drinking

Are there boy/girl drinks? And where do bears fit in?

My Fellow Inebriates,

I got some new tasting notes from my friend Michael:

With Michael's bear Gustav. Can you "own" a bear? Whose outfit is sillier?

right now i am tasting a white russian. it is creamy and girlish but slightly strong and very bearly. tooodles liquor store bear

One of the first things to go when you’re drinking any quantity of vodka is punctuation. Add some Kahlua and you can say bye-bye to your caps as well. Michael’s notes are my very favorite kind—when you are three sheets to the wind you can be totally honest.

The White Russian didn’t originate in Russia; but it contains vodka, hence the name. Add cream to a Black Russian and there you have it.

There are dozens of variations on this drink but the classic method is to pour vodka and Kahlua over ice cubes and then add half-and-half. It’s totally, totally, totally yummy.

Michael mentioned that the drink is “girlish,” which raises the question: Are there “girl” drinks and “boy” drinks?

Here at LBHQ we don’t go in for gender stereotypes so much as we do massive, unspecific overgeneralizations. To put it more honestly, I’m freaking scared that someone will hunt me down if I start spouting off about which spirits I like to wear a dress while drinking (and there are some). So instead here’s a sampling of personality traits and drinks to match.

White Russian, fave drink of "the Dude" Lebowski. Drinking makes us all better people.

BEER—You’re down to earth and easy to please. Sometimes you leave appliances in your yard.

COOLERS—You’re underage. Or maybe a sugar junkie.

BLENDER DRINKS—You like drama in your relationships. You also like loud, mechanical whirring sounds.

COCKTAILS—You’re purposeful and know what you want. To you, blender-drink fans are your bitches.

WHITE WINE—You’re optimistic but sometimes insecure. You’d like to be a nudist but you don’t know how.

RED WINE—You’re classic and confident but not very street-smart. For instance, you wouldn’t know how to shiv someone with a broken bottle.

SHOTS—You don’t like wasting time. Ideally you’d like to get naked right now.

If you’re reading this, Santa…

I don’t enjoy getting hosed by retailers at any time of year, but the festive season seems the most predatory. When I heard on the radio this morning that one-sixth of all gift cards go unredeemed, I was jolted into sobriety. One-sixth! That’s a lot of languishing gift cards—between 8 and 10% of all gift cards purchased.

Across North America, that’s over $8 billion dollars that’s been paid to retailers and never exchanged for goods. Talk about money for nothing!

Gift cards were on my mind because my mum was reading my list for Santa, and she said: “Why don’t you just ask Santa for a gift card so he doesn’t have to waste his time hunting for bizarre alcoholic products?”

Well, I would never want to put Santa out or embarrass him by asking him to wheel a cart full of Malibu around his local booze shop, so I thought my mum had a pretty good idea there. But then this radio report made me paranoid! What if… What if Santa brought me my card, but it got lost in the wrapping paper on Xmas morning and thrown away? OMG. What if somebody else picked it up by mistake and took it away with them? OMG! What if my parents, in their parental way, put away my gift card for safekeeping and forgot about it? OMG!!

According to statistics, there are about $300 worth of forgotten gift cards lying around in the average North American’s sock drawers. What do retailers think about this?

Capable of forgetting to use a gift card? I'd say so.

Well, when gift cards first became popular, retailers did worry about cards going unredeemed—but strictly from an accounting perspective. So they programmed them with expiry dates. If you forgot to clean your sock drawer for too long, then tried to buy a toaster at Sears with an old card, you were out of luck. Finally regulations were introduced prohibiting retailers from selling these suicide gift cards. And retailers weren’t too sad because they realized they were raking it in regardless of whether they programmed the cards to expire or not.

But how do retailers feel about their customers spending money but getting nothing in return?

Yo, they totally love it!! This has become an industry unto itself. Take Best Buy, a place that specializes in hosing customers by placing loud price tags on things so they look like they’re on sale when in fact they’re not. In 2006 they profited $43 million dollars from unredeemed gift cards.

All of this worried me. But my mum said she was sure I’d pester her so hard to use the card that it wouldn’t get forgotten. I guess that’s true.

So Santa, if you’re reading this, you can send a gift card if you like, so I can buy my own Goldschlager, Bacardi white rum, Bacardi 151, blackberry brandy, strawberry liqueur, banana liqueur, Hypnotiq, Malibu, Pernod, champagne, melon liqueur, Bailey’s, Crown Royal, Frangelico, peppermint schnapps, Kokanee, Capistro and Domaine D’or. But please bring some Broker’s Gin because we don’t have any at our liquor stores in BC, and Julia Gale of Broker’s didn’t offer to send me any. Oh yes—and that tequila that comes in a gun-shaped bottle. I want to try that.

Yours truly,

Liquorstore Bear

CHAIRMAN’S RESERVE—the spiced rum for hedonists

My Fellow Inebriates,

This morning’s drink recommendation comes from Taylor, who writes:

Husband and I recently visited St. Lucia, and quickly fell in love with their home brew, Chairman’s Reserve Spiced Rum. The normal Chairman’s Reserve Rum has a vague taste of whiskey to it, but the Spiced is this amazing blend that is tasty enough to drink straight.  It is made with nutmeg, cloves, vanilla, cinnamon, and richeria grandis…which is perfect to mix with eggnog.

I had some minor hesitation about circulating this information, principally because I don’t go in much for husbands. A husband takes Taylor out of the running for LB-style stalking, not because of any well-defined boundaries I have but because I am totally chicken-shit.

Still, this rave review is impossible to ignore. CHAIRMAN’S RESERVE Spiced Rum is by its own admission hedonistic, and egg nog’s seasonality electrifies pleasure seekers with a mad urgency to combine it with any and all varieties of hooch before it exits the market.

I get the sense that Taylor went all-out with her egg nog adventures. One of my favorite things about the Internet is that it prompts sharing:

All I did was pour 1 part rum, 4 parts nog, and shaved fresh nutmeg on top. The result is an orgasm-worthy performance of flavors in your mouth. 

I hope Taylor will forgive me, because when I first read this I had just ingested a skullfull of vodka, and things were a bit blurry on the page…er, screen. So I just saw RUM NOG SHAVED FRESH ORGASM-WORTHY PERFORMANCE FLAVORS MOUTH.

Whoa!

Obviously I have to get myself some CHAIRMAN’S RESERVE.

I’m really grateful to Taylor for peppering her booze review with keywords that will probably generate a decent spike in readership for me. I hope you’ll all visit her site as well—it’s lots of fun.

Okay, now what word can pull me back from the gutter? Let me think. Oh yeah—husband. That takes me back to booze, and the rest of Taylor’s recommendation:

Chairman’s Reserve Spiced is also amazing with ginger or root beer. My favorite combo (outside of the eggnog, of course) is Barq’s root beer. The bite of Barq’s against the spicy-sweet taste of Chairman’s is just an exhilarating combination. I’ve already converted a plethora of friends who only swear by beer to convert to the dark side.

These are awesome ideas for rum! So when you’re shopping for egg nog, pick up some Barq’s as well—that way you won’t have to mourn the departure of egg nog at season’s end. Maybe you too will be a convert just like Taylor’s friends (and I’m not surprised she has a plethora, are you?).