What triggers a passion?
Well, I certainly drank my share in college and beyond. I
have specific drinks tied to specific locations and events: beer by the pitcher
at Rick’s in Ann Arbor (leading to my only public singing experience in New
York City), crap-but-cheap Long Island iced teas at Uptown in Bowling Green OH
on Tuesday nights, fuzzy navels by the lake at Rose Hulman on a warm spring
day, my first sip of julieska at the Arosa Keller in Essen Germany. For the
most part, though, a drink was something that was combined with another
activity or experience.
With games, my epiphany was at the hands of James Ernest,
showman, poker player, game designer and CEO of Cheapass Games. James was the first person
to challenge me to separate the game experience–the social involvement,
metagame aspects and material components involved with playing a game–and think
about the mechanics and rules that make up a game as a device for social
experiences. It let me experience (and, nowadays, evaluate) games not only for
their emotional and social pleasures, but to appreciate WHY a game does or does
not work on a purely mechanical level, and then see how the game experience
either magnifies or obscures a design’s mechanics.
For alcohol, it was a 2007 NPR interview with Jeff Berry,
upon the publication of Beachbum Berry’s Sippin' Safari. The book is a
celebration of the tiki craze in the US, and the interview focused on the
Zombie–a drink normally presented as five random rums, pineapple juice, and
whatever else fruit juice was on clearance at the dollar store last week. This
is a drink that was shrouded in mystery and history, and Jeff told a story of
corporate espionage, detective work, and sheer joy for the topic that
absolutely hooked me (well, at least made me go out, buy the book, and act as
the starting point for another story that I’ll tell later this year).
All of a sudden, alcohol became a medium of creation isolated
from the usual social trappings. With a palette of ingredients millennia in the
creation, I now had a sense of how to play with a well-stocked bar to make
drinks and appreciate how the component parts combine to create something
better.
This also brought me into the mixologist craze, and what an
interesting experience that has been. I’ve discovered some great bars, tried
some fairly exotic mixers, liquors and drinks, and certainly broadened my
appreciation for what can be done with alcohol. Things like shrub and falernum
are now recipes I can rattle off from memory, and the complexity and subtleties
of a contemporary cocktail can be a marvelous opportunity to simultaneously
drink and dissect.
That said, a 2011 issue of Imbibe featured an interview with Ray Foley, a voice for working bartenders and bar service for decades and who has
both a passion for bartending and scorn for those who would push the occupation
of bartender into a niche, boutique corner of the industry. This is the man who
invented the fuzzy navel, and say what you want about the joys of homemade
cardamom-infused limoncello, Ray Foley has been responsible for serving more
drinks than you or I ever will. A good drink should be shared, and the easier
and more accessible a drink is, the more people that will have the opportunity
to enjoy it.
I am not an expert, or even trying to achieve that status (I
have friends who are far more
gifted in that regard), but on this blog I’ll try to walk the line between
highbrow and lowbrow, a hand extended into each world, trying to snag things
that everyone will find, if not necessarily practical or to their tastes, at
least interesting to hear about.
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