ologist is replaced by an opulent confidence that brings to mind Porthos—a dandy through and through but also an expert swordsman willing to murder strangers over an imagined slight. Don’t let them trick you into guessing how much Tai goes in a Mai-Tai.
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Photobond your rep. Go to enough mixology conferences and you’ll eventually run into actual real-life cocktail masters who know what they’re doing. While it’s important to appear next to them in pictures (this is a version of photobombing called photobonding) do not engage in conversation with the DeGroffs, Wondriches, Regans, Berrys, Haighs and Whites of the cocktail world. They won’t be so crude as to denounce you on Twitter, but this clan has a secret network, and once you’ve been outed as a fraud you’ll never be a brand ambassador, you’ll never get a book deal, and you most assuredly will never get a bar job that doesn’t have the word “back” attached to it.
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Don’t get rat-boxed.2
Beware of scenes where mixologists have been allowed to overbreed to the extent an ugly element of competition has crept in. Whereas mixologists generally congratulate one another’s creations and reinventions with such booming exclamations such as “A huskily carnal delight!” and “A boldly original reworking!” and “I want to marry this cocktail!”, overpopulation can create a cruel caste system. Those in the upper caste are hailed as artistic geniuses and explosive innovators and those below are reviled as Johnny-come-lately gutterswine who just rolled out of a ditch full of turds and yet, incredibly, want a seat at the kewl-nerd table.
MIX ‘EM UP!
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Learn how to shake a cocktail. The secret is behaving as if an invisible entity exactly as strong as you has a grip on the shaker and is energetically trying to take it from you. This creates an up and down, forward and back, heave and ho motion that appears 2 A reference to the Too Many Rats in a Box Theorem. In the 1930s, behavioral scientists discovered that if you put too many rats in a box they become agitated, antisocial and, most heinous of all, start eating their young. And if you are a late arrival, you can guess who the elder mixologists will consider the “young.”
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very stylish to observers. This is important because . . .
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The longer and more bizarre the manner in which you shake a cocktail, the better it will taste. This is called the Benihana Effect. It also makes you appear a little insane, and most people are loathe to insult cocktails made by a nearby insane person.
31 ions.
Make sure they know you care very much about their opin-
Stare at them with an aggressive yet fragile smile, as if the slightest suggestion that your cocktail is anything less than spectacular will make you either burst out crying or reach into their mouths and rip out their unappreciative tongues.
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Alcoholics are the best taste testers. It’s true! So be sure to steer your more devilishly untamed drinks toward the guys with cigarette burns on their pants.
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Vegans, because they have trained themselves to eat weeds, are also superior taste testers. And the last thing you want is them thinking your cocktails are raising sea levels, so when describing your cocktail use these words liberally, even if you’re not sure what they mean: locally, sourced, farmers, market, gluten, free, sustainable, green, craft, eco, friendly and homemade. For example: “All my eco-sourced ingredients are freely sustained by the locally-friendly homemade farmers craft glutenning their markets. Green!”
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Learn to pair your cocktails. This is the art of telling people what to eat with your drinks. Then perhaps later you can tell them what to wear and what they should talk about during the meal because plainly they’re imbeciles and need all the help they can get.
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The longer it takes to make a cocktail, the better it will taste. Just like waiting in line for what seems an eternity at the DMV makes you appreciate your driver’s license all the more, waiting 20 minutes to get a drink makes the drinkie slaver with anticipa-
tion. So be sure to add a bunch of arbitrary stages (remember the ice in a bag thing?) and refrain from using any modern technology created to speed along the very thing you are doing.
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Carefully monitor how long it takes someone to finish your cocktails. If someone drinks your masterpiece in under three minutes, mutter: “Pearls before swine.” If it takes more than three minutes, snarl: “Great! You’ve drowned the damn thing in melted ice!”
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Sometimes grimaces are secret smiles. If someone shouts, “ What the hell did I just drink?” after trying your new recipe, keep in mind that that was exactly the sort of response you wanted: a passionate ache for knowledge.
A MIXOLOGIST WALKS INTO A BAR
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When in bars, subtly communicate to the bartender that he is massacring the cocktail you just ordered. During each stage of the cocktail’s manufacture, make a tiny lunge as if trying to save a lemming from hurling itself off a cliff. Alas, each lunge will be too late, so you must sigh mightily until his next blunder, which will be immediate. If a bartender stirs your cocktail, cringe like a bullwhip was laid across your back and say, a bit breathlessly, “Could you please shake so as to aerate?” If he shakes your cocktail, let loose a large groan and complain loudly to the nearest person, “He’s bruising the vermouth!”
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Don’t forget the ice! There was a time when asking, “ Where is the ice from?” would be met with, “The ice machine, asshole.” But now bartenders have to mutter, “It’s triple-filtered in-house,” even if it’s not true, and it isn’t.
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Pity the fools. It’s easy to get a little misty-eyed when musing over the mixologist’s chosen fate: a courageous explorer far out in the nether regions, wrestling with wild new liqueurs and liquors, while the bartender squats in his safe little bar mixing safe little drinks for his safe little minions. Sliding your bartender looks steeped