“Proper” Drinking

I can’t say that I got quite as annoyed as Yglesias (or Farley for that matter) about this piece of drink snobbery that listed drinks one should never order in public. This is mostly my own snobbery because who really cares what someone orders if they are happy. That said, I’ve harassed my wife for ordering frozen margaritas over the real thing (much less alcohol in the frozen kind. Why pay for ice?). And this is bad on me.

But a couple of the drinks you are never supposed to order make no sense.

What is so wrong with hard cider? Now, most of the hard cider I’ve had is not particularly enjoyable to me. But this is an American heritage drink. This was the low-alcohol drink of choice in early America (as opposed to rum for the hard stuff). Americans grew hundreds of kinds of apples. And they weren’t going in mom’s pie. Most of them were being processed into cider.

I would guess that we will see a renaissance in cider distillers over the next decade. It seems like the next frontier in craft alcohol, both because it is underrepresented in the market and because of its historical importance in America. I know there is a little bit of this already happening.

And even if you order a Woodchuck, who cares? I didn’t know that was a drink to make fun of.

I’ll also say that a tequila sunrise is a perfectly fine drink that I enjoy myself on the occasions I remember to buy orange juice.