A friend sent me a link to an obscure old video on YouTube. Dated 1990, it’s a clip from some sort of TV special. He sent it for several reasons.

Principally I guess, because I love Mel Tormé. I inherited this from my Dad who had to carefully explain to me how this shatteringly be-toupéed parody of a lounge singer, with a face like a smashed frog and a stage presence so ingratiating it could strip the veneers off your teeth... was in truth a phenomenal jazz musician. I was besotted. I love him, particularly when he regularly drifts off into vocal extemporisation.

I actually ran into him once. Must have been the late nineties. Charleston International Airport SC. He was coming out of the gents, fiddling with his flies and I came round the corner like a runaway rhino and flattened him.

The second reason is that I also revere Donald Fagen.

The clip is five minutes and forty seven seconds too long for anyone who doesn’t share my peculiar combination of interests. But check it out nonetheless.

The song is The Goodbye Look, which might be one of my favourites. What Fagen can do, with amazing economy, is create a scene, an image, in an almost filmic way. Whenever I play it, it stuns me again. The name may or may not be lifted from a hardboiled detective novel by Ross MacDonald, the story of which has nothing to do with the song... but does remind you of the skill of the American detective genre writers, in constructing a world entirely of atmosphere. Plot is convoluted and ultimately impenetrable.

The narrator of the story is an American ex-pat ...

Marimbas, congas, a lot of tightly arranged Tiki tat... all enriching the happy scene. And then…

I love Ross MacDonald, but he doesn’t have that kind of economy. This is Chandler or Hammet, but by way of Hollywood screenwriting. I’d sell my soul to write like Chandler or Hammett but neither of them can start a story in four lines, spin it on it’s head in another four and have the reader gagging to know how the hell it’s going to end.

I’d write phenomenal books if I could paint pictures like Donald Fagen.

My friend loved the clip because the song is delivered by someone who shows absolutely no awareness of its darkness. Brilliantly but with the oleaginous gloss of a guy doing a dinner show at a tropically themed bar. This is Graham Greene, but delivered by Nick Apollo Forte in Broadway Danny Rose. And if the cognitive dissonance of that doesn’t give you a nose bleed, you might want to consult a therapist

Hold on...

WT actual F is a Cuban Breeze?

There are a few recipes online, but they all smack of commercial tie-ins from booze companies. Apparently it was ‘Popularized by the movie Glass Onion’ and is supposed to be made of vodka, Amaretto, pineapple juice and lime and sounds frankly revolting. One of those utterly abominable pan-tropical combinations you might expect as the signature drink at a swim up bar in a luxury resort. But now... today! Not in 1982 when Fagen wrote the song, nor indeed in 1952 when the last American diplomats were fleeing Cuban coup d’etat.

In ‘52 Gretchen would have made a Daiquiri. But in ‘59, the Ocean Spray cranberry growers’ collective began heavily promoting cocktails including the Sea Breeze (Vodka, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice). By the 70’s it was one of the American Association of Bartenders top cocktails.

In the 80s, when Fagen was writing The Goodbye Look, the Absolut vodka company recently launched in the US, were promoting the hell out of a series of vodka-based cocktails, including a revitalised Sea Breeze.

And sure enough, in the Absolut archive, there’s a forgotten ‘Cuban Breeze’ that swaps out the vodka for Cuban rum.

Now that, I can get right behind...

• 45g Eminente Claro Cuban Rum (Havana Club would possibly be more authentic)

• 75g Cranberry Juice. Ocean Spray’s ‘Cranberry Juice Drink’ is now a repellent sham of a thing that tastes like 90% HFCS. Alain Milliat does a real juice in small bottles. It’s criminally expensive and hard to find, but worth the inconvenience

• 50g Grapefruit Juice. Fresh if you can. I note that Waitrose has just started stocking huge pink Sicilian ‘Radically Seasonal’ ones via Natoora

But that actually makes quite a long, fruity drink, to be served in a highball full of ice. This might be my last drink. Lets spin the proportions to a classic Daiquiri that Gretchen would have know intimately how to knock up

.

• 100g Rum

• Then use the cranberry and grapefruit to make it a sour

• 30g Pink grapefruit juice

• 20g Cranberry juice

• Dash of Falernum

• Frozen glass in the shape of a cheap RGD-5 Soviet fragmentation grenade

I know what happens, I read the book. I think we’ll call this ‘The Goodbye Look’.

Edited to add…

Just reading Fagan’s memoir Eminent hipsters I note he mentions en passant Gretchen as ‘Faust’s Girlfriend’ and, sure enough, via Cliff Notes…

“Gretchen (short for Margarete) is the tragic heroine in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's masterpiece, Faust. An innocent, pious young woman, she falls victim to Faust's seduction, aided by the demon Mephistopheles . Her relationship with Faust brings about ultimate ruin , culminating in her spiritual salvation.”

I’m not sure there’s anything that boils my piss quite as much as Out-Of-Office messages.

I’m sure one was actually useful once... maybe. Like once somebody actually let the fucking paperclip help them write an ‘informal business letter’.

But look... here’s the thing. I’ve had about 9000 emails this week asking me if I want to ‘opt-out’, in case the forthcoming, crashingly cynical, entirely AI generated, ‘Celebrate Father’s Day with our dreary product’ email is going to trigger me.

(It doesn’t trigger me, BTW. But the warning is exactly the kind of thing that would have given Dad an aneurysm).

So. I’ll tell you what. Over there in the HR Dept. Why not think about this...

‘Dear Colleague,

A while ago, we installed on your laptop a facility to use an Out-of-Office message, to alert clients and co-workers to your absence and to reassure them that they would have your full attention on your return.

We thought it was OK when you started being amusing...

“Kevin is away from his desk today on an Elven Quest across The Shire but will return to do your bidding w/c the 12th”.

... That’s amusing, we thought. That showed a kind of... Hey guys... we like to kinda hang loose here at Soma Media. Disruptor Informality!!!

When one colleague in marketing OOO’d “Woo. Prosecco O’Clock!!!!” We took a holistic view and only insisted on 6 months suspension and Addiction Therapy.

But please, as of today, be aware of this...

When you put up something like “I don’t work Mondays or Fridays” or worse “I’m away from my desk, enjoying me-time, contemplation and self-actualisation”... you will FUCKING ENRAGE A FREELANCER.”

That triggers my ass!

We work as parts of teams, with people in corporate environments. It’s pretty much the job description. So when somebody in that team drops off-grid for 4 days of random mountain biking, hiking to Machu-fucking-pichu or just sitting at home and doomwatching ‘Rivals’ while banging down Whispering Angel and weeping snot... remember we don’t do that. We can’t.

Tonight’s martini is a P.O.T - though obviously I won’t put that on my autoreply - it’s a Push-on-Through. I can, when necessary, which it often is, overlay the Cocktail Hour on work... when it looks like I’m going to be up ‘til 0200.

I also don’t get weekends. I often have to cancel holidays. I can’t remember the last ‘quality time’ I had to myself because, frankly, I spend half my working life trying to get anything fucking quorate amidst a screaming batshit-tsunami of whinging, pass-agg OOOs from people who basically hate the jobs that give them a regular cheque and the privilege of a channel through which to whinge.

I was supposed to do an interview tonight.

I got a message at the last minute. He had 14 things to do, back-to-back that were going to take him through the weekend, which he would terminate on Sunday night with ‘150 Negronis’.

That, my friend, is the sort of OOO I can appreciate.

This one’s for you mate.

I want to make something clear from the start. I’m a Berry Bros. & Rudd No.3 kind of guy. I’m the sort of man who seeks out bottles of High West Bourbon, of Eminente Claro rum. I love my hand-crafted Valentia Island vermouth that they don’t even import to England and the Noilly Prat Extra Dry that I have to get a friend in France to ship over because it only goes to the Americas. Arcane, prestige booze ‘R’ us. I am a man of wealth and taste, and happy to express it by spaffing insane amounts of cash on branded ethanol. It seems I’m a sucker for liquor with a narrative - no matter how fictional.

But I also love “Rail Booze”.

You know when you’re sitting at your bar stool and you look behind the barkeep’s head and you can see all the expensive stuff. Carefully arrayed on the backlit glass shelves. All those premium brands at a suspiciously similar £50 a bottle pricepoint?

I love every bottle of it. I’ll pay to drink a world class gin. I mean... seriously... do you think I wear a Rolex because I want to know the time?

But if you go in to an ordinary bar, with a decent barman annd you ask for a martini. The barkeepdoesn’t reach up to the glistering shelves, the premium bottles. He (or she) will reach down, into the Well, or the Rail. The place where the commodity spirits lurk. And here’s the thing. If they’re even half damn good, they’ll make a cocktail that will blow you away.

Top notch restaurant cooking is all about finding the most exclusive and expensive ingredients and combining them in innovative ways. If ‘Chef’ recommends a carrot, you’ll be told how one part time farmer in the arse end of nowhere, coaxed it into life by hand, in a bed of volcanic sand flown in from Hawaii. Your steak will be infinitely better if the cow had a name and a home address. It’s all about the obscure and the artisan.

