It's a pretty drink, that's for sure.

The Tom Collins and The Pink Gin

Overview:

There are certain types of booze that we tend to associate with certain times of year. For me the system is pretty simple. If it's hot outside, then I tend to go for the lighter stuff: gin; vodka; or light rum. In the winter I tend more towards darker fluids like whiskeys, dark rum, and so forth.

Of course, this is Seattle, and we don't get summer up here, at least not while I'm home.

So we decided to more or less please ourselves and pretend it was summer, and try a drink that neither Lincoln or I had ever experienced before.

Jerry Thomas, the man who made drinking fun.

The Tom Collins is a pretty old drink, dating back to around 1876 or so in New York. Apparently, a few years before, there was a popular prank people played on each other. One person would walk up to another and say, “Have you seen Tom Collins?” The person being questioned would predictably respond that they did not know such a man. The first person would then claim that Mr. Collins was talking trash about them in a nearby location, usually a bar. Yeah, we don't really get it either, but it was the nineteenth century. These people generally dropped dead of consumption or gout or the croup or whatever at about age 32, so they didn't have time to develop more sophisticated forms of humor. This is why kids like the Jerky Boys and people over the age of 40 think they're retarded.

Along came a guy named Jerry Thomas, known as “The Father of American Mixology” by people whose job it is to track such things, and presumably by Thomas himself. He created a recipe which was basically a gin and sparkling lemonade drink, and which is not far off from the current version. Thomas also created a drink called the “Blue Blazer,” which featured lighting whiskey on fire and tossing it back and forth between two glasses, creating an arc of flame, which sounds like a lot more fun than that stupid Tom Collins prank.

You need this stuff to kill your brain. Bad brain.

Ingredients

You'll need some gin. As usual, the only “wrong” type of gin is cheap gin. Proper gin is created in a complicated multiple-distillation process, with repeated infusions of different sorts of botanicals and ingredients, each one with its own recipe. Hendrick's, for example, features cucumber, while Rangpur is made with Rangpur limes. Cheaper stuff doesn't really have infusions. They just squirt whatever oils and syrups they want in there. This is why cheap gin tastes greasy and awful.

Now, anyone looking for an easy shortcut can go to the grocery store and grab a two-liter bottle of Collins Mix, which is basically a sort of lemon soda. But Lincoln and I don't really care for premixed stuff, plus that swill is loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, which is kind of the devil. It's impossible to avoid it completely, but we do our best.

So instead, we got some organic lemon juice and some good club soda. We also, after much searching, managed to find where they hide the maraschino cherries at Top Foods. You're also going to want some orange slices (we found that half a slice per drink is about right), and some decent sugar or sugar syrup.

You need this stuff to help your brain. Nice brain.

Step one is vital, at least in our house. I held a large garbage bag while Lincoln shoveled two hundred pounds of empty bottles and cans off the kitchen table. This provided room for the important bit, which is selecting the right music. Lincoln has been listening to a lot of J-pop and alt-country lately, so I told him to pick out whatever he wanted to listen to, as long as it wasn't J-pop or alt-country.

He did not disappoint. He vanished into the Man Cave for a few moments and reappeared with The Now Sound of Brazil, Matisyahu Live at Stubb's, and World Psychedelic Classics: Love's a Real Thing. He'll have to write reviews of all those someday, but we worked out that, if he wrote one CD review every day, it would take like six and a half years to get through them all.

Ed: Assuming I don't buy another CD in the next six and a half years. -Lincoln

You don't HAVE to have lava lamps; but it helps, in some unspecified way.

Preparation

The prep is pretty simple. Fill a shaker about half-full with ice cubes. Dump in two ounces of gin, one of lemon juice, and a heaping spoonful of sugar, and shake like an angry babysitter until the sugar is dissolved. Strain into a Collins glass (and enjoy the look of panic on Mustafa's face when he realizes that he is unsure what a Collins glass looks like, or even if we have any) filled with ice. Add club soda to the top and garnish.

We screwed up the first one by adding the club soda into the shaker along with all the other stuff, but it didn't completely destroy the experience for either one of us. As we listened to a Hasidic rapper doing reggae in a tavern in Austin, Texas, we sipped at the Tom Collins.

They aren't bad. The garnish added a lot to the drink, both the cherry and the orange, and reminded us both of the importance of the right garnish in the right cocktail. We found it to be a good alternative to a gin and tonic for a summer drink, and the relatively low alcohol content made it refreshing and easy to drink. It's also got an air of sophistication about it: Lincoln commented, “This is what Professor Utonium drinks.”

So easy, in fact, that we decided to go ahead and try something else, which turned out to be a really dumb idea.

HMS Invincible's medicine cabinet.

The Pink Gin

The Pink Gin was developed as a way for Royal Navy officers to enjoy Angostura bitters, much in the same way that the Gin and Tonic was created as a way for Royal Navy officers to get their quinine. Apparently, being in the RN Medical Corps in the mid-nineteenth century consisted of adding medicine to powerful liquor. I tried this myself, but it would seem that the world is not quite ready for the Gin and Pepto-Bismol. I sure wasn't.

Angostura is supposedly a specific against seasickness, and gin is a well-known specific against standing upright. All you need is Angostura and some gin.

This drink is astonishingly simple to make, which contributed to our downfall. You can make this drink “in or out.” Zap the inside of a wine glass (we don't have wine glasses, so we used martini glasses) with three dashes of bitters. Swirl it around inside so that the interior of the glass is coated. If you prefer your drink “out,” you slosh out the excess bitters; the meaning of “in” will be left as an exercise for the reader. Add two ounces of gin and you're done.

It's a pretty drink.

And I do mean “done.” I was keeping notes as we went, and the readability falls off sharply after we started making the pink gin. The only things left are Lincoln's comment: “The best drinks are the simplest ones,” and mine, “It's gin plus.”

Oh, and a recipe for an improved Pink Gin.

But that's a secret.

We became less and less coherent as the evening progressed, and soon realized that we had killed an entire fifth of Rangpur plus what little Hendrick's we'd had left. We tried to watch a DVD, but I didn't even make it past the credits before I conked out.

So that's it, two really nice gin drinks. Just two things to remember. First, try to show a little more restraint than we did. The whole point of this is to increase your enjoyment of life, and spending most of the next day lying on the couch whimpering is not part of that.

The thought I will leave you with, however, is one that Lincoln scrawled in my notebook:

“Alcohol makes the monkey brain bigger.”

Profound.