G.P. 7 Kingsley Amis’ Ten General Principles
Commercial mixes are okay
Welcome back to the next iteration of my focus on the general principles Kingsley Amis lists in his excellent book, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis.
In the book, he lists ten general principles, which can be summarized:
For drinks accompanied by fruit or vegetables, try adding juice
Commercial mixes are okay
Wine preparation is important, but price is more so
He who believes he has a hangover does not
Eating fattens you
To refresh yourself on past principles, feel free to follow the links above to previous entries.
This is a fun one. Let’s get after it!
G.P. 7:
Never despise a drink because it is easy to make and/or uses commercial mixes. Unquestioning devotion to authenticity is, in any department of life, a mark of the naïve-or worse.
Let's talk about commercial mixes!
These days with bar ingredients, it is all the rage to go house-made, no preservatives, and all-natural, but I find more often than not, something is missing. Yes, that thing may be high fructose corn syrup, caramel coloring, or ester gum from tree rosin combined with glycerol (looking at you, Squirt), but we are drinking alcohol here! Nobody ever said any of this stuff was supposed to be good for you.
Kinglsey drops this G.P. on us after giving the recipe for Woodrow Wyatt's Instant Whiskey Collins. A simple whiskey highball made over ice with bitter lemon soda and garnished with a cherry. Our (much sweeter) American version would probably be something like a 7 and 7. The fact that it uses a commercial soda prompts him to call out those who would dislike a drink just because it uses a commercial mix like bitter lemon.
Over the years, I have had many versions of highballs with house-made sodas. They usually don't cut it. Take the Paloma for instance. Often, a bartender will mix grapefruit, sugar, and soda water as a substitute for a grapefruit soda, and what a poor substitute it is. There is something magical about using a bottle of Jarritos, Squirt, or my favorite, Ting, to top up your [insert agave spirit of choice] based highball. A carbonated soft drink is not just fruit juice, fizzy water, and sugar.
The other one that gets me is the bars that try to make their own cola. Nobody wants artisanal cola; they want Coca-Cola from an ice-cold glass bottle and preferably hecho en Mexico. Though, the sugar in your Mexican Coke may not be exactly what you think it is...
But who cares? It's delicious. Every now and then, I pour myself a Crown and Coke and enjoy every single last drop, and I don't worry that I probably cut a few precious hours off the total of my life.
It seems the cocktail world loves to look down on products that make things easier and frequently taste better than what can be made in a dented saucepan with a hot plate an hour before the bar opens. Tonic water is one of the main culprits. Ten years ago, it was all the rage to extract quinine from cinchona bark purchased on the internet, then sweeten, carbonate, bottle it up, and serve it to guests as house made tonic water. Not only do these house tonics not taste as good as a commercial mix, but they are also SUPER DANGEROUS. An overdose of quinine, known as Cinchonism, can be fatal and/or terribly uncomfortable with lasting effects.
The legal limit for quinine in carbonated beverages is 83 ppm and is used for flavor. We aren't fighting malaria in the kitchen or at a fancy cocktail bar. One of the most popular homemade tonic recipes online is more than double the commercial limit and now has a warning about consuming it. It is probably best to leave the tonic making to the professionals, and best to consult a doctor before extracting anything from tree bark you bought on the internet before mixing it with gin and sipping it in the back yard on a hot day.
For a commercial recommendation I prefer Fever-Tree tonic water, but I certainly don't mind the bottom shelf tonics like White Rock or Schweppes. I almost always add some Angostura Bitters to my usual G&T too!
Another despised ingredient by the bar world is lime cordial or bottled shelf-stable sweetened lime juice. As someone associated with a commercial lime juice (yeah, I’m in Walmart), I would be the first to say you should just squeeze a lime if you have one available, but that is the whole purpose of lime cordial in the first place! It was a way to have citrus when you didn’t have fresh citrus around. Way back in 1753 the Brits figured out that citrus could cure sailors that had scurvy. It is pretty hard to keep fresh fruit on a ship out to sea for weeks or months at a time, and Rose's Lime Juice came on the scene and solved that problem.
Are commercial lime juices like Rose's full of artificial flavors, artificial colors, and HFCS? Very much so (shameless plug: mine uses real cane sugar and lime juice). Do they taste good mixed with gin? Very much, so but (shameless again) mine is better.
Bartenders have gone so far to avoid lime cordials that they even shake Gimlets these days with sugar and lime instead of a cordial. Like the Paloma I talked about earlier, fresh lime and sugar does not taste the same as a lime cordial. A Gimlet made with fresh juice instead of lime cordial won't taste right. And you should stir a Gimlet anyways, which should be the big give away that you shouldn't use fresh juice. In this instance, it's the disregard for authenticity that is the issue.
I could go on and talk about Clamato Juice in a Caesar cocktail or using the officially trademarked ingredients in a Dark 'n' Stormy instead of making your own. I also don't mind pointing out that while you may have to take out a second mortgage to buy a small jar of Luxardo Maraschino cherries, they are better than anything you can make in a mason jar down in your basement, still I think you get the point that Kingsley and I are trying to make—it's okay to crack open a commercial mixer and use it in a cocktail. Unless, of course, we are talking about Pat O'Brien's Hurricane mix. I wouldn't touch that stuff with a yard pole. Instead, you will find me at Manolito sipping on a Papa Doble.
Now the other little snippet Kingsley includes in this chapter after his wonderful Bloody Mary recipe is this:
G.P. 7.5:
And yet, on the principle—very nearly worth erecting into a G.P.—that in all alcoholic matters subjectivism plays a big part, a lot of people will feel better after one or two Bloody Marys simply because they expect to.
It's refreshing to hear his voice of reason calling all matters of alcohol subjective because they really are. I think this sudo G.P. ties in great with G.P. 7 because taste is undoubtedly subjective too.
As a matter of fact all of these principles are subjective, and it does us all a great deal of good to keep that in mind as we move forward down our cocktail journey.
Speaking of subjectivism, next week we go feet first into wine!
G.P. 8:
Careful preparation will render a poor wine just tolerable and very nice wine excellent. Skimping it will diminish a pretty fair wine to all right and a superb wine to merely bloody good. That is about as much difference as it will make. Much more important is price, which is normally a very reliable indicator of quality.
Subjectivism aside, I still think you should stir a Gimlet.
Thanks for reading!