But cocktails aren’t like that. The very best cocktails in the world are made from bulk manufactured, industrial products, marketed and sold by large companies. The best have had the same flavour for a hundred years. The best martini in London is made of components designed and manufactured to exactly the same tolerances, at the same scale and with the same attention to technology and brand science as a Big Mac.

I buy small-batch gins with semi-artisanal cues in the packaging, with a narrative about a 200 year old family recipe of curated aromatics, of a hand-built and extremely small still, in a barn somewhere attractively rural... but we’re talking about something made in a large machine. A product that the the government has an unreasonable amount of legislative control over. If you like, you can build a still, grow your own juniper, and lick your own labels, but the Revenue still hold you to the same rules as Diageo... which is quite possibly why an alarming number the ‘curated’ small batch liquors out there are actually made on contract, by the industrial giants.

And, truth be told, if you tinker with your flavour profiles enough that I can tell it’s not regular gin then you’ve created something that I might, occasionally enjoy as a novelty but will ultimately screw the classic cocktail I actually want.

A couple of weeks ago I bought my usual bottle of BB&R #3, I mail ordered my bottle of Eminente Claro, so I would have Martinis and Daiquiris in abundance and at will £40 for the gin £32.50 for the rum. Then, alongside I picked up bottle of Beefeater (£21.50) and Havana Club (£21.50)

So the idea of a martini actually should be “To create an astonishingly good drink out of utterly standard booze. Anyone can mix £50 a bottle “curated” gin with £50 a bottle “curated” vermouth and make a martini I’ll pay for... but what really floats my boat is the kid who’s got Beefeater and NP dry on their rail and can turn that into a creditable martini.

It can be done. It’s the most glorious secret of the cocktail world that the ingredients of the The Best Martini in The World are in stock, right now, at your corner offie.

The really scary thing is that any single element that distinguishes your premium product from the rail stuff actually diminishes its utility. Blue gin? Gin that tastes of chrysanthemums and a hint of Yuzu? You might be able to make one interesting and entirely evanescent proprietary cocktail with it, but you’ll never supplant what a culture sees as the kind of ‘throughline’ of gin. The throughline that rail gin is evolved to express perfectly.

This makes things interesting. Food and wine can rely on this idea of scarcity and exclusivity of ingredients and, if they get it right, can subsequently set price as high as the market will take.

But I recently noticed quite a number of premium gins are marketing on simplicity and purity. BB&R have been assiduous with signifiers of ‘old-school and un-messed with’. The peerless Boatyard Double is offers no fancy claims of innovative, complex flavours but has become a huge cult success with the almost self-effacing positioning that it’s designed for Martinis. Even faithful old Tanqueray Export now flags on the label that it’s made with ‘only 4 botanicals’.

To anyone interested in brand science, this is, how to put this... a head-fuck?

The messaging that they’re actually managing to pull off is “Our state-of-the-art, premium product... tastes unadorned, simple, honest. Like Rail Gin”

Imagine. “Romanée Conti. Tastes how you remember commodity red wine. Designed for mulling”.

“Big Tosser Craft IPA. Made in small batches in our Dalston microbrewery to taste exactly like a really cold can of Hofmeister in 1986”

The funny thing is, though, that this is not the first time the booze industry has addressed this brilliantly. Vodka only really appears on the American market in quantity in the 40s. They could sell it on its strength, the fact you could drink it and not smell like a total lush when you went back to work, and (at least until McCarthy) on a certain fur-coat-and-big boots, Dr Zhivago exoticism. What they didn’t have was any narrative or scarcity, exclusivity or complexity of taste. It was cheap, strong, clear and made by Commies. How do you turn that round?

Remember Absolut? Strong, pure, utterly clear and tasteless. Made in neutral Sweden and great in a Cosmopolitan. Absolute balls-of-steel marketing.

So I find myself in a fascinating position. I’ve got BB&R #3 in my freezer, right next to a bottle of Beefeater. I’ve got Eminente Claro in the drinks fridge door right next to the Havana Club and about 90% of the time, I’m damned if I can express a preference.

And no, I’m not going to toss the premium stuff in favour of rail booze because all those quality luxury cues are as pleasurable a part of the drink as really good glassware. I can make a premium gin martini exactly as good as a rail gin martini and love them both equally.

This is a gorgeous martini. This is a gorgeous expensive martini. This is a gorgeous expensive martini in a £75 glass.

Part of my planning - the unhinged Gantt chart in finger paint and crayon that makes my existence possible - is, you’ll be relieved to know, a cocktail at six.

I’m happy to neck espresso, pull all nighters, wheedle and lie to editors and shovel all domestic responsibilities into the oubliette of ‘the work’, but I can’t do it without booze.

This is a working definition of ‘self awareness’.

The drinks fridge is just behind my right shoulder. I use a Herman Miller Aeron Operator Chair, customised with rollerblade wheels. I can shoot myself 5m across the room to the coffee machine at will. And yes, I am actively considering a catheter.

But I’ve got the drniks fridge set so I just need to spin. All the gear is on a tray, on the bench over the fridge. Nobody can say I haven’t considered maximum efficiency.

I CAN MAKE A MARTINI WITHOUT STANDING UP

But tonight I took it too far.

You remember the last scenes in Goodfellas?

It’s a masterful piece of Scorsese direction. Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, is in the full, ice-sweat grip of cocaine paranoia. He knows the mob are closing in on him, the FBI have a wire taped to him and he can hear the Police helicopter hovering. It’s perfect. He leans forward, looking up through the windscreen... up at the chopper... sweating bullets. Eyes scanning the sky like overclocked radar...

…and then the voiceover...

“Basically, my plan was this: I’d go get a job, I’d get a Cadillac, I’d get a few bucks, and I’d give the rest to Jimmy...”

It’s the most masterfully perceptive piece of screenwriting I know. The juxtaposition of those words over the face of Liotta. Desperate, but powered through everything by the last artificial fillip of chemical hope. As driven as he is deluded...

The pace of the cutting and the monologue racks up... relentless... unbearable. Gabbling faster and faster. And as a viewer - in common with anyone who’s ever watched addiction unwrap* - you find yourself experiencing that awful precipitous realisation ….

“You have a plan. And it has less zero hope of happening”.

Sometimes I think of deadlines like Henry Hill thinks of NYPD choppers. Hovering, beating... cranking up the pace.

I digress. I needed a drink and fast. So...

Basically, my plan was this:

I knew enough of the maths of a Martini that I could build one from first principles and be back at my keyboard in a matter of seconds. Frozen glass, check. We’re going for a Montgomery so 1:15. 5g chilled NP vermouth using a bulb pipette, followed by 75g of -7ºC Berry Bros. & Rudd No.3 from the freezer. I knew the gin temperature would come up, that’s obvious, but not by enough to screw things up.

Stirring from room temp ingredients drops the temperature at the expense of dilution so, by the time you’ve dropped what’s in your mixing vessel to -5c you’ve probably added 15-20% of melt water.

Are you getting this?

I got chilled water in the fridge.

5g + 75g = 80g.

Let’s not go crazy... 15%.

15% of 80 ... that’s ...

What the fuck is that noise? Is that some kind of fucking chopper?

Twelve! Fucking twelve!

Twelve g of fridge cold water is not going to mess with the system.

It’s gonna work. That won’t raise the temperature beyond, like what? Half a degree.

Jesus... even Jimmy’s gonna go for a -4 martini.

Cut.

Thing is... it was shit. It was a dreadful, dreadful drink. Correct in every principle but lacking any iota of the ritual that gives it all meaning. Hollow. Meaningless. Tooth-grinding, neon-hot vapidity. It was mathematically, proportionally perfect. The perfect plan. But it was never, ever going to survive contact with reality.

I poured it down the sink.

I took a deep breath and mixed a Daiquiri.

A lemon Daiquiri. Shaken in the Alessi.

It took a deep breath and a couple of extra seconds to turn round the timeline crunch. The collapsing telescope, motorway pileup, Hitchcock zoom, trainwreck. It took some breathing and a little ritual to turn it all around and open it up.

God it feels good. Now all I have to do is sort out this copy.

So.

Basically, my plan is this:…

*Scorcese’s own relationship with coke is a matter of comprehensive record

A few weeks ago I did a presentation on cocktails, in the process of which I misplaced my ‘Alessi’. I was bereft.

I know. It sounds odd.

In theory, the only thing worse than a 3-part cocktail shaker with a built in strainer is one with a gimmick brand. It’s the kind of design overkill that makes life miserable on about a thousand different levels. It’s going to leak... the lid’s going to jam... it’ll be a bastard to clean. Why the hell don’t we just stick to the ‘Boston’ tins like eighteen generations of professional barmen?

The thing is, though. There’s one particular cocktail that I love unreasonably, for which the Alessi 870 is perfect.

I’ve written elsewhere about the Daiquiri I had in Venice. Yes, of course the Daiquiri is a Cuban, rum-based sour - Jesus, it’s named after the town where Bacardi had their factory - but the way it was served to me was as a clean, simple aperitivo, made with Sicilian lemons instead of Cuban limes. Incredible calm and stylish. I make it with a very pure and uncomplicated light rum (the one I was served was Bacardi which is effectively neutral, but I use Eminente Claro which is still near-clear, just a tad more nuanced.)

It’s weird, but that particular combination seems, to me at least, more Italian than anything else.

