Leave the Drinking to Real Drinkers, eh Pumpkin?
26/10/06 11:32
The drink itself may have involved a distilled spirit, but with a nose in cinnamon-induced spasm and a tongue heavily coated in what tasted like concentrated canned pumpkin pie filling, it was impossible to tell. The drink’s creator was, I’m sure, proud of the thing. Even one judge—a man whose fond memories of his grandmother’s pumpkin pie outweighed his ordinarily sound judgment—liked it. Not so much as a cocktail, he said, but as a dessert. The consensus, however, was that it was far, far too much of a mediocre thing, less a cocktail than a homage to an autumnal theme, a desperate attempt, like a Martha Stewart centerpiece, to get an entire season inside one container. Plus it tasted like a vanilla malt gone horribly wrong.
The next day my local paper informed me that the number-two-selling flavor in beers at the moment is pumpkin. And the day after that I was reading a web-letter from a prominent cocktail maven, only to discover that the featured cocktail of the month was a pumpkin special which used a puree of the eponymous gourd to hide the flavor of Plymouth Gin, one of England’s more useful gifts to the world. Perhaps, I thought, they’re confused and think Plymouth gin was invented by Pilgrims in Plymouth, Mass., to serve to the visiting Indians on the first Thanksgiving. In fact, it just happens to have been made, as it is being made once again, in Plymouth, England--only a football field or so away from where those Puritan scolds boarded their ships to leave licentiousness behind. And it’s a lovely gin, when you can taste it.
What, I asked myself, is going on here? Is the entire country nuts? Are they so used to holiday-driven consuming that they’re no longer capable of common sense? Well, there is that, but the real problem, I realized in a blinding flash of insight, was that we now have not just a generation of drinkers, but a generation of bartenders who really, deep down, don’t like the taste of booze. Hence, vodka. Hence root beer schnapps. Hence watermelon daiquiris. Hence pumpkins.
In the course of my subsequent research into the transformation of the American palate, I found bartenders beside themselves looking for a replacement for Bols Pumpkin Smash Liqueur, which has been sensibly removed from the market. I found pumpkin schnapps, and found it used in cocktails in the Campbell Apartment in New York, heretofore a place I believed to be trustworthy cocktail bar. I met Skyy pumpkin-infused vodka and discovered five—count ‘em, five—pumpkin-flavored beers at my local wet goods dealer.
All this, I believe, so that a new generation of vipers can get lit without having to suffer the actual flavor of hops, malted barley, oak-infused corn mash, ancient grape spirit, distilled molasses, or anything else not commonly associated with fruit smoothies.
Most of the cocktails in that contest had at least four and in many cases five, ingredients. Many of these were obscure, and many more were cloyingly sweet or overpoweringly intense. In virtually no case was the spirit underneath even remotely detectible.
Which is bunkum of the highest, or lowest, order. The great cocktails of all time have two or three ingredients, and most of them include bitters. The goal is a balanced taste of the principal spirits and wines inside, and the result is more, not less, than the sum of its parts. You like pumpkins? Have some pie. You want a strawberry shake, order one at McDonald’s. If you have a can of Kool-Whip in your refrigerator, please stay home with it and if you have ever voluntarily ordered a bananas & crème frappuccino, please do not seek work as a bartender. Finally, if the only flavor you really, truly like is chocolate, I would suggest that you have the taste buds of a nine-year-old and I would further suggest that you find a nice ice cream parlor and stay the hell out of decent saloons where the grown-ups are trying to get a drink.
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