Yesterday’s call for liquor-cabinet pictures was a huge success. Not only did I receive detailed inventories of your booze collections, my fellow inebriates, but my inbox contained these awesome pics.
Said Emily: “Our alcohol collection gives yours a run for its money.” Yes, it does—we have no vodka in our house at all, never mind a bottle dedicated specifically to mixing with baby formula. With a KitchenAid mixer to break up the resultant curds! Lucky baby!
♦ ♦ ♦
Next up: A fantastic inventory from beerbecue with suggestions of wine and beer not depicted but also present in the house. (Note the family-friendly “Disney Princess hair salon comb.”)
Damn, this is what I’m talking about—a decent booze collection. I was going to tape this picture to my dad’s head after he went to bed, but…I passed out first.
♦ ♦ ♦
Sadly, Miss R’s camera was stolen in Las Vegas last year, but she described an inventory that easily eclipses LBHQ’s with its third- and quarter-bottles of Tanqueray and Bacardi respectively plus tonic, limes, and “cheap-ass beer.” Like ours, the collection resides in a bottom kitchen shelf. Thinking I would find a proxy photograph, I googled everything Miss R described and got this:
Can you believe it? It’s a cake. Which has little to do with Miss R’s liquor cabinet and—if cooking gin and thereby burning off its alcohol is involved—is something of a heresy. Still, it’s pretty cool-looking. It just so happens that my Nana—the one with the bionic knee—is a professional cake decorator who blows our minds with an amazing cake every time P or V has a birthday.
Maybe, when V turns 5 this September, Nana will make her a Tanqueray cake.
♦ ♦ ♦
Keep sending those liquor-cabinet pics here, my fellow inebriates!
The house got turned upside down this morning in a search for this.
It was the umpteenth search for a teeny Chihuahua whose owner keeps stuffing it into small spaces and then freaking out when it’s AWOL for bedtime.
By the time Chihuahua was finally discovered in the car, it felt like gin-and-tonic time. And, while my mum informed me 10:30am was too early (arbitrary on her part, wouldn’t you say?) she did agree to break out the GORDON’S LONDON DRY GIN again this evening.
The $12.69 mickey in our freezer represents another infidelity to BROKER’S GIN and by extension its lovely Business Development Manager Julia Gale, a woman who once savaged her knee busting out on a dance floor to Love Shack by the B52s.
I know (I think?) I promised Julia I’d wait for her delicious gin to be reinstalled at our government booze store, but I’m not made of stone.*
It all started with BEEFEATER 24, a purportedly higher-end version of the famously juniperous BEEFEATERmarketed as a tea-infused homage to the founder’s dad’s penchant for that beverage—but really a cagey gimmick to gain market share by offering options within its own brand. When I espied the new BEEFEATER variety I was briefly blinded by it and forgot that I was holding out for BROKER’S. But BEEFEATER 24, while enjoyable, is a bit of a departure from traditional gin, so it felt like a miss (in retrospect). A couple of weeks after it was finished, I told my mother we needed some normal gin so I could feel better—both about my breach of trust with Julia and about my delirium tremens—but she said no. She said we need to keep our booze spending down to a dull roar.
Luckily my mother is weak-willed; as soon as the thermometer surpassed 30° she relented and started considering gin of her own accord. But only a mickey! (For tasting purposes.)
Thus rationed, I requested GORDON’S because it struck me as a good baseline, standard-issue gin. Chances are, every other gin-based cocktail you’ve ordered at a bar has been made with Gordon’s; it has the widest reach of any gin. I really felt (Julia) that it would be quite an omission if I didn’t procure some.
GORDON’S isn’t the cheapest gin on the shelf but it’s one of only two available (in my hood) in a plastic mickey. This makes it fantastic for lurching around a parking lot with—a distinction it shares with the bottom-shelf Canadian gin GILBEY’S, which is the cheapest, and which my parents won’t let me review unless I manage to procure a free sample.
The last time my aging parents bought a mickey, they probably did so to spike a punch. That’s how weird the purchase felt, they said, although I think they were just bitching about taking “bear requests.”
Soooo…
GORDON’S LONDON DRY GIN—check
Plastic 375mL bottle—awesome
$12.69 price tag—almost as good as it gets
Limes—check
Superstore house brand tonic water—check
Expectations—low to middling
Little did we know last night how much of today would be devoted to hunting a three-inch Chihuahua. I think we should have had four ounces apiece, but we settled for two in tall tumblers with lots of ice.