So the Alessi L 870/50 Cocktail Shaker in 18/10 Stainless Steel. Mirror Polished, Silver, 500 ml, designed in 1957 by Carlo Mazzeri & Luigi Massoni, might, to you, be just the most utterly predictably naff bit of 1990’s Conran Shop yuppie tat, but to me, utterly mission critical.

It expresses a kind of raffish, rackety sprezzatura, but also the cocktail itself requires a premade sour mix and, being a sour, a shake rather than a stir.

The ‘870’ has a neat 500ml capacity, so it’s full of ice faster than a Mil-spec ‘Boston’. That means it’s also great for a ‘45ml sour mix:120ml rum’ load. That’s gratifyingly larger than a single glass. I pre-make the lemon juice/syrup mix and filter it precisely so there’s no requirement for fine straining. The built-in strainer is entirely sufficient. And the last 3rd of the mixed cocktail can happily sit on the ice, ready for expedient refills.

It’s pretty much ideal.

Anyway. They’re dirt cheap on Ebay. God knows... probably dozens of tragic old yuppie admen selling off their last remaining effects to make a few quid after final job loss and catastrophic divorce... but it’s a design classic for a reason, and I’m glad I’ve managed to replace mine for £29.00.

I’m just topping up from my ‘870’ now and wondering about making up another batch of sour mix from the Sicilian lemons I found in Waitrose.

But, whatever happens... if I ever tell you I’m looking for a Philippe Starck ‘Juicy Salif’ lemon squeezer... just shoot me.

I’ve been working for weeks on a something to put on the opening page of the new book.

I wanted to dedicate it to my Dad... but then I always do. Every time I have to mark something significant in my life I think about him.

Dad had an absolute lock on unconditional love. It was like he invented it. At a conservative estimate I reckon I was 3742 different individual disappointments to him. But the bugger never let on. He was always supportive, kind and loving.

I’d love to say ‘To My Father, who would have been proud of this book’, but... honestly? What would be the point? Dad was proud the first time I shat in his shoe. He found ways to be proud when I failed, repeatedly, proud when I was a complete arse, and he never stopped.

I go through this process every time.

“Dad would have been proud”.

LOL.

I hope I continue to do this. It’s a truer memory of him and a better memorial than...

“To Grant”.

I sort of wanted to dedicate it ‘To anyone who’s even drunk with me’. Anyone who’s ever shared in the complicated ritual of self-intoxication truly deserves recognition. Every one of them. And then I suppose I should add all those I hope to drink with in the future. Drinking is all about the anticipation of the next one... so a life of happy imbibing stretching out in endless horizon is the joy that keeps us all alive.

“To everyone I have, or hope to drink with”

True... but trite.

Johnnie Carson is suppose to have said...

“Happiness is having a rare steak, a bottle of whiskey, and a dog to eat the rare steak.”

I like the idea of a gag... but this one is about whiskey. So I needed something better.

My mate Elliott suggested I might use one of the only two jokes that work for Classicists…

“ A Centurion walks into a cocktail bar...

Can I get a Martinus?

Don’t you mean a Martini?

Mate, if I wanted two I’d have asked.”

That, I like. It was the lead suggestion for a while... then I read something in a substack from Il Pelagi. An episode in the whole James Bond cocktail lore I’d never heard before. It’s where Fleming got the idea of the Vesper.

I’ll quote directly...

Suddenly, there’s a whole new layer of context.

II.6.

Christian Church. 1611

II.6.a.

Vespers. The sixth of the Canonical Hours of the breviary, said or celebrated towards evening; = evensong n. 1; also, the time of this office.

Whoah! So actually, the original ‘Vesper’ wasn’t necessarily the blend of Gin, Vodka and Kina Lillet that cocktail nerds have been arguing about ever since Vesper Lynd copped a headshot in the book. It’s much more important. It’s vespers…

It’s a religious office marking the end of day.

That is, to say the very least, significant.

Because I live in Cambridge, I can nip out to an excellent evensong any evening I fancy and in spite of being the most godless arse that ever lived, they let me draw peace and calm from it.

But until I read Il Pelagi’s substack I’d never made the connection.

Tonight I took a direct Tanqueray Gibson as my ‘Vesper’. What was yours?

And the dedication for the book?

Do you think I can get away with ...

Deus, in adiutórium meum inténde?

I’ll be honest. I don’t have much time for promotional gimmicks, but this one was exceptional on about half a dozen levels.

First. I heard about it from . I’ve only ever encountered the guy online but he seems to be the Right Sort of Chap. He drinks martinis, knows far too much about them, takes great pictures of them... and his handle has tantalising resonances of deep ocean fish. That, as they say, is a guy you’re gonna want to listen to. When he mentioned the No3, a promotional item from Berry Brothers & Rudd, my interest was perked

Second. I first encountered Berry Brothers & Rudd No3 Gin at Dukes. had taken me there to have a martini mixed by Alessandro. As he mixed, he talked about the custom-made gin he favoured and gestured over his shoulder in the direction of No 3 St. James’ St. where, about 200m away, Berry Bros & Rudd (BB&R) had run their wine merchant since 1698.

There was something about the way he did that. “They’re my neighbours. Of course I use their gin”. I left the place, predictably on Cloud 9 but indelibly marked with No 3*.

Third. When BB&R decided to issue a promotional glass, they didn’t bugger about. They went to Nude. You may not have heard of them but, if you’ve had a drink in even a half-hip bar or restaurant in London over the last five years or so, you’ve drunk from Nude glassware and probably wondered ‘Oooh. I wonder if I should buy some of these?’

Fourth. The engineering. They approached a proper engineer. Dr. Junfeng Yang — a lecturer at the University of Leeds and specialist in thermodynamics. Call me a nerd, call me OCD, but I want a Doctor of Thermodynamics involved in my drink at every possible opportunity.

And look what they did! I’m not a fan of the coupe as a delivery mechanism ... in fact I’m frankly prepared to punch out the next person who brings up Marie Antoinette’s tits in a conversation about glassware. I’m sorry... it’s sexist, unwholesome and in the end, utter bollocks.

But look at the length of the stem. Thermodynamics aside, that extra height imbues an incredible elegance. The balance between height and width is textbook. The stem is *precisely* as thin as you can get away with in crystal glass that can actually be handled by humans. On a simple visual level, you’ve got to say that’s a little blinder.

Now. Let’s get into the gears and spanners bit. Look at the picture and notice that slightly darker blue area at the bottom of the bowl.

Damn right.

That’s a plug of solid borosilicate glass. Look at it another way - the exterior curve is subtly different to the inside, ‘flat bottom’ profile, to the extent that there are several grammes of solid glass. Solid glass that will, after being stored in a freezer, hold cold for ages.

I mean... it feels sacriligious to bring it up, but this is the same principle as the beer glasses they used to keep in a freezer at TGI Fridays. If your beerglass is effectively a kilogramme of freezer-storedPyrex, it’s going to chill the absolute buggery out of your cheap-ass Bud Light and keep it there while you try to seduce your colleague in HR, fail, and retire weeping to your damp flat. Alone and talking to a pot plant.

Sorry... went off-piste there.

So this glass *will* hold cold like a heavy, cheap, moulded glass, while looking like a high end, classy blown one.

So... Fifth. I think the promotion ended ages ago. It’s sort of forgotten. But if you go here... you can get 2 glasses for £153 ... which sounds high, until you realise that you get a bottle of gin with it (£40 in Waitrose) which brings things back into reasonable perspective. It’s not like you’re not going to drink it anyway (see footnote)

So... Sixth. I can see why they made the whole thing a little bit blue. God, I worked in Brand Consultancy for years... I see what you’re doing! But I’m prepared to live with it. Because a) the engineering is SO on the button and begrudgingly, b) I bloody love their gin.

“In recent tests” as they say, the glass performed brilliantly. I made martinis Alessandro style with frozen No3 , but the glass held cold for at least two refills.

Light, it is not. But the balance is near perfect.

Truly. The No3 glass is the Wonder of the Age.

If Nude ever get round to manufacturing a clear version, for general distribution, we’ll all be buying them by the half dozen

(I have no commercial relationship with BBR, BTW. I had to buy my own pair. and nobody, unfortunately, subsidises my drinking)

*Every bottle of No3 has a metal key set into the front of the triangular light blue bottle. I have prised the key out of every bottle I’ve drunk and put them on a key ring.

I’ve changed the keyring three times. Each bigger, obviously.

Initially this amused me. Recently I’ve begun to feel like Jacob bloody Marley

I think I inherently distrust the entire idea of perfection. Much wank is spoken or performed in the Cult of Perfectibility - the fallacious belief that ‘perfect’ is to be desired or can ever be achieved. Perhaps what’s spoiled the idea of perfect is lifestyle journalism, Surely the most slaveringly decerebrate headline is that which promises “The Perfect…’ anything.

This prejudice means I will never be able to offer my own hot take on The Perfect Martini Glass, because I can’t believe such a thing could ever exist and because, after years of persistent drinking, I have to maintain a suite of near-perfect ones in order to meet any need

The most complicated reason I can’t choose is that every glass is loaded with significance. I can’t even begin to parse out how much of my response to the glass is physiological, or aesthetic. How much cultural and how much purely emotional.

