January 2021 - Cocktail Concoctions & Connections

January 29, 2021

Daniel Gillen

A man walked into a bar and ordered a drink. A minute later he heard a voice saying, “You look great. Have you lost weight?” He looked around, but there was no one near. Again, a minute later, he heard, “You know, you don’t look a day over 30.” He looked around again, no one near but the bartender. He leaned toward the bartender and asked, “Did you hear that voice?” The bartender explained, “Don’t worry. It’s the peanuts. They’re complimentary.”--- Since my long-ago but not yet forgotten days home from college, hanging out with friends at the Lodge Bar and Grill or The Reunion Inn in Irondequoit, New York, playing bar games, and hoisting a few Genesee Cream Ales, I have always been comfortable being that “man who walked into a bar.” Then it was The Pinewood at Manhattan College and Corby’s at Notre Dame, and more recently Kelly’s Pub in Cape Charles, Virginia, and World of Beer here at home in The Villages, Florida, that all contributed to solidifying that comfort. Because bars are, as my wife Mary says, “happy places” for me, it stands to reason that we would have a well-stocked bar in our home. For parties, I have always enjoyed coming up with theme drinks or party-starter shots, and even invented a few personal potions. With the craft cocktail boom in full swing, I started playing with variations on the Old Fashioned and Manhattan classic whiskey cocktails, and exploring adventurous mixtures with other spirits. I am not a professional bartender, but one doesn’t have to be a professional to practice and enjoy any craft. When we were brought face to face with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, significant changes to our daily lives occurred. For our children and grandchildren, the changes were immense, having to work from home while homeschooling, and make important decisions about confinement and social distancing to protect their families. For us, and other comfortably retired couples, the changes were less severe. Yes, we still had to wear masks when shopping, and we still had to make sensible decisions about social distancing. We couldn’t go to those bars I love or to trivia nights or to chorus rehearsals or to cards with friends or to dancing in the squares. Gone, for now, were the days of planning the next fun cruise or exploratory road trip. Because of all those unexpected influences on our daily lives, one other significant thing happened...we had a lot more time on our hands. After cleaning the garage and organizing my sock drawer, an idea struck me as a way to exercise the creative portion of my brain. We had started to have a once-a-week Zoom virtual happy hour with four couples to whom we were very close and with whom we had enjoyed many memorable retirement experiences. In addition, happy hour became a thing to look forward to in our days of confinement, and almost every day, we would walk across the street to Bob and Bev’s front patio with a treat in one hand for their dog Beau and a drink in the other hand. As the sun set, other couples would sometimes stroll by, and we relished those happy hours of relaxed conversation in the presence of outdoor, socially-distanced friends. For a short time, the stresses of our pandemic-stricken world would melt away and we would return to a kind of normality. It was this new focus on the happy hour, and my desire to share the happy hour experience with family and friends, that generated a new way to help fill my days. I decided to burden those family members and friends that I thought could put up with me, with a “Craft Cocktail” daily happy hour email. Each evening, I sent out a recipe and picture of what I had concocted at happy hour for them to mentally or physically enjoy as they wished. To educate, to entertain, and to generally heighten the happy hour experience, the daily recipe was preceded by a thematic essay related to the drink. Each essay drew upon internet research, personal observations, and my quirky way of creating related tales based partly on history, but embellished by the strange workings of my imagination. Each drink of the day was, therefore, the end of a specific trail through the tangled forest of mixology. I started with a goal of doing this for one week, but my own growing interest in this forest of fizzes and frappes, and the pure enjoyment of learning and creating, kept this going for an entire month (31 days). I have plans to publish these 31 tales as a book, but in the interim, to test the waters of interest, I decided to start this blog presenting stories of cocktail connections.