somehow demeaning to the drinker. But Ill just spill it is a justification that I hear nightly. Listen, using a stemmed wine glass or cocktail glass is the sign of a real grown-up, male or female. If you cant use a stemmed wine or cocktail glass without feeling emasculated or spilling your drink everywhere, you should go home and practice. This is a skill you should have learned in college.

Glassware

Theres no shortage of glassware out there to sip spirits from, and theres certainly no shortage of articles written about which glasses are correct for sipping things like whiskey or cognac. And just about every year there seems to be a new crop of both.

Brandy snifters are good for storing vintage matchbooks, or making a tiny terrarium. Theyre this old-timey, really dumb option for tasting spirits, a holdover from God-knows-when, and their main selling point is that they are designed to warm up the liquid, thereby vaporizing the alcohol. Hey, you know what you dont want to smell when youre trying to enjoy a spirit served neat? Pure alcohol. Pure alcohol smells like the inside of your nose burning and not much else.

The ideal glass for evaluating spirits on the nose and palate (our overly fancy language for smelling and tasting) allows you to smell and taste the actual flavors in the spirit and not just pure alcohol. In the words of cartoon propane salesman Hank Hill, you want to taste the meat, not the heat.

So ditch the snifter and use one of the many other, better options out there. Seriously, a coffee mug is a better choice for tasting spirits than a snifter. There are a few options that I really like (see the illustration, ). You can easily find them online.

Drinking Games

When I say drinking games, Im not referring to playing chess, checkers, Monopoly, cornhole, or even Cards Against Humanity with your friends while youre having drinks. You know exactly what Im talking about. Drinking games that are designed for one purpose: to get everyone playing extremely drunk whether they want to be or not.

If youre in college and youre playing drinking games, youre fine. Weve all been there. But once you graduate, or reach an age commensurate with someone who has a bachelors degree, youve got to knock it off with the drinking games. Youre a grown-up now, and grown-ups (a) drink at their own pace, (b) engage in conversation with other grown-ups while drinking, and (c) participate in games of leisure, such as golf or horseshoes, while they drink.

So the rule Im proposing is this: make the weekend after your first week at your first real job the last time you play Quarters, Beer Pong, Flip Cup, Asshole, Roxanne (or Jammin), Three Man, and especially Wizard Staff or Edward Fortyhands. Or, ideally, wean yourself while youre still in college and before you go out into the world.

Privacy

I was fortunate to have gone through most of my heavy drinking years at a time before everyone carried cameras around in their pockets and long before cameras became connected to the internet at all times. Thats not to say that there arent a few choice photos out there of me at my prime idiocy, but fortunately most of them are not digital.

Decide whether youre going to allow photographs while drinking and whether you care about strangers being able to see you, if at not your absolute worst, then rarely at your best.