So here are my go-to five…

Richard Brendon’s glassware is light, thin and shockingly tough if handled with a modicum of care. I don’t ‘chuck’ mine in the dishwasher - I place them carefully. But you’ve got to have a fair amount of confidence to do that with a £75 glass.

In fact, I’ve never lost a glass in the dishwasher. Plenty have gone during an expansive gesture while storytelling at table… but the dishwasher is absolutely the best place for top notch modern glassware. Traditional silica glass was susceptible to ‘thermal shock’. It would expand when hot and contract when cold and sometimes… if for example you poured a cold drink into a warm glass, the expansion/contraction was more than the glass could take and it shattered from the internal stresses. I think we all know how that feels. It’s probably why we drink in the first place.

Modern borosilicate glass is resistant to thermal shock. It’s flexible and it distributes heat easily through itself. Now I don’t think for a moment either you or I would pour a frozen martini into a warm glass - we’re not barbarians - but the beauty of gossamer-thin borosilicate is that, when you pour frozen alcohol in, the glass immediately freezes. You can keep the glasses in the freezer if you wish… but it’s not actually necessary.

Brendon makes very fine borosilicate glasses but he’s also a tremendous designer. His glasses are austere, elegant and restrained. His martini glass is pretty much the perfect, expression of what a martini glass is supposed to be… but an impossibly delicate silverpoint sketch of it. If it was any more pared back it wouldn’t actually exist.

I first encountered Brendon’s work when he collaborated on a fait-tout wine glass for Jancis Robinson. I took out a mortgage to buy half a dozen and they’ve survived 4 years of hard punishing work. But as well as his ‘ur-martini glass’ he’s collaborated with Jeremy King to make custom martini glasses for each of his restaurants. Subtly different versions for the Park, Arlington and now Simpson’s… between you and me, I’m aiming to nick the full set.

I’ve written at length elsewhere about Libbey’s classic cocktail glasses which, if they weren’t the absolute first of the conical icons (probably Lobmeyr) were certainly the ones that set the trend for a generation of American drinkers. Apart from their bomb-proofness and excellent cold-holding capabilities they are also just such solid pieces of American engineering. The glass, a tough ‘Pyrex’ style originally used for lightbulbs and searchlight lenses, is pressed into a mould rather than delicately blown and spun. Huge machines are involved. It has structural resonances with the classic Coca-Cola bottle or the headlamps on a truck. As with any conical, stemmed glass, form follows function… but the functionality is just so butch. In spite of its undeniable elegance, it feels like a glass for a Drinker rather than a Dilettante.

1 Club Row has played a blinding cocktail game from the start. I particularly love that the list is split in two. All the smokey, dark, contemplative ones are presented as ‘after dinner’ which feel to me the perfect place for a Vieux Carré or a Sazerac, the pre-prandials are the classic pipe-openers, martinis, Manhattans, a Negroni and a straight-edge Daiquiri. But they were also the first restaurant to serve me a small martini in a gorgeous little short glass. It’s thick enough to hold the cold which, after all it doesn’t have to do for very long. It’s a nice touch when the staff at The Dover, Donovan or Vibrato change your glass half way through, but, by that point, your mini-martini is finished. Still, it’s a great thing to keep about, if only for that transactional point in the evening when you find yourself thinking ‘I really shouldn’t have another’ but you really can’t argue with a half.

John Jenkins have been making machine and handmade glassware for bars and hotels since 1901 and their clients are basically the list of places you might ever aspire to drink a martini. For the sake of brevity I’ll mention just two. If you’re lucky enough to have a Martini made for you by Alessandro Palazzi at Duke’s it’ll be built in a John Jenkins ‘Connoisseur’. If, though, you sneak into the back bar at Osteria Vibrato and have Jack make you a Gibson, it’ll come in a John Jenkins ‘Havana’.

It’s still a cone, but taller and thinner, and to balance, the stem is shorter. Because they’re so focussed on commercial use, both glasses are a little more robustly built than, for example, the Richard Brendons. They need to go into a glass washer at the end of service so they’ve got a touch of Mil-spec about them… but the extra heft also means they have more thermal mass. They freeze down well and ‘hold-the-cold’. This makes them perfect for the ‘half-way-swap’. The slicker-than-the-path-to-hell legerdemain by which your glass is changed as soon as the frost on the outside dissipates.

You need two frozen John Jenkins for each martini… which is why I keep half a dozen in my freezer.

Harry’s in Venice is such a glorious room, in such a spectacular location and so laden with lore that one might forgive them anything. They’re Italian so you sort of expect a ‘direct’ martini, but their practice of pouring in advance and keeping them on trays in a freezer under the bar is a ballsy move. They’re serving what might be one of the most significant martinis in the world whilst denying both themselves and their customers any contextualising ritual. No ice, no careful measuring, no shakers or stirrers… effectively zero interaction with the barman. It’s astonishing. It really shouldn’t work but it does.

I still remember the first time I ordered one. The barman, as slick as a matinee idol in his white mess jacket didn’t even break eye contact. He just slid open what appeared to be the glass top of an ice-cream freezer and reached down as if rootling for a Calippo, Then up it came, a tiny frosted glass looking much like the kind you’d keep your toothbrush in at a Holiday Inn.

He slid it toward me across the polished wood, teeth sparkling, and rotated it. Jesus… it’s got a logo.

A sort of chubby 1930s Michelin-esque barman character, pouring into three glasses. It’s a good logo, for sure. Strong, dynamic diagonal… a touch of Fascist futurism… undercut by cartoon charm. Very Venetian. But I don’t even want to see ‘Guinness’ on my pint. I want to drink it not advertise it.

But it’s a beautiful drink and I find myself loving it. Truth is that there’s a lot more going on… so much so that I’m filled with forgiveness - because I’m now convinced it’s all about the arse.

Think about it for a second. There are maybe 40 covers in Harry’s. Less than half a dozen stools at the bar. Hemingway came here dozens of times. He must have sat right here at least once. And Sean Connery… and Humphrey Bogart. Dickie Greenleaf sat here and he didn’t even exist. C’mon…. Think about it…my worthless posterior and Grace Kelly’s Actual Arse. There’s an intimacy with greatness there that no other venue could dream of emulating.

So yes. There needs to be a Harry’s Bar logoed tooth-mug in the freezer too. It might have a naff ‘souvenir’ quality too it but, dammit, they wouldn’t let me take the stool home and I want to remember being there.

Thing is... I can’t be without them. Any evening, my livener can be subtly enhanced by the design or the emotional load of one or other of them.

I need them all.

Truth is, I secretly abhor the very notion of a low-alcohol cocktail and take a fairly dim view of those who do not. The whole point of cocktails ... what distinguishes them from desserts or smoothies, is the thoroughly grown up belt of strong liquor. Real cocktails do just enough to ethanol to make it drinkable and nothing more.

The other element that helps them go down is ritual. Which is what makes tonight’s offering so interesting.

Into your best frozen highball glass, place a stack of ice. Pour over a splash of Angostura followed by the squeezings of half a lime, then go to the very back of the drinks fridge and haul out a Schweppe’s Indian Tonic and a Schweppe’s Ginger Ale - full-fat of course...

Digression. There is something so brilliant about the ancient ‘mixers’. I know, a thousand small artisanal makers have created new and more interesting versions but the whole damn point of them is that they’re sui generis and fixed in the collective memory by time. A tonic water curated by a couple of man-buns in Clapton is about as useful a contribution to the gaity of nations as a chef’s ‘take’ on Worcestershire Sauce. It’s supposed to taste of the the Golf Club bar. It’s supposed to taste like the stuff your Nan had with her gin. If you like disruptors in the Adult No and Lo drink space, you’ll probably take ‘House Tommy K’ with your Gourmet burger and we can have no further contact.

I like the little tins, because they’re easy to hide in the fridge and they get really cold. Really, of course, they should come in the little bottles. The ones with a ground ‘collar’ around the widest part where they’ve rubbed against each other in the crate. Where they’ve been collected from a hundred pub tables, had the Lambert & Butler fag-ends shaken out and been returned to the bottler for refilling. God ... for the hiss and rattle of the crown cap!

Pour in both mixers at once, pausing half way up to let the effervescence subside a little. Straws. because by drawing from the bottom of the glass you pull the drink down through the ice. Garnish with a slice of lime because we’re all ready on the slick path to hell.

This is the drink they used to make for Adrian Gill, who, from around his 30th year was a committed, and by all accounts faithful Friend of Bill’s. So, ‘For a variety of reasons’ it was called an AA.

If I’m taking a night off (who am I kidding?), if I need to slow down or if, like this evening, I fancy something before The Hour, then this is the one. Sure, it’s firing blanks, but it’s got full liturgical drama and an origin myth you could hang a wet towel on.

Is it a cocktail?

Make one - a full-dress, Ceremonial AA - and let me know.

I’m at an interesting phase with the book. First pass edits and the like. It’s a phase I really enjoy and one where changes and improvements still happen. Today, I was working through some notes from the brilliant Rob, on a section about glassware in North By Northwest, in which he quite unexpectedly flagged ...

“3. 3. • Having referred to the 20th Century Limited train, is it worth mentioning the cocktail named after the train (first recorded in the 1937 Café Royal book)?”

