Drink Of Choice

I'm not a heavy drinker, as I have noted in the past. I have my preferences, however. My first love, so to speak, was beer. On the night of my twenty-first birthday, I stopped at a grocery store on the way home from class, and bought a case of Miller High Life. For a long period after that, I would drink one beer a day, buying a new case of twelve each time the previous was exhausted. I would usually get whatever nice, ordinarily too-expensive microbrew was currently on sale. In that way, I developed my initial knowledge of beer.

Eventually, I got interested in stronger spirits. I had consumed wine on a number of occasions in youth during church services, and never really got anything out of the taste. The memory of communion is still the most powerful sensation I get from it. A bit later in college, I started trying different hard liquors. Vodka wasn't for me. It tasted like rubbing alcohol or lighter fluid. Rum was better. I enjoyed a Haitian variety I had. I liked Tennessee sipping whiskey. My favorite is George Dickel, which I came to after reading an interview in which Merle Haggard praised it without reservation. Irish whiskey was also good. I recall enjoying some Jameson's while singing along to Johnny Cash's "Sam Hall" one night in Chicago.

The one I like best currently is that uniquely American distilled beverage, bourbon. It's tasty, and I find it to be a more pleasant way of being patriotic than most that people opt for. Furthermore, it provides coastal blue-staters like myself and southern red-staters common ground that is too often overlooked. When the great Kentucky Derby rolls around, what else could you drink? Jim Beam is passable, but best are Maker's Mark and Bulleit. I keep meaning to buy some bourbon, but won't do it until I get some proper glasses. I like to think I have some sense of propriety.

What's next? I retain a great interest in absinthe, but would be at least as interested in trying some rye whiskey. It held sway in the northeast until being dealt a severe blow by the trauma of prohibition. Today, it remains marginalized in the domestic liquor picture. I'd bring it back if I had the power. With absinthe, I don't know if the time is right yet. It went through a ban unlike that of other spirits, and the result is that there is no certainty on exactly how it was made during the old days. Besides- the process of drinking it is so elaborate and involved- I'm just a simple man who just wants to pour a simple drink to sip while reading. I haven't got the wherewithal to mess with strange spoons, sugar cubes and open flames. The right receptacle is all I can manage.