One of my minor recurring cultural disconnects with a lot of my faculty colleagues is that I very much prefer beer to wine. I don’t object to wine— I’ve got friends and family who are really into wine, and I’m happy to drink whatever they pick to go with dinner. It’s just that, all else being equal, I prefer the general flavor profile of beer to that of wine, so given the choice would rather drink beer.
When faculty plan social-ish events at which alcohol will be provided, though, they almost always get wine, but not beer. There are some reasonable logistical reasons for this— beer tends to be consumed in greater volume, so it’s a bit more hassle to buy and transport enough to serve a moderate-sized group— but it’s still a little disappointing to show up to something and find nothing at all in my preferred mild alcoholic beverage category. Not worth making a stink about, or anything, just a bit of a sigh and a roll of the eyes.
(Of course, I’m sure I sometimes prompt the reverse reaction in colleagues— the regular weekly happy hour I pseudo-organize (I send an email once a week saying “Happy hour Friday, at the usual place and time…”) is at a bar with an excellent craft beer selection, but not a whole lot in the wine department…)
Anyway, I was thinking about this both because it’s Friday and I’m looking forward to the Non-Student Happy Hour tonight, but also because I was in Connecticut yesterday to give a talk at Wesleyan University (having previously done colloquia at Williams and Amherst, this completed my Little Three speaker’s punch card, which will get me $0.25 off my next purchase at Dunkin’ Donuts), and drove home this morning listening to podcasts. One of which was this week’s Very Serious episode with Josh Barro and Peter Suderman talking about cocktails. That’s another area of beverage culture that I don’t know very much about. Again, I don’t have a problem with cocktails per se, I just don’t know much about them, so on the rare occasions when I’m in a place where a mixed drink order would be appropriate, I tend to go blank and end up defaulting to an “and” drink (gin or vodka and tonic, mostly). Or I just embrace the déclassé and ask to see the beer list.
So, I was mildly interested in hearing what Barro and Suderman had to say about the making of cocktails, on the off chance that they would mention something that would stick in my mind as a more interesting drink to order the next time I’m in a place where people order cocktails. (“Mildly interested” is about the right level of involvement in a topic for driving the western stretch of the Mass Pike…) And from a Science Guy sort of perspective, I found some of it really interesting (bits of which can be found in text form in Barro’s post linked above), particularly treating drinks as categories.
Other parts, though, just sound like a lot of work. (Part of this, of course, is that Barro is generally a really fussy guy, and Suderman makes him seem free-wheeling…) And, of course, there’s the core problem that I just don’t really care for a lot of the core flavors involved in cocktail culture— I don’t really care for whiskey in any form, and intensely dislike a number of fruit juices, which really limits the options. And I’m not really in a place or a stage of life where I can readily try a bunch of cockail variants to find out whether I like any of them enough to be a future regular order. I mean, if Suderman or Barro want to invite me over and mix drinks for me to try, I’m not going to say no, but, you know, I don’t think the odds are great.
There was a point in there, though, when they were talking about the Aviation (which I’ve never had, but sounds like something I might try) and one of them said something like “This was a really big drink ten or so years ago, but it’s out of style these days,” that reminded me of a really liberating realization I had a couple of years ago. That is, I realized that I’m at a stage in life where I’m more or less obliged to be incredibly uncool. SteelyKid is literally a teenager now, and The Pip isn’t far off, so they’re squarely in the zone where any attempt on my part to stay current with music or slang is incredibly gauche. So, of course, I attempt to offer those sorts of commentary at every opportunity, specifically to set them up to theatrically object to me ever saying that a song “slaps,” let alone anything more up to date than that…
(One thing I make a point of not doing, though, is disparaging music they like, even the bits of it that I kind of hate. I’ll gladly encourage them if they decide to not like things that bug me— I’m 100% on board with The Pip asking to change the station when Megan Thee Stallion or Cardi B come on— but I’ll mostly grit my teeth through stuff that they like (the example that comes to mind being a couple of Lil Nas X songs that I find incredibly tedious). There’s very little in pop culture that rises to the level of offensiveness needed to justify that kind of oppositional relationship.)
And, to a large extent, the cultures around wine and cocktail, and particularly my mild anxieties about not partaking of those cultures, reflect a kind of status hierarchy that’s very much like coolness. Recognizing that I am very much an Uncool Dad makes it a little easier to let go of those things— to be the guy who orders off the disappointing draft beer list at the wine bar, or drinking a gin and tonic at the cocktail party. Again, I’m fine with trying new things, given a list of more-interesting cocktails to pick from, or the opportunity to have somebody who knows wine pick a bottle to drink with dinner. But at the end of the day, I just don’t really care enough about this stuff to make it worth putting in the effort needed to get really into these things.
It did work to distract me on the drive from Springfield to Lee, though, so that was nice.
Kind of lightweight fare, here, I realize. I’m a little too fried for heavier topics, but felt the need to write something, so this is what you get. Anyway, here’s a button:
and if you’d like to poke fun at my lack of cool, the comments will be open:
For cocktails, you should really take a look at Dave Arnold's book Liquid Intelligence. Consider this experiment: take ice at 0°C, room-temperature gin, and vermouth from the refrigerator. Fill a mixing glass with ice, add 60ml gin and 15ml vermouth, and stir for 30s. What temperature will the resulting liquid be at?
Arnold's book is perhaps the only cocktail book to discuss ice, dilution, and chilling in terms of entropy. And the use of liquid nitrogen in cocktail preparation: pre-chilling glassware, but also a technique called nitro-muddling to make e.g. the amazing thai basil daiquiri.
One of the advantages of going to Cornell for grad school is that you can take the Hotel school's wine-tasting class. Where you taste 3 or 4 wines every Wednesday afternoon, for credit. And that made a tremendous difference in my confidence walking into a wine store, and I became somewhat of a wine drinker. But when the kids were little, I neither wanted to finish a whole bottle of wine in an evening, nor let a bottle stay open for several days. What I liked about cocktails was that spirits keep essentially forever, and there is a some amount of culinary expression in fixing one. So I worked my way through Dave Wondrich's Esquire drinks book. (Wondrich is another great cocktail writer: comparative literature Ph.D. who decided to leave academe and write about spirits and cocktails for a living.)
And beer has always just sort of been there. I like the priniciple of craft beers and such, but so much of them are IPAs and I've finally come to terms with the fact that I don't like IPAs at all. I think they taste like mosquito repellent. So I look for wheat beers in the warm months and stouts in the cold months.