Drink

It was January in Chicago and the forecast was for heavy snow followed by bitter cold — high time, I thought, for a shot of malört, the most undrinkable beverage on earth. Or so I’d always heard — and therein lies a tale I didn’t expect to tell. Chances are you’ve never heard of malört, formally known as Jeppson’s Malört, Carl Jeppson being the Swedish immigrant who invented the liqueur a century ago. However, it’s legendary in Chicago, where it’s commonly described as a rite of passage. That tells you a lot right there. Lest there be any doubt, readers are invited to search for #malortface on X, formerly known as Twitter, or Instagram or Flickr.

It’s 1951 and the Hotel Monteleone burns bright, a gilded island of light and liquor adrift in the New Orleans dark. Inside, the air is thick with the sweet tang of cigar smoke and the murmurs of polished conversation. Over in the Swan Room, the trumpets blare, their brassy notes cutting through the gentle chatter, their absence filled with the lively, gravelly voice of Louis Prima. The crowd sways in rhythm, caught between the pulse of jazz and the flicker of chandelier light. Outside, the French Quarter is still alive.

Compromises are odious. They reek of disappointments both large and small, when no one really gets his way — there’s never a loser per se, but also rarely a winner. But very occasionally, seemingly disparate concepts can come together and create a new thing that is technically a compromise but ends up feeling like more than the sum of its parts, thanks to felicitous, and often impossible to predict, synergies. See: the bánh mì sandwich, the Constitution of the United States, Disney and Pixar. And now: Prosecco. The world’s favorite cheap, cheerful, reliably tasty tipple is dipping its toes into profundity — and the results are surprisingly successful.

It was nine on a Monday morning, and whereas my fellow commuters were heading to the office, or their classrooms or a lecture hall, I was on my way to Parcafé in the Dorchester Hotel, right next to London’s bougie shopping district, Mayfair. It’s a place to buy Ferraris and Bugattis and shop at the Row and Goyard and be passed by an endless convoy of black Rolls-Royce SUVs. Waiting for me at the hotel would be a man with a little golden cup, containing a freshly brewed portion of mankind’s favorite black nectar. And his is the best, uncut stuff on the market. The man is Amir Gehl, founder and CEO of Difference Coffee, which sources some of the best, rarest coffee beans in the world.

There’s nothing quite like the third swig of a gin and tonic at the end of a long summer’s day. Or of an Old-Fashioned combating Old Man Winter’s chill. The bite on the tongue. The slow burn in the belly. The gradual easing of emotional and physical tension. Except for the hangovers. There’s nothing quite like those, either. As I — sigh — age, I’ve developed a relationship with alcohol that has become increasingly love-hate: I love it, it hates me. A slight intolerance to booze, German/Irish heritage notwithstanding, has always given me a rosy flush that on round three deepens to an unflattering scarlet that could be mistaken for theatrical rouge.

Some undetermined time in the long past, possibly in 1890s Montana, a miner had finished a long and tiring day and needed a refreshing beer. But after aparticularly taxing shift, a beer wasn’t going to cut it alone. He asked the barman for a shot of whisky as well — and washed it down with his pint. It’s hard to call the boilermaker a cocktail, and inventing one certainly wasn’t on the mind of our tired protagonist. To this day, mixing beer and spirits is not generally the province of mixologists; it’s a combination more often favored by partygoers looking to get slammed as entertainingly and quickly as possible.

Want to get drunk, fast? To most, that’s the point of the Long Island Iced Tea. It’s not so much a drink as a chemical formula designed to make an enormous percentage of alcohol consumable in a single glass. When I worked at a cocktail bar, a man once ordered two, and I asked if he would like me to hold on the second until his guest arrived. He replied, “No thanks, they’re just for me.” He proceeded to down both within a few minutes, for what surely began either a wild or very bad night. For the unfamiliar, Long Island Iced Tea contains almost every liquor you can imagine and no actual iced tea (though it shares its color).