How To Order A Drink

One of my minions (work study students) at Enema U is turning 21 this month.  If he goes out binge drinking on his birthday, I'll be very disappointed.  I've been very proud of this young man so far--he quit the football team because the training hours conflicted with his class schedule.  This automatically qualifies him as too smart for any of the normal degrees for jocks--sports journalism, social justice for the chronic bedwetter, and so forth.  If I find out that he went out on his birthday and got blotto, I'm going to tell his girlfriend about the red-haired history grad student who has been giving him the eye. 

It occurred to me that we don't teach teenagers how to drink anymore.  By the time my two sons, What's-His-Name and The-Other-One, were old enough to drink, they didn't live at home anymore.  I'm not saying that the first time they drank a beer was on their twenty-first birthday—but It wasn't like I could take them to a bar in their formative years, either.

Perhaps I can offer a little advice on the first step in drinking—How to order a drink.  Very few people do it correctly anymore, and truthfully, if you live in a small town in Southern New Mexico, as I do, you may have a very difficult time finding a bartender who understands what you mean.  I have mentioned this before, but when I asked a local bartender to make me a vodka martini with an onion, he was gone a long time, and when he came back, was holding a plate in each hand.

"I didn't know if you wanted chopped or sliced onions," he said.  "so, I brought both."

Let's start with the basics: when ordering a drink, always ask for the liquor first.  "Would you bring me a scotch and water, please?"

This is probably a good time to talk about the different kinds of liquor the bar keeps.  First is the 'well' liquor.  If you ask for "Jack Daniels", they will bring it to you—and charge you extra for it.  If you ask for "bourbon", they will reach down into well—the shelf just below the bar-- and serve you the house bourbon—which I guarantee will not be Jack Daniels.  You can tell a lot about a bar by seeing what they use for well liquor.  If you have never heard of the well brands, don't bother asking the bartender for anything exotic.  

"Call liquors"—any liquor that you ask for specifically by name--is more expensive.  If you want your martini made with Absolut, ask for it by name.  "I'd like to order an Absolut martini with a twist."  This drink will cost more than if you had said, "A vodka martini with a twist, please." 

Call liquor will not be the most expensive liquor in the bar. For that, you ask for the 'top shelf' liquor.  Behind the bar, the higher a bottle is placed on the shelves, the more expensive the liquor is likely to be.  If you are curious, you can ask the bartender what premium or top shelf liquor he keeps.  "What single malt scotch do you have?"

If you are in the bar with the 'Wal-Mart' well  liquor, and you have decided that you will stick with call or top shelf liquor, the bartender will absolutely give you what you ordered—for the first three drinks, anyway.  After that, he'll probably charge you for the premium liquor and and serve you the crap from the well.  This is even more likely if you want a lot of ice in your drink.  The colder the drink, the less you can taste anything but sugar.

Most bartenders believe (and experience has proven them correct) that few drinkers can tell the difference in liquor after three strong drinks.  One notable exception to this is practically any single malt scotch from Islay (pronounced "eye-lay").  On the island of Islay, they roast the barley over peat fires, which gives the scotch (such as my favorite—Laphroaig) a very distinctive taste that could never be mistaken for a highland blended scotch.

The chances of finding a bartender who knows how to make a good cocktail at most bars is rapidly approaching zero.   If you happen to find such a bar, the bartender is probably good enough to figure out what you want—no matter what you ask for—so I will skip the details of how to order a fancy cocktail: let's just stick to the basics.

If you ask for "bourbon rocks", you will get a shot of well bourbon in an ice-filled old-fashioned glass (a short heavy glass that holds 5-6 ounces).  If you ask for "Jim Beam straight up", you will get a shot of Jim Beam in a shot glass.  Asking for a "double rye neat" with a "water back", will produce two shots of rye whiskey in a old-fashioned glass without ice, with a glass of water on the side (a chaser).  If you ask for a "double Stoli chilled", you will get two shots of Stolichnaya vodka that have been shaken with ice, and then strained into a old-fashioned glass.  

You have to be careful what you order.  If you ask for a "rum and coke back", you will get a shot of rum with a small glass of coke as a chaser, not a rum and coke with a glass of water as a chaser.  Do you see the difference?