WT actual F?

I had absolutely missed this one.

There it is, in Tarling’s original Cafe Royal Cocktail Book, named after “The most famous train in the world” and credited to Charles A Tuck

Tuck was a London bartender and Chairman of the UK Bartenders Guild who, from 1950 was head bartender at the Piccadilly Hotel. In 1967 he published Cocktails and Mixed Drinks which includes the Twentieth Century. Rather refreshingly, he makes no effort to claim it.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

2/5 Dry Gin

1/5 Creme de Cacao

1/5 Lillet

1/5 Lemon Juice

Shake

As we’re all aware, any pre-80s recipe mentioning Lillet puts us into a world of pain because it would have been a reference to Kina Lillet, a quinine-heavy version of the aperitif that was discontinued in 1986, to the eternal disgust of Vesper botherers.

So we have to trade in Cocchi ‘Americano’ which is the accepted modern equivalent.

It really is a cracking cocktail. The idea of combining the chocolate flavour of the creme de cacao with that equal quantity of fresh lemon juice is frankly, weirder than Martin Landau’s subsequent performance as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. But, like Landau, it actually works. Neither flavour predominates.

The 20th Century Limited ran from Grand Central to Lasalle Street station in Chicago from 1902 to 1967. The trip took 20hrs but there were ‘observations cars’, a well equipped bar, a hairdresser and ‘secretarial services’ provided. All of which makes me even less happy about my shitty commute on the Cambridge Vomit Comet. There were also, crucially for the plots of both North By Northwest and The Band Wagon, a luxurious dining car, bunks and private sleeping rooms.

Rather pleasingly, the railway company used to give flowers and cologne to travellers as they boarded and ran scarlet carpets along the platform at stations, apparently the origin of the term ‘Red-carpet treatment’

So here’s my rather lovely 20th Century, in the Libbey #3601 - authentic for the dining car scenes - and, with a bit of luck, I’ll be able to sweep Eva Marie Saint up into my bunk in the final scene of the evening.

I love eating and drinking alone. Sure, a guest, a date, a ‘companion’ as reviewers primly call them, is a lovely thing to have, so the entire event is a collaborative celebration, coloured by conversation and interaction. But go solo and all that is stripped away. You have no choice but to concentrate on what you’re consuming, on your thoughts and on your surroundings. I’ve come to understand that a review written alone has an entirely different timbre to one where someone else was present. Meditative, forensic, inward- looking, maybe too focussed. An accompanied review is emotional; a solo one analytical. But once you get adjusted to the solitary vice, there’s only one place you want to sit. And that, without wishing to sound like some gin-ruined barroom existentialist, is ‘The Last Seat’.

It’s a function of their design that most bars are L-shaped. The main run faces outwards, an open space for conviviality. With barstools for dates, or standing space for maximum ‘crush’ service. One end of the bar must be open, so staff can get in and out. But at the other end, usually furthest from the door, there’s the short-run, the ‘return’ to use the architectural term. It’s usually three seats long. Unsuitable for couples, too small for a party, the last place the owners felt they could slam in a few extra seats and fill them with the loners. God’s own corner.

The Last Seat is at the end of the return, right against the wall, so it has a unique, comforting physicality. You sit, half turned and feel your back totally protected. You’re touching the bones of the place and you can let it embrace you, if that’s what you want.

Floating around the Internet, there’s a very low-fi, black and white sequence of Sinatra on one of his many TV specials. The set comprises, if memory serves, a cardboard ‘bar’ and a bad gobo projection. He’s singing ‘One For My Baby’ - possibly the definitive performance of his paean to lost love.

He sits, of course, in the The Last Seat - even though there are no others. It’s the perfect shot. We the viewers, are placed in the position of the regular drinkers. Happy, probably with a date, probably with somewhere to go afterwards, but we’re looking across the corner of the bar, full into his expressive, tortured face, past the impassive bulk of the barkeep’s shoulder… “Set ‘em up, Joe”… and a million Bobby Socksers melt, screaming at his yearning, heart-torn, weltschmerz, to clutch him to their collective bosom.

Of course, the Ultima Stool has plenty of opportunity to lean for support if the evening progresses the way you secretly know it will. But it’s also an absolutely ideal spot to be seen. Calm, enigmatic, romantic and fascinatingly self-contained. If you’re the kind of arse who packs a performatively intriguing volume in the jacket pocket as bait and conversational prompt, then there’s no better spot than The Last Seat from which to subtly flash it.

Then there’s the geometry. Every time the barman spins away from the hustle of the seething herd, there’s a 50% chance you’re in his field of vision. That’s the weird maths of sight-lines; why it never takes more than the first drink to be on friendly terms, when that’s what you need. But you can be thoroughly ignored too. I still have no idea how we telegraph this need. Some subtlety of body language, some coded physical signifier. Maybe I’ll ask the barman next time. I have a theory is that it’s about the qualities of my ‘slump’. Just a couple of degrees of angle change in the shoulders, a nano-shift in weight forward onto the elbows. A second longer focussing on the garnish in your cocktail and a professional can tell you’ve entered the meditative phase. But that may be the drink talking

I had a friend, years ago, an American with a colourful, possibly imagined history in ‘Covert Ops’. He swore that The Last Seat provided ‘tactical advantage’. He reckoned you could fade into the background for surveillance, you could see under the bar by the cash drawer to check for weapons but most importantly you could ‘cover all the PIEs’. I loved him for his acronyms as much as his weird paranoias - he meant ‘Points of Ingress/Egress’ and I could only see pork, jelly and a hard-boiled egg. Secretly, though, I was thrilled how much it resonated. That seductively powerful feeling of slipping a little down the buttress of the wall and into the collar of the jacket, lowering the eyes, tucking a little closer in behind the drink and disappearing from the world. Even if, for me, ‘covert’ simply meant that if, rendered shabby, I was the last to leave, nobody noticed.

I guess that’s my favourite thing about it. Drinking with someone else makes me gregarious and expansive. Alone I become introspective and considered, but slumped in The Last Seat, I get new context. My internal script is rewritten by James Ellroy or Le Carré …and that’s infinitely more entertaining than reality.

I love how online conversations send me off on journeys...

Hold on. I feel I should read that in a ‘radio’ voice...

 EXT. DAY. 

TIM - “Hi. I’m Tim Hayward, and I’m on A Journey, to discover...

Why does every commissioning editor want a bloody journey. Why do they want us to leave? Discover what? That my brain dissolved three pitches ago?

What I mean is those afternoon trips through old books and the backpassages of the web, tailing, in this case, James Salter.

He was, by all accounts, God’s Own American. Cartoon handsome, West Point educated, then a fighter ace in the Korean war and then... well basically becoming the Writer’s Writer, moving to Colorado. Skiing, climbing, hanging out in what appears to have been a 30 yr long Ralph Lauren ad, shot by Slim Aarons.

In his one book about food, co-written with his predictably superb wife, it becomes apparent that he led an enviable life, that included drinking, apparently, 8700 martinis.

More controversial is his recipe. Initially conventional…

“First, use a good English gin—Beefeater or Tanqueray both ninety-four proof, are preferred. The dry vermouth should be Noilly Prat or Martini & Rossi…In a pitcher or shaker put about six or eight cubes of hard ice cracked by hand (Place the cube in the palm of your hand and hit it smartly with a heavy spoon). It is important that the ice be cracked so as to present the maximum cold surface to the gin and vermouth—a martini is and should be a slightly diluted drink. Pour one or one and a half small capfuls of vermouth over the ice. And enough gin to fill, or nearly fill the martini glass…Stir or shake until the contents are very cold. A martini that is not absolutely icy is a failure...”

… it runs suddenly and brilliantly off piste. Like a high-G diving turn, throwing us off his tail…

“…Shake a Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce bottle, then quickly remove the cap and with it, dash a faint smudge of the contents—far less than a drop—into the bottom of the shaker before beginning. It adds the faint, unidentifiable touch of greatness.”

My own ‘writer’s life’ is less perfect. But it does allow me to spend a quiet afternoon thinking about savouriness in martinis, going back over notes, chasing references, making martinis and testing them, while pretending to take photographs.

Which is why you’re seeing this.

There is no record that Salter was even vaguely anglophile. Why the hell would he be? Having avoided being shot down, he had done even better out of his country than it had out of him and I don’t begrudge him a second of it.

But I bet he never had a bag of scampi fries.

This is where I indisputably win. I couldn’t walk into a pilot’s bar, boast about my Boom-and-zoom, demonstrate my Flat scissor with waving hands and mime out-turning a MIG-15 in my F86. In later years, it turned out, I couldn’t climb a mountain, hold my own at Hollywood parties or look good in trunks. But what I can do is walk into the pub round the corner, with my head held high and ask the barman in a loud, clear voice for a foil scrotum of packing chips that smell like a fishing smack.

I once mentioned my predilection for them online and received a strange and secretive message via a back-channel. It turned out to be my own Deep Throat. A man who’d worked at whatever gigantic food processing monolith then manufactured Scampi Fries.

“They were the most expensive thing we produced. A total Loss-Leader,”

“..all the prestige snacks were made with loads of MSG and a few micrograms of artificial flavouring, he whispered through a handkerchief over the receiver, but for Scampi Fries we were importing tonnes of Nam Pla and lemon grass”.

