Thoughts on Punch

Social drinking when you can’t be social

Punch is for large groups.
BUT
We can't be in large groups.
SO
How do we drink punch during a pandemic?

This is the longest since I've been legally allowed to drink that I haven't stepped foot into a bar or restaurant. It feels bizarre. There was a period when most of my awake time was spent in a bar. Albeit looking back, it seems most of that time was cutting ice and juicing citrus in a cramped kitchen or the creepy basement of said bar.

My daily cocktail hour is still going strong, and I have even tacked on a nightcap a few days a week. The bottles I use the most have been replaced a few times. Things like Tanqueray, Maker's Mark, Campari, Noilly Prat, etc. I even had to pick up a new bottle of Angostura because I shook the last one dry. Something is still missing though.

I miss the routine. I miss having the usual, and I certainly miss someone else doing the dishes. What I miss, most of all, is the conversation—the people. That leads me to the punch bowl, the most social way to drink.

With the holidays around the corner, we are in prime punch time. I often make punch for Thanksgiving because it is an easy way to get a drink in everyone's hands while mine are busy with the turkey. That is the entire point of punch—lots of people able to serve themselves. Come to think of it, a turkey is more or less the punch bowl version of a chicken. There is no way a quarantined couple can take down a 15-pound bird, the same way my wife and I wouldn’t be able to put a dent in a proper bowl of punch.

Like air travel, the punch bowl doesn't make sense right now. Drinking punch is about being social. A punch bowl is what the furloughed office water cooler secretly wishes it was on the weekends. According to the numbers, it seems as if everyone is drinking more during these COVID days, but everything is single serve. A bowl full of self serve booze is assuredly not on the menu. 

A punch bowl is already an underutilized vessel. You need a certain number of people to even think of punch. Most recipes involve enough liquid to serve 15+ people. I am not sure when I will be around 15 people next.

So is punch gone for the foreseeable future?

With all this extra time to think, I came up with an idea to get a glass of punch back in my hands and some conversation:

A bar could make a big bowl of punch and bottle it, can it, put it in growlers, etc. Each vessel is labeled with a time to meet and a QR code that leads to a Zoom so people can meet "at the punch bowl." It could even be a weekly subscription for a Friday evening pre-dinner punch social.

This would be so easy to implement, and there are books and books of punch recipes. Think of it as a soup of the day but with liquor! 

I would also hope that the punch social would continue once the bar and restaurant bans are lifted. It could be a great move towards marketing an in-person punch happy hour now so that it is in place when we get back to normal. It would be great to put some real faces to the digital faces you’ve been drinking punch with over the winter.

Would this work? I think so. Heck, I attended a Zoom concert last week and had a way better time than I thought I would. It would involve getting out of your comfort zone a little bit, but that is what the whole year has been. I am pretty used to being uncomfortable these days. We are proving to be massively resilient.

Thirsty for punch yet?