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PaperclipPerfector  22hr ago (text post)   568 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 2, 2026

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What is everyone’s go-to cocktail? I tend to be a beer guy, and keep it simple with cocktails. Gin and tonic, whiskey sour, a martini if I’m feeling fancy, or a tropical rum drink if I’m really in party mode or on the beach. Anyone have anything a bit more adventurous? I like rum, scotch, gin, bourbon, not really a huge vodka fan.

Edit: A gin martini, just to clarify. Typically with Beefeater.

A non-alchoholic Radler. 0% abv beer and the sourest carbonated soft drink you can find in the store.

Southern Comfort Collins. My grandfather's wedding drink of choice, and I picked it up from him. Can't remember if he always made sure his came with a cherry, or with pineapple...

On a hot day, I'll go for either a gin & tonic or a Pimm's Cup. Or a mojito, I guess. If it's really hot, I'll make granita with vodka. Cold weather, it's got to be either a hot toddy or a hot buttered rum. For the absolute laziest of days, Rum & coke/Dr. Pepper/Cheerwine/basically any dark soda.

Do beer cocktails count as cocktails? Half-and-halfs are pretty good (Beer/root beer), and then of course radlers and shandygaffs are great on hot days. There's also the "girly Guinness", AKA Guinness & Grenadine.

I love a Kentucky Mule. Well, any Mule, but Kentucky the best.

What’s your opinion on Kentucky Gentleman? Lol.

Quite frankly a Greyhound is as simple as it gets, but incredibly good with the right grapefruit and vodka.

If I can tolerate something sweeter that day, a Painkiller is something worth buying ingredients for. Homemade hurricanes are superior to the Bourbon Street product - combine with mail order mulfalettas and conecuh-jambalaya for the best time.

As other people have mentioned, an Old Fashioned is an excellent drink - it's what my grandpa would have every day after work. I use fresh black cherries over maraschinos and skip the sugar.

It's not my go-to cocktail but the best one I've had in the past five years was "Naked on a Plane". Impossible to get at the average home bar, but I may make it my signature: Lemon twist and a frozen raspberry with mezcal, Yellow Chartreuse, and a combination of Amari, Aperol and Nonino.

I'm partial to an Aviation. My friends have a Bartesian device that mixes drinks for you and makes a very respectable Aviation, so it's mostly what I drink when I'm visiting, which is the only time I really drink.

Malibu and pineapple. Can get it most places, easy to make myself on the rare occasion I want to drink at home, tastes absolutely delicious. You can't ask for much more.

Paloma and/or old fashioned.

Manhattan. For the "adventurous" version, I like to use both rye and bourbon, add a dash of Angostura bitters, a dash of Cherry Heering, shake with ice and strain into a martini glass with a maraschino cherry or two skewered for a garnish, but the simplest "2 oz any whiskey, 1 oz sweet vermouth, over ice" is already pretty good.

If you like whiskey sours and you make your own sour mix, try reducing the sugar a bit and adding amaretto. Amaretto sours are too weak and too sweet, but if you usee whiskey to fix the one problem and tweak the mix to fix the other then it's a great flavor.

Gin and tonic with ice and a lemon wedge. Not precious about the gin though London Drys are my preference. Wilkinson tonic.

Yesterday I was given something called Framboise by a very wealthy Frenchman and it tasted as if would take the paint off a car.

Yesterday I was given something called Framboise by a very wealthy Frenchman and it tasted as if would take the paint off a car.

Is that a cocktail, or a beer?

Old fashioned.

Sidecar.

Okay, that's not true. I'm way more likely to make an old fashioned or something with gin (negroni, corpse reviver). But a good sidecar is a nice step between liquor-forward and citrus-forward.

It depends on the bar, but if I'm at my regular place during happy hour or the other place that can make it, a Hugo 75.

If it's my regular bar and the night bartenders are on (neither one knows how to make a Hugo 75, but then the happy hour bartenders can never get my house Collins right either), usually their house take on a Tom Collins (a Tom Collins with St. Germain instead of sugar and a few dashes of orange bitters).