There are a lot of special requests that you can add.  A "dry martini" is not a martini prepared with little or no vermouth, it is a martini made with dry vermouth.  The phrase, "very dry martini" is about as meaningless as a "Rum and Very Coke."  A "dirty" martini is a martini with juice from the olive jar added.  You can actually buy bottles of olive juice.

Okay, you have your drink in front of you.  You are sitting at the bar, you gave the bartender a twenty and have left all the change he brought you lying on the bar in front of you while you drink.  (This insures prompt service—you haven’t yet tipped the bartender.)  It is at this time that someone will sit next to you and after a few polite minutes offer a wager.

Nick the Greek once said that if a man walks up to you in a bar and offers to bet you $10 that he can made a Jack of Spades jump up out of a deck of playing cards and spit apple cider—you shouldn’t take the bet, for as sure as a bear shits on my cabin’s welcome mat, you will end up with an ear full of cider.

Bar bets, technically a situational bet, are deadly.  They sound like you can’t lose—especially after that second double rye.  But, if you take the bet you are about to get an expensive education.  Yes, it is more than likely that in a room of twenty people, two of them have the same birthday.  If you email me, I’ll send you the mathematical formula to prove it.  No, you can’t stand with your heels against a wall and pick up a quarter placed between your feet—well a man can’t but his girlfriend can.  All of these are bar bets, and the amount of money lost on them through the years would balance the national debt.

The best bar bet I ever saw was done by a guy in Mexico and involved an ordinary housefly.  He was just sitting there at the bar nursing a double reposado tequila with a water chaser while he casually watched a few flies playing on the bar.  Suddenly, he lashed out and captured one of the flies in his loosely clinched fist.  He shook his fist close to the side of his head, listening to the buzzing of the insect for a few seconds, and then suddenly flung the fly into the open glass of water.

By now, every eye in that bar was watching the man.  Was this guy crazy? 

The man, apparently unaware of the attention he was getting, began calmly poking at the floating fly with his index finger.  It took a few pokes, but eventually the fly slowly sank to the bottom of the glass where it remained motionless.

The man asked the patron next to him, “Do you think that fly drowned?”

After a long stare at the motionless bug, the man answered, “Yeah, I think so.  I’ve studied dead and it looks just like that.”

For a long minute, no one said anything, then the man said, “Nah.  I think he’s just resting after his swim.  I’ll bet you a dollar he’s still alive.”

This seemed like a safe bet, so the second man slid a dollar from the change in front of him towards the water glass.  “You’re on,” he said.  “Fetch him out.”

“No,” said the man.  “Let him finish his swim first.  I’ll get him out in a little while.”

By now, there must have been ten people—including the bartender—watching that insect take his public bath.  By the time the fly had been underwater about three minutes, a few other people had wagered a dollar or two on the fly.  After about five minutes, the man even offered to double all the bets!  Everyone loves a fool—as long as he has money—so most people accepted the offer.

Finally, the man poured most of the water into another glass and laid the poor waterlogged fly on the bar.  It appeared as lifeless as Julius Caesar, but amazingly, the man said he still had confidence in the fly and even offered to double the bets again!

When just about every single loose sawbuck in the bar had been wagered, the man calmly reached over and picked up a salt shaker, unscrewed the lid and poured a tiny pyramid of salt over the fly.  Within two minutes, the salt began to shift as the fly crawled to the surface, shook itself a few times while the man pocketed his winnings, then launched itself into the air and flew away.

I bought that man a drink and asked him about the trick.  According to his experiments, you could leave that fly submerged in the water up to eight minutes and still resurrect it with a handful of salt.  Any longer that that was likely to be an inadvertent burial at sea.

Only one man ever wins a bar bet—and it ain’t you.

A few last words of advice for the neophyte at the bar.  If you take the aspirin the night before, the next morning’s headache won’t be as bad.  Don’t eat the bar peanuts: they are older than you and you really don’t want to hear about the last guy who put his hand into that bowl of nuts.  No one over the age of 10 not accompanied by a small child ever orders a Shirley Temple.  Coffee drinks are for ski chalets.  If you are going to drink too much, stay away from sweet drinks.  And if you intend to drink way too much, drink Banana Daiquiris.  Bananas are the only food I know that taste the same up and out as they did in and down.