I’d feel vindicated, but weirdly I’d rather not be.

For years I’ve enjoyed the frisson of knowing that I could whip up the finest martini in the known world and that nothing could go better with it than a snack you could only buy in the worst pubs and that would, reliably make 65% of my readers combust in a combination of hauteur and disgust. Only I knew this. It was my secret.

I don’t blame Salter. Poor bastard. He couldn’t have known. And I wish him nothing but good, but there is no better snack with a Lea & Perrin’s tinctured martini, than a pack of Scampi Fries and I will fight any man who disagrees.

Particularly Salter.

Though I might ask him to take his shirt off and oil up.

Cocktail origin myths are often blurred and imprecise, but The Zombie is different.

It was actually invented by someone, at a place and time that’s indisputable. It didn’t emerge out of meetings of cultures, the intermixing of age old drinking traditions. It was designed, by a bloke who owned a bar, who wanted to attract customers and understood a lot about the way people drink, spend money and enjoy themselves. For me, it feels like one of the first cocktails that’s a pure product of marketing imagination, and it became a viral phenomenon.

It was created by Donn Beach, who opened the Don’s Beachcomber Bar in Hollywood in 1933 and probably the originator of the Tiki trend in cocktails. He’d travelled extensively around the pacific and his highly ‘themed’ establishment served rinks that used fruit and fruit juices more heavily than hitherto, often rum based and plastered with visual cues of ‘tropical’ exoticism.

The American Bartenders Association record the original recipe as ...

5 ml (1.5 oz) Jamaican dark rum

45 ml (1.5 oz) Puerto Rican gold rum

30 ml (1 oz) Demerara overproof rum

20 ml (0.75 oz) Fresh lime juice

15 ml (0.5 oz) Falernum

15 ml (0.5 oz) Donn’s Mix (2 parts fresh yellow grapefruit juice, 1 part cinnamon syrup)

1 tsp Grenadine

1 dash Angostura

6 drops absinthe

It’s a clever recipe. Extremely easy to drink. It’s not hugely strong but the key thing is that it’s designed to feel like it is. There are the 3 rums (though they add up to a normal double). There’s a homeopathic quantity of absinthe. This put the fear of God into Americans who’d returned from France after WW1 believing that could drive you mad/ blind. Only tiny quantities were needed to give the characteristic smell of danger.

You couldn’t build a drink to better express the idea of fucking you up... well... unless, as Beach did, you restricted it to 2 glasses per customer, served it in a skull and called it a ‘Zombie’

Beach varied his recipe over the years and barmen all over the world took the idea and added their own refinements - all on the theme of danger and oblivion.

This ceramic Zombie mug was imported from Japan by the Otagiri Company founded in in 1954 in San Francisco. They were supplied to Trader Vic’s restaurants, a chain that took the Tiki Tradition and turned it into an international phenomenon. It was originally designed so you could serve it with a small candle fitted inside the ‘face’ for added spookiness. Making the drink into a slushy with crushed ice added impact and further quietly insured you wouldn’t actually get blind drunk until you’d drunk eight. They wanted to buy a lot of drinks, to be drunk/sober enough to tip generously when you paid the bill and they didn’t want you vomiting on the table.

History doesn’t record who first extracted the overproof rum and served it on top in an inverted lime shell where it could be lit. It’s a terrific piece of theatre and a nice re-use of a waste product. And we don’t know what genius worked out you could flick ground cinnamon into the flames for a sparkly flare. But I’ve got to imagine they made great tips.

You might not want to drink one, but you have to admire the Zombie.

Where the Martini is the purest expression of Modernism in a glass - beauty through austerity and form rigorously following function - the Zombie is the purest expression of post-war American consumerism. A cocktail with chrome and fins.

About 3 other people will care that I spent too much time a while back, trying to track down the type of glass used by Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint in the movie North By Northwest (1959).

You will recall that the pursuit forked unexpectedly when I realised that there were actually *two* glasses featured;

Glass 1. The conical classic ‘Martini’ glass in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York and

Glass 2. The smaller glass from which Roger O Thornhill is drinking a Gibson when he meets Eve Kendall for the first time on the 20th Century Limited.

Glass 2 is much more like a modern ‘Nick & Nora’ in shape, though the stems are similar and I’d become quite convinced that these were two entirely different kinds of glass, particularly when research indicated that Glass 1 was a Libbey #8876 and Glass 2 was a #3601. Of course. Entirely different glasses, easy to differentiate by the modern cocktail obsessive as early versions of the two acceptable vessels for your cocktail.

But then I started digging even further. The conical #8876 appears for the first time in a 1956 Libbey catalogue for ‘institutional’ buyers. They specify bars, fountains, hotels, liners and *trains*. and conveniently, the #3601 and the smaller #3600 appear right alongside it. But, like an idiot, I hadn’t put this into context.

The ‘retail’ catalogue from Spring of the same year, shows the range of glasses for the home bar, with only one glass - the #3601 - being called ‘Cocktail’.

Returning to the ‘56 ‘Institutional catalogue we can now see the head paragraph which, read in context, is introducing, *to the trade*, a “novel 6 ounce glass has been most successfully used to merchandise a better value “King Size” cocktail.”

And now, quite suddenly, looking at the 3 ‘Cocktail’ glasses in a row, I can see design similarities. The angle of the cone is a little different. There are differences in stem design... but it seems pretty clear to me now that, as far as the manufacturer was concerned, the new #8876 was actually a ‘King Size’ #3601.

OK. This might not keep you awake at night, but here’s the thing. The iconic martini glass... the triangle shape... subject of a million neon signs and even one or two book covers might actually have a traceable birth point.

All earlier Libbey catalogues going back to pre-war, feature a Glass 2. A #3601. A ‘cocktail’. But that’s it. A standard (worryingly a 3 /12oz standard) cocktail glass. There are wider ones but they’re always billed as ‘Champagne’.

Then there’s a promotional push in 1956 to promote upselling, to commercial bars, of a novel 6oz ‘King Size’ serving with a special glass and ... Bang. The 1959 film that fetishizes the martini also effectively documents the birth of the iconic glass. Roger O. Thornhill doesn’t arse about with tiny cocktails. No... he drinks from the All New, ‘King Size’ glass. Can you imagine the effect that Cary Grant, swigging from that glass had on the drinking public?

Yes... I know about the 1925 Lobmeyr ‘Ambassador’ ... but as a massively luxury object, originally designed for champagne, it might easily have died a lonely death.

Sometimes we need to credit the popularisers as much as the originators. I mean, when you think that without Jill Norman and the all-new Penguin Paperbacks, Elizabeth David might have remained a Vogue columnist. Without Tom Cruise in Risky Business we might have forgotten Ray Ban Wayfarers in about 1950.

Huzzah for the #8876 and poor, bewildered Roger Thornhill.

These are tiny issues, significant to few. But they while away a happy Hour.

This is the ‘Bravura’ which was popular in the ‘80s. It took me a while to track a couple down and I can honestly say it is one of the most disturbing objects I’ve encountered in this project.

That stem is curves for no practical reason at all, apart, maybe, from swerving the place where your fingers naturally want the stem to be. A queasy bait-and-switch. There’s a temptation to seize the curve like the handle of a tea mug... which half works... but also shoots your drink up your arm. You either have to hold it close to the rim - the way you’re never supposed to hold a glass - or you kind of ‘cup’ your fingers, suggestively under and around the bowl. You know... so you can really get things up to whatever room temperature is in a sweaty singles bar, with maximum efficiency.

This being the 80’s they also made a double bowled ‘Margarita’ version which has the distinction of looking like a diseased udder. It wouldn’t get past the algorithm if I shot it.

I think they made some with clear stems which were probably the least egregious, but they also did them in ‘amber’, ‘ruby’, ‘aqua’ and this ‘cobalt’.

It’s rare that design can actually effect your emotions quite so negatively. No matter what you pour into it, this glass expresses a combination of despair and desperation.

Last night I finally got to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Magnolia’, which has almost certainly warped my perceptions a bit... but so much of his mise-en-scene telegraphs a cokey, edge-of-sanity, riskiness. Some terrific shots of bars, TV studios and shop interiors where everything is teetering on the edge of, not just ‘kicking off’, but detonating. I’m not sure if it’s just association or something inherent in the design of the period but this glass has it in spades. It’s the kind of glass a spiked drink comes in. It requires Michael Mann lighting. It can only be grasped with a hairy-backed hand with rings, a heavy bangle and a linen jacket sleeve pushed up. Or a hand full of crimson false talons. Certainly problematic attitudes around consent.

I’m not sure Henry Gibson drinks from a Bravura in the bar scene, I’ll have to go back and check. But I know Tom Cruise would have.

Perhaps that’s what the colour is for. A cocktail should say “drink me”. In a cobalt ‘Bravura’ it says “If you’re feeling like this... you probably shouldn’t”.

The pinã colada (it translates as strained ‘pineapple’) is not, in itself a bad idea. It’s thought to have originated in Puerto Rico in the 1920s, basically a mixture of Bacardi rum, pineapple juice and coconut cream. That’s a high fat (30-40%) product extracted from coconut ‘meat’, by grating it and extracting the oil with hot water.

