repeal day

Last night, I realized that it's been a few months since A and I have made a good drink. For my birthday last year, she took me to a cocktail workshop at Mint/820, which set us off on a heavy-drinking phase that meant lots of sugar syrups and sticky counters and cracked ice. I'm not saying that our heavy-drinking phase ended, just that we got lazier about it. While there's a lot to recommend a chilled cocktail on a hot summer day, a cold beer or a glass of rose wine can be just as refreshing, without all of the fruit-squeezing, measuring and shaking. Not to mention that our liquor cabinet was getting really out of hand.

Frankly, cocktails can be a boozy rabbit hole to fall down; once you get started, the ingredients and demands grow more and more esoteric. You start out learning how to make a simple, slightly embarrassing drink-or-two, like a cosmopolitan or a lemon drop, and soon you're mixing gin flips and scouring your liquor store for batavia arrack to make a 19th-century punch. It didn't take long before I was trying to mist an orange peel through a lit match to burn the citrus esters that would land atop my drink.

With most drinks, I've gotten over this baroque tendency, realizing that Portland has enough good ol' booze experts that it's worth leaving the mixing to more capable hands, with their libraries of tinctures and tonics and obscure liqueurs. But whether A and I go out for a drink or we try to pour one at home, none of this geekery would be possible had time stood still in 1933 and Prohibition remained.


Which is why it is our duty to celebrate Repeal Day on December 5. Maybe it just seems like something that was dreamed up by the Dewar's marketing department, but a lot of good holidays were originally just corporate sales ploys; at least this one provides a better-than-average excuse for a drink. The true beauty of Repeal Day is that while we may recognize it on the 5th of December, it can't be bound by a specific "day" or a "historic moment" - it is a holiday that resides deep inside each of us. In fact, I'll be celebrating Repeal tonight with a manhattan and tomorrow night at the Holiday Ale Fest. I may even celebrate Repeal Day after Friday with a few drinks over the weekend. You see? Repeal Day is only as much of a holiday as we make it.

So nowadays, if I reach for something besides beer or wine, it's normally just a good spirit, neat or on the rocks. But Repeal Day seems to call for something fittingly classy and old-school. Maybe it's time to dust off the cocktail shaker and bust out those brandied cherries we put up this summer. Tis the season.