I love hot drink season. There's something so nice about serving someone a warm drink that's so buttery it's almost a pastry. One recipe I found called for 1/2tsp butter which is just comically small. The one major flaw with this mix is that it puts in all the water first, which makes it too cool by the time everything's all mixed. If I were to make it again (and I will!) I'd mix all the liquid ingredients separately, dissolve the syrup in half the water, mix the two, and then add the last half of the water to get everything nice and toasty for serving.

One cocktail book I have advocates for just shoving a red hot poker into the glass and heating it that way, but I think that's a little too hardcore for me.

I take pride in my cocktail mixing. I've put in a lot of work into honing my judgment of flavor combinations, learning how to construct an effective cocktail recipe, and building a stable of excellent ingredients. Whenever anyone comes to visit my house, I do my best to give them a beverage experience that's perfectly tailored to their desires, whether it's sweet or bitter, punchy or mild, alcoholic or not. Although sometimes experimentalism takes me in a direction that is not worth repeating, by and large I believe the drinks I make are excellent.

But excellent is not always what's called for.

Liz and I used to love going out to bars. Our signature move was to take off work early of an afternoon, show up just as the doors opened around 4pm or so, and just shoot the breeze with the bartender during the easiest hours of their shift. Bartenders are great conversation because they're always up to something else in their lives, and the best ones also care a lot about the craft of serving people just what they want. We'd stick around for a few hours, get some snacks, maybe order dinner if the bar served it or head out for pizza, and end up home by 8pm feeling like we'd had a full night out.

All that ended, of course, in 2020. Other than a few mostly-outdoor visits during the vaccine honeymoon^[1], we haven't been back to a bar since, and every day I miss that experience of lazily sipping on the latest Negroni variant while merrily chatting with someone who an hour ago was a total stranger to me.

For Liz, that experience was wrapped up inseparably with the particular flavors of happy hour, during which bars served cheaper drinks off a special menu to draw customers. Happy hour drinks are usually well-known classics such as a Manhattan, and they're usually substantially less fancy than a cocktail bar's primary menu. They'll often use only "well" ingredients, the inexpensive stuff that the bar buys in bulk to form the backbone of cocktails that are then made more flavorful with higher-shelf ingredients.

So when that's where Liz's mood takes her, I put away my high-end vermouth and adulterate my usual mixing whisky. Sometimes an excellent experience calls for mediocre flavor, and I try never to let my pride get in the way of mixing the right drink for the moment.

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1. Our cheeky term for summer/fall 2021, in the all-to-brief gap between getting vaccinated and vaccine-resistant COVID variants taking over the world, when people at large were still taking common-sense precautions despite COVID numbers being lower than they've ever been since. In some sense I miss those days even more than I miss the era before the pandemic, because in those days I really believed that people…

It's really tough for me to read this post which is, to a substantial degree, about the hypothetical of my wife dying. But I think it's worth sharing both as a celebration of the fact that she is very much alive and as a meditation on what life is like with only the ongoing application of modern medical treatment between oneself and the void.

Also, I gotta say, I am pretty proud of that beverage. The flavors meld really well—I wanted to make sure the black sesame was still very much the primary note, which it absolutely is, while giving it a bit of richness with the scotch and cacao as well as a touch of liveliness with the amaretto and absinthe. I might actually seek out more black sesame ice cream to be able to make this for friends.