The International Bartender’s Association suggest 5 rum :5 pineapple juice: 3 coconut cream, strained, and either shaken with ice or blended with it into a ‘slushy’ texture. It’s a happy little mixture. Fun, sunny and infinitely accessible. Which is probably why bartenders couldn’t leave it alone.

I spent a fair while searching contemporary recipes for the pinã colada and combined some of the ‘twists’.

Many bars serve theirs in a pineapple. This requires a special tool, available cheaply online, that you screw down into the cut top of a medium-sized pineapple, like a polar explorer taking a core sample. It’s immensely satisfying and lifts out a spiral of perfectly cut pineapple rings. A hotel or cruise ship kitchen doing enough breakfasts and fruit salads would probably empty hundreds of fruit like this every day and deliver the ‘shells’ to the bar. Strangely, I couldn’t find a single recipe that suggested using the fresh pinapple extracted for anything other than garnish. All recommended branded, prepared juices. (On top of this, several sources suggested adding sugar syrup).

Most recipes add lime juice or ‘sour mix’, which, I suppose might counterbalance the enamel stripping sweetness of the pineapple juice.

All modern recipes seem to involve the blender, which does great things to the texture, but several creditable sources suggest adding both xanthan gum (an additive used as a thickener in commercial food production) and ‘foamer’. A neutral agent that replaces egg-white.

Some modern recipes suggest that the resultant smooth, fruity, deliciously fatty cream can be chucked into a whipper bottle and served as a cold foam.

I couldn’t resist chucking everything at this one, including all the nicknacks in the props box. It’s just so silly... so fun.

Because, fundamentally, here’s nothing wrong with any of these techniques. Most of them would be easy to achieve with the facilities in a reasonable sized hotel. Though xanthan and nitrous oxide whipping were originally found in industrial food production, they are now absolutely everyday tools of ‘Molecular’ chefs.

I’d love to think of cocktails as a diverse, happily inclusive continuum from the modernist purity of the martini or the manhattan right the way over to the ‘everything in the toolbox’ pinã colada... but do they really have anything in common?

It’s not unusual to observe that an extra-large ‘seasonal’ latte from Starbucks, decaffinated, sweetened, spiced, its texture enhanced and served in a disposable sippy-bucket doesn’t have much to do with a double espresso. You can argue with the barista whether or not it’s a ‘coffee’ or what Starbucks themselves refer to as a ‘the hot beverage you are about to enjoy’.

I suppose the martini and this terrifyingly mighty ‘pinã’ are related in the sense that they are happy and fortuitous ways to ingest liquor, but I can’t get round the thought that the pineapple number does dual service. In the same way that a pumpkin spice and nutmeg festive latte can be read as a hot milkshake, a full-dress modern PC is legitimately interpretable as a delicious boozy dessert.

Fresh, ripe lemons are easy to extract juice from just by slicing them in half and squeezing by hand, but a simple ‘reamer’ helps. This is usually a wooden device, carved to fit the inner curve of the rind, with a textured surface. A lemon half is held in one hand and the reamer applied with the other. For speed, the reamer shape might have its bottom flattened and be used, single-handed, standing on a flat surface. Hundreds of patents exist for variations on the basic reamer idea.

You’ve almost certainly used one of the glass ones, superbly functional with their little skirt of a saucer built in underneath, and nubby little teeth to catch the pips. They must have been designed after 1946. As, any food writer will tell you, lemons didn’t exist before Elizabeth David discovered them.

There are even electric juicers. Fearsome devices you can feed bags of citrus into and watch the juice stream out. Possibly a time-saver in a hotel kitchen when you’ve got to make fresh squeezed orange juice for breakfast service, but if your barman is squeezing fruit in bulk at the beginning of his shift, it’s time to find a better place to drink.

There is one squeezer though, that sits behind every serious bar that’s absolutely brilliant at wringing out every last drop of juice, without extracting bitterness from pith or peel. It handles a half a fruit at a time, which by remarkable coincidence usually means a very helpful 15g or so from most of the lemons or limes we can get our hands on in the UK.

It’s almost universally referred to as a Mexican Elbow. I say this without guilt, because I’d always called it a lemon-squeezer until my error was explained to me, one night in San Francisco by Encarna Santacruz, a bar-back from Juarez.

You lift up the handle, drop in your halved fruit, cut face down, and squeeze. It couldn’t be more perfect. The domed back of the device squeezes the fruit inside-out against the basket, some arrangement of slots or holes in the bottom filters out pips and bits. A stream of juice squirts straight into the glass and nine times out of ten, nothing squirts in your eye.

There are big versions of this lever arrangement designed to stand on the bench so you can really put some pressure on them but they, too, feel like something you might employ to make buckets of drinking juices. The Mexican elbow is a neat little hand tool that juices an elegant sufficiency, fresh and just when it’s needed.

My own elbow, pictured here, was designed and made by Damian Chandler (@dsjchandler) at his design company Studio Ella (@studio_ella). It’s cast in steel for reassuring heft. The cupped part of the top arm is marked with drinks measures and equipped with pourers, but most importantly it’s slightly bigger than standard. It takes half a large Sicilian lemon or half of a very small orange...

…which is precisely as far as I’m prepared to go in putting bloody fruit in my drink.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is the dullest cocktail picture you’ve ever seen and, I have to admit, I’m with you on that. I could have chucked a bunch of coloured lights in there, polished the tins or given it a bit of glitter, but to have done so would have missed the point.

This is my favourite shaker. It is, I think, the tenth I’ve owned. I gave a couple away to good people, lost at least one and all were, by the time they departed, unmourned.

The earliest one I can remember had belonged to my nan and was made of of smoked glass with a crackle pattern and a lid made of a sort of plastic fake bronze. It looked like something you might have bought after-shave in during the 70s. It broke when I shook ice in it.

There was a nice little silver-plate ‘Cobbler’style, German made, I think, from around 1935. The cobbler is the three-part type that’s shaped like a fat amphora. The top separates at the widest point to get ice and ingredients in, then once it’s been closed up and shaken, you can remove the smaller ‘cap’ and pour the drink through the strainer built into the neck. They’re cute. The cap doubles as a jigger measure, they never fly apart and shower everyone with Sex-on-the-Beach. Too often they jam shut, but they’re are ideal for use in student accommodation, festival tents or anywhere else where drink is needed but a full dinner jacket might not be available. Mine departed with the same girlfriend who gave it to me.

It may have been a rebound overreaction but I replaced that with the classic Alessi 870 (By Luigi Massoni & Carlo Mazzeri), a highly sought-after derivation of the cobbler, which looked outstanding on a shelf in my flat, attracted admiring comments from all and was, without shadow of a doubt, the most useless object I’d ever owned. It was too small, fiddly and made a noise like gastro-intestinal distress when shaken.

At some point I bought myself a ‘Parisian’. These are by normal aesthetic standards, the most beautiful shakers. The two parts marry in a union so perfectly engineered it hardly disrupts the smooth line of the casing. It is, if the usual Gallic bollocks is to be believed, inspired by the calves of ballet dancers. It also jams closed at the slightest provocation, permanently locking your drink inside. There are few more humiliating experiences than shaking an elegant little margarita for two and then being unable to get to it... pawing at the smooth, cold exterior with frozen fingers while it refuses,with almost palpable hauteur, to cooperate and yield.

Because of its two part design, you’ll also need a strainer for your Parisian. I like the ‘Julep’ version on the right in the picture. You can buy them with the bend already in the handle or get a straight one and bend your own to fit (pointless, but it has a certain “build your own light sabre, young Padawan” charm to it). You slide the strainer into the tin, clip the bend over the side and you can hold it in place, and hold the ice back while you pour. The ‘fine strainer’ keeps out ice shards and small bits of vegetation.

The glass object is a 150ml lab beaker. Because I weigh my ingredients for consistency, rather than using a jigger or other volumetric measure, I need something that sits on the scales and into which I can build the ingredients. Honestly? It’s a daft idea. I’m just a nerd. Use a jigger - the barman does.

Eventually, you will arrive at the Boston. The standard professional shaker which originated when some enterprising barman slammed a tin mug over a straight sided beer glass and changed the world forever.

My first was the classic glass/metal combo but then, after a long, drunken conversation with a barman, I swapped to two stainless steel tins, manufactured by a company in Japan. They arrived with a bit more shine that this but not fully polished, what would be the point? You’ll notice that the bottoms of the two halves have an extra layer. They’re sometimes called ‘weighted’, which sounds kind of rugged and weapony when the barman describes it, but weight and balance is not what it’s all about. That extra metal makes the bottom more substantial and rigid, meaning that the rest of the cup can be thin, light and flexible.

This is the beautifully simple key to the engineering genius of the Boston shaker. The larger tin, the bottom, gets filled with ingredients and ice and then the smaller tin is slid in, on a slight angle so that one side is in an entirely straight line. A sharp tap on the bottom of the lid and both elements immediately flex to seal. Better still, the rapidly chilling air inside the sealed container, contracts, creating a small but significant pressure difference, pulling top and bottom closer together and tightening the seal.