Ahhhhhhhh!!!!
Not bad, not bad. Especially considering the slight weirdness of our BEEFEATER 24 experience (although not as weird as HENDRICK’S). GORDON’S serves up exactly what’s needed in a decent G&T. Good infusion, good balance—more than serviceable and thoroughly underrated by gin snobs. It is, after all, the world’s best-selling gin.
But it’s not for gin noobs! GORDON’S hits all the traditional gin notes, and it hits them hard. If you’re looking for a gin that doesn’t really taste like gin, GORDON’S is not for you. If you don’t really like the taste of gin, there’s a whole shelf of gins crafted for you, with bizarro tasting notes like “cucumber” and “nothing.” If all the bottles came to life after the liquor store went dark at night, GORDON’S would kick the shit out of those pretty gin bottles. And maybe BROKER’S would help it if it was ever reinstated in the store.
I know, I know, it’s silly to anthropomorphize the gin bottles. Next thing you know I’ll be imagining Chihuahua is a real dog.
* NEW MATERIAL ONLY. POLYESTER FIBRES. PLASTIC BEADS.
Things are looking up at LBHQ—I think. If I weren’t such a dumbass about checking my Twitter account, I would have realized days ago that the lovely Julia Gale, Business Development Manager at Broker’s Gin, had tweeted me:
“Greetings young Liquorstore Bear! Please may I have your contact details?… We’d love to call you.”
Two days late, I scrambled to reply. (Julia had told me previously that Martin and Andy, the owners at Broker’s, would be visiting my home province to rectify the gin situation—i.e., the absence of this elysian gin from our government liquor store shelves.)
For those of you who haven’t been following our correspondence, here’s a recap from November:
JULIA:
Greetings from Broker’s Gin!! Dreadful to hear that you can’t get any of our fine gin at the moment, especially as you’re obviously a fan. I know that Ontario is awash with the stuff at the moment so maybe you’re from another province. If you drop us a line to broker@brokersgin.com with some more information, we’ll try to help!
LB:
Julia, delighted to hear from you! You’re right; it is dreadful that I can’t find Broker’s Gin at the moment. Ontario is full of hooligans so I wonder why they have it and we don’t here in beautiful British Columbia, where it is mild all year and perfect for making a gin-and-tonic every single day. Of course I also wanted the little hat from on top of the bottle. I thought that after finishing the contents I could wear the little hat and look like you, Andy, and Martin—all so smart and British-looking.
These pleasantries carried on for a while, with a few solutions being proposed:
Cross the border to buy Broker’s in the US
Ask Santa for some
Chain myself to government liquor store railing to demand reinstatement of Broker’s Gin
What with potential cross-border cavity searches, a disheartening Santa spoiler, and my failure to find a pair of small handcuffs, these ideas weren’t quite doing it for me. Then Julia emailed about Martin and Andy’s visit to BC.
I really wanted to talk to Julia, to hear her lovely English voice (even with the post-flu pornstar/Barry White gruffness she says it’s acquired over the hols). I can’t fathom why she isn’t joining Martin and Andy on their visit. Anyway, my parents would never let me answer the phone—they say I’m a mouth-breather. So I gave Julia my parents’ numbers, and she said Martin might phone. This makes me a little nervous…
What if my parents don’t answer the phone? Take my dad, for example, who just yesterday ignored an unknown 604 number. What if that was Martin from Broker’s Gin? OMG!
What if we don’t click? I don’t know Martin quite the way I know Julia. He might not enjoy talking to bears the way Julia does.
What if he’s very serious? Broker’s Gin has a web page dedicated to humor (“I’ve gone on a gin and tonic diet. I’ve lost two days already!”) but what if Martin turns out to be very stern in person? (Mind you, it’s okay if Julia’s stern, so long as we establish a “safe” word.)
What if Martin and I do click, then spend the day getting drunk, betting at the casino and regaling each other with stories—and he’s too hungover to attend his meeting, and fails to get Broker’s Gin back into liquor stores here? OMG!!
So it’s a very anxious day, my fellow inebriates. If only I had some gin to take the edge off.
Liquorstore Bear 