If I'm a bar I don't know and/or at a work event where everyone else is drinking martinis I'll go for a Manhattan, fancy enough but hard to screw up. See also: the Negroni or Boulevardier.

Really though, it depends on context. If the bar is slammed or just a dive I'll order something easy like a shot and a beer.

As a Wisconsin resident I'm obligated to tout the virtues of the brandy old-fashioned, but since it's already obvious I will raise awareness of the Brandy Alexander, a delicious brandy drink that also incorporates dairy, for a Midwestern twofer.

I had a discussion some years ago from someone who was from Wisconsin and we were talking about the economics of the industry. I’m from a region in the states that’s hugely known for its wine and alcohol production and I grew up knowing a shitload of people who work directly in this industry or have touched it; despite the fact that I don’t drink hardly at all, beyond social occasions. I remember as a kid my mother driving me by all the locations for these places.

If you want a basic idea of how the industry works it goes a little something like this. If you look at bourbon for example, the grain bill (which is the raw ingredients), the brewing (wort or bier), and barreling costs about $400-$850 for 200L of 60%/120 proof raw/white grain alcohol (better ingredients is going to be more expensive). Barrel aging costs about $1.30/mo and inventory/turning/rotation costs about $0.20, so that’s about $1.50/mo.

So let’s look at a 15yr aged whisky/bourbon. Maybe, $850 to start, plus ($1.50x12monthsx15years)=$270 plus the original $850=$1,020 liquid cost. But it’s at 60% alcohol (approximately, some alcohol ‘seeps’ as it ages, so this isn’t entirely correct) so you need to water it down to 40%/80proof. So you have about 275 to 310 liters of ‘finished’ bourbon out of a barrel depending on several different factors. Go ahead and call it 300 to keep it simple. That is about $3.75/L or about $2.80 per 750ml bottle.

In general, bottles, corkage, labeling and corkage are $3 to $15 per bottle. So you’re talking good bourbon, so it’s a minimum of $10 bottle, or probably more than that. So the bottle is about 4x-5x the liquid.

And all of this doesn’t touch the issue of taxation. In some states, the distiller pays taxes on the grain; and taxes on the materials; and taxes on the liquid; and you pay taxes when you buy it (and some of us pay ‘taxes’ when we drink too much and get arrested). Alcohol is taxed massively from the beginning of production all the way to consumption. But that actually speaks to how much of a massive revenue driver it is.

Another interesting factoid. For local craft beers in the silver ‘craft beer’ generic blank 16oz cans with a sticker label, the beer inside will cost about the same as the can and the label. Canning will take the processing cost to be more than the liquid. For liquors (even great liquors) the bottle will cost 2x to 20x the cost of the liquid. And actually, the more expensive the liquor, the greater the cost of the bottle (so you’re getting more ripped off the more you’re willing to pay). As an extreme example, look up 50 Cent’s champagne. It’s called “Le Chemin du Roi’” and the bottle costs about $20-25 and the Champaign costs about $3-$5. It retails for about $200 at start.

There’s about 4 huge producers that make liquors in massive quantities for everyone. About 99% of the ‘craft’ liquors you drink, are ‘brandicorns’ that have zero distilling assets and contract with these manufactures to make their spirits and then put a craft label on them. As a rule of thumb: if they don’t have a distillery you can visit, it’s made by a mega corporation, and so they are selling you a brand.

The economic value in booze is overwhelmingly marketing.

As a former Sconnie, my grandmother whole heartedly endorses the brandy old-fashioned.

Lately I've become rather obsessed with Ranch Water and Old Fashioned.

The boilermaker is the perfect cocktail. It cracks the meta of alcohol usage. It rapidly spikes your blood alcohol in a way that feels good, but one or two aren’t going to keep you from going to work in the morning. Perfect for the two-hour evening drinking session of the working man.

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