It’s that little bit of flex that does it for me. Every time I crack out the shaker, I give it a little squeeze and my heart soars. You know how churches and cathedrals were designed to put the literal ‘Fear of God’ into the congregation? How painters and sculptors were commissioned to create works to inspire by glorifying what God had wrought? I haven’t a religious bone in my body but squeezing my tin every cocktail hour inspires me. I wonder at what man’s rational, secular ingenuity has achieved in the pursuit of getting elegantly wasted.

As long as you trust it and just ‘tap’ it shut, the Boston tins never jam. They can’t, because flexing them again breaks the seal. It’s only if you lack faith, if you hammer it closed, that you’ll find yourself Embarrassed at the Bar.

History, aesthetics, physics, inspiration and faith. And who does it make you think of? Tom Cruise in a Hawaiian shirt.

No wonder humanity’s in a mess

Like Cpt. Grimes in Decline and Fall, I am troubled by ‘stirrings’. No. Not that sort. The kind of stirring you do to a cocktail.

The basic rule is that cocktails containing fruit juices (or dairy, or God help us, egg), should be shaken, but the simpler ones, the ones based on a high percentage of extremely pure alcohol. You know... the Good Ones. Well they’re stirred. A slower, more contemplative process. They say that shaking a ‘martini bruises’ the gin... which is patently bollocks, but also, explains rather well the spirit of a less frenetic approach.

The big argument between shaking and stirring is usually about two groups of basically unattractive obsessives, thumbing their noses about degrees of dilution while, actually, they couldn’t be further from the truth.

Let’s do a bit of theoretical physics. You chuck a bunch of ice into a vessel, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s -15ºc. You add to that a bath of drink at fridge temp. Maybe 5ºc.

The nature of thermodynamics is such that, neither of those constituent elements will rest until they reach equilibrium. The booze will chill. The ice will rise in temperature, until they both reach the same point. This will happen no matter what you do to the mixture.

(There are a few variables, like the temperature of the vessel, the stirrer and the surrounding air, but, for the sake of this thought experiment, think of it as a closed system)

Some time, if you can be arsed, mix a martini with frozen gin. Once again the ice and the alcohol will try adjust their individual temperatures until they match. But if the gin is at -15ºc and the ice is the same. neither will change at all. Nothing will get colder or warmer. The ice will not melt, so there will be no dilution. You’ll end up with neat gin, with a bunch of unmelted ice floating in it.

Add fridge temperature gin to freezer temperature ice and the the ice will warm as the gin cools. As the ice rises in temperature, it will melt. Not much, but it will melt. The amount of dilution will, eventually be a function of the difference between the starting temperatures of the booze and the ice.

I know that it feels intuitively right to think about the agitation of the ice , the physical action on it, the buggering about, to ‘speed up the chilling’. But that is ALL it does.

If you graph the drop in temperature in a stirred and a shaken cocktail, you see the same story. If the ice is at one temp and the booze is at another, the combined mess will drop to the point of equilibrium. On a neat little curve... but it will end up in at exactly the same temperature and... naturally... with exactly the same percentage dilution.

Shaking aggressively can chip off little bits of ice, which means, if you care about such things, that the perfect clarity of your drink might be compromised. Who are we kidding? Of course we care.

In a drink containing fruit juice the physical upheaval of shaking helps to homogenise the ingredients improving appearance and, in some cases texture.

The most important thing to take away when considering stirring is that you are trying to reduce the temperature efficiently while minimising what one might characterise as ‘excessive turbulence’. With this in mind, I favour what’s called Japanese style stirring, where the shaft of the stirrer is gripped loosely so it can rotate, in the fingers. The back of the spoon end is pushed agains the wall of the mixing vessel and moved carefully around. This technique, once you get the hang of it, moves all the ice, as a single mass, spinning it in the liquid. The cubes don’t move with respect to each other, just through the liquid. You start slow and speed up

The sound is glorious. A gentle swishing. If you hear a crunch of ice on ice, you’re probably moving too fast.

Try to be consistent. If you do it the the same way every time and it’ll get easier to refine.

Having wired up my stirring cup and plotted temperatures I know that the drink will not drop significantly in temperature after around 80 rotations. But I know that once equilibrium is achieved, it won’t get more dilute... so I usually count 100. Using a timer instead, this would be an approx 1 minute stir.

Not here’s an interesting thought. Once the drink is stirred and the low temperature is reached, it won’t melt any more ice for quite a while. You can leave the drink, with the ice, in the vessel while you build other drinks. You can leave half of what you’ve mixed in the vessel while you tackle the first half (I use a double-walled stainless steel mixing jug so outside temperature is not that significant. The poured drink will warm up in the glass. The stuff left in the jug won’t). And here’s the really shocking notion. You could theoretically pour your stirred martini over ‘rocks’... it would stay cold in the glass, longer, with insignificant dilution.

Next, much like Cpt. Grimes I guess, I’ll get the shakes.

I'd really set my mind firmly against ever drinking a cocktail with pineapple in it.

It's difficult to juice fresh pineapple without heavy equipment so any cocktail calling for it is referring to something out of a tetrapack with about the same relationship to real fruit as a carton of Um Bongo. A drink garnished with pineapple would be humiliating, a drink 'in' a pineapple would be a kind of aesthetic waterboarding.

But then I read Richard Godwin's brilliant substack on the 'Special' Daiquiri served at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba from the 1930s onwards, and it sounded, to a confirmed daiquiri fan... oddly appealling. The further I went down the rabbithole, the better the story got.

The Hotel Nacional de Cuba would fit comfortably on the Trip Advisor page between The Overlook and Bates Motel. Monumental, fascistic and creepy. It was designed by New York architects who appear to have taken The Fountainhead seriously. It was financed by an American bank and built by US contractors. Unsurprisingly, it attracted that cream of American society, who could afford to discretely avoid prohibition the same way their scions seem to avoid tax today. 'Cuban'? Hmmmm.'Nacional'? Not so much. Charles "Lucky" Luciano stayed there. In hindsight, that might have been a moral high point.

Early recipes for the Nacional were roughly half and half rum and pineapple juice, enlivened with the juice of half a lemon and a slug of 'apricot brandy'.

I'm always interested when apricot brandy crops up. It's a fairly niche product in France but in the US, a company called Old Mr Boston made a domestic version. As prohibition lifted they began macerating sweet dried American apricots in neutral alcohol (that's a uniquely American interpretation of 'Brandy'). Bear in mind that neutral alcohol - ie vodka - had no market in the US at the time, so a version softened and sweetened with dried fruit might appeal to consumers. It added alcoholic strength and sweetness to a drink with no really polarising flavour and must have been staggeringly cheap to produce on an industrial scale. All they needed to do was create a market.

Which they did. Brilliantly. By publishing the Old Mr Boston's Official Bar Tender's Guide and distributing it to effectively every bar in the US. About 11 million copies were printed in 68 editions. All the cocktails a barman needed. And the most amazing thing was exactly how many of them suddenly featured the inoccuous, hard-to-hate, US made, apricot brandy.

It's not surprising - in fact it's entirely brilliant - that the Nacional featured this weird stuff from the get-go.

I could have bought some sort of posh pineapple juice, but I bet that's not what they did at the Hotel Nacional.

If you have half an hour to dive down a history hole and get seriously angry, start digging into the role the United Fruit Company (later Dole) played in the politics of South and Central America, specifically in propping up the Batista regime and in 1961, the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

No. No artisanal local product here. They'd have opened a can of Dole pineapple juice at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba. You can bet your shaker on it.

Pineapple is interesting stuff, particularly when it's been processed. It's not a citrus fruit - it's a different family altogether - though it does contain some citric acid. It also contains a fair bit of malic acid... that's the stuff they put in kids' 'sour' sweets. So it has strong tart and sour elements. It can be packed in its own juice so it doesn't need to be preserved like other fruits, in a sugar syrup. It also contains an enzyme called papain that breaks down proteins. I'm not sure if it's the papain that does it but clobbering pineapple in the blender also creates a fantastic texture. An almost soapy gel.

So instead of fretting over an artisanally hand-harvested pineapple at Waitrose, I bought a tin of Dole pineapple rings (packed in juice), blitzed them to hell and passed the results, with some force, through a fine sieve. That would be pretty authentic, I thought. And it was amazing. With the sharp and sweet balanced, half way to being a sour mix, but with the texture of hair conditioner (iirc).

Also, after a fair amount of fiddling and tasting, my preference toward the simpler daiquiri began to emerge. It needed a little lime, it needed a little sugar syrup.

Some recipes add a dash of bitters and more power to their elbows, but then I remembered that President Kennedy was a daiquiri fan and rather liked a splash of Falernum in his.

Cuba? The Mob? CIA operations through US corporations? Yes... we have to get JFK in there somewhere

60g rum

22.5g pineapple gloop

15g apricot brandy

15g fresh lime juice

7.5g simple syrup

2 dashes Falernum

(do yourself a favour and double these quantities)

Shake. Garnish with lime (though you wouldn't regret a lightly salted rim either).

You know those old American cars they still keep alive in Havana? Absurdly atmospheric. Ridiculously, pompously American. No reason to survive but somehow lovingly reappropriated and irresistably fascinating to blokes of a certain age?

I reckon the Nacional could be all that, in a glass.