Ditch Your Gin and Tonic
A better-tasting alternative
I used to be a gin-and-tonic boy. It’s a simple drink, accessible and inclusive, and very popular. While a certain sort of snob might roll their eyes at anyone who wears white linen after Labor Day, gin and tonics are increasingly acceptable throughout the year.
The problem is, gin and tonics don’t taste very good.1 They don’t taste like anything, really, just a watery melange of liquor, lime, and bubbles, cool but anodyne, bracing but bland, refreshing at first but tedious soon after. A few sips into a gin and tonic and I feel like I’m drinking some kind of carbonated dental solution on the rocks. By the time I’m finished, my tongue is anesthetized and my gums are sore. A delicate film of lime limns my teeth. (“Cold pastoral!” wrote Keats.)
Of course there are alternatives. If your primary objectives are refreshment and simplicity, consider a Gin Daisy.
Here’s what to do.
Stick with the gin, obviously. Gin is nice because it’s easy to disguise, and because drinking vodka is pointless. As for brand, you don’t need anything fancy. Really you’re choosing between dry and herbal. Dry is the safer bet. Pour 2 ounces into a shaker.
Now take a lemon and cut it down the spine. Put one half back in the refrigerator; you can use it for your next drink. With the other half, squeeze between 3/4 – 1 ounces of lemon juice, depending on how much you want the lemon to shine. (I like a shine.)
Now put two fistfuls of ice into the shaker and shake for about thirty seconds, or until your palms are uncomfortably cold. Strain the mix into a Collins glass filled with ice, or just pour everything in together and add more ice as necessary.
Top with your favorite soda water.
There’s your drink: a punchy, mildly sour alternative to the staid and stolid G & T. Add a few drops of Rose’s grenadine for a pink sweetener. Garnish with mint or lemon peel if you like. Play around with the ingredients: for example, adding another 3/4 ounces of orange liqueur to Step 2 will give you an “Old School Gin Daisy.” Doesn’t really matter. It’s just spiked lemonade. That’s all you need.
In an earlier draft of this post, I compared the taste of a gin and tonic to sewage. I thought this was a strong, bold argument; instead I was told it was gross. Even inaccurate! Sewage is composed of waste water and human excrement, among other things. Did I really mean to say that gin and tonics are the equivalent of fecal matter?
Well, no. Gin and tonics are distilled, bottled, and federally approved for consumption. But also I wasn’t making the comparison to suggest that gin and tonics taste like shit. Only shit tastes like shit. Sewage is something else, and not a fixed thing but an amalgam of many different things. Sewage is complex. I even have to assume some sewage tastes better than other sewage. Sewage sourced from a Swiss spa, for instance, will taste better than sewage from a New Orleans gutter, not because of the fixed fact of their respective environments, but because of the variable facts of their inputs and outputs.
The point of the analogy is this. Gin and tonics taste like a curious combination of everything and nothing: overwhelming in effect but underwhelming in flavor. Sewage, too, is a curious combination of everything and nothing: the gross downstream product of all life! — and waste.
It was a very strong, very bold argument, and it’s shameful that it’s been shunted to the footnotes.