Newsletter

Why Cocktails?

Thoughts on the ACBN's mixological meandering

Scott Hines

03 Jun 2025 — 7 min read

I’m not a big drinker.

That might be a bit of a defensive-sounding way to open a newsletter—like yelling “NO I WASN’T SNIFFING PAINT” as someone walks into a room—but I feel like it’s a worthwhile clarification. I’ve shared a cocktail recipe in most Friday editions of this newsletter for the past six years, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression.

I’m not housing these things every night, you know.

Sure, in my youth, I could drink my body weight in macrobrewed American light beers. I did go to a Midwestern state university. Those Naturdays are far behind me, though. I’m a 43-year-old capital-D Dad now. (I believe the technical term for this is “washed”). My Saturday nights are no longer dictated by whether the bar closes at 2am or 4am or what party is still going, but rather “will having one drink make me fall asleep before Weekend Update?”

So, why cocktails, then?

Well, first, there’s the matter of quality over quantity. As noted, I am not a college student anymore; I am an adult with a job (several, even) and if I’m going to get tired after one drink, I can at least afford to craft something that I will enjoy more than whatever comes in a 30-pack at the gas station.

(No offense to Busch Light. You have a time and a place. It’s just not this one.)

More than that, though, I’ve come to relish the experimentation.

That’s kind of the core of what I’ve been trying to do with this newsletter since I first started it—I’m experimenting. Sometimes, that means I’m tinkering with food, playing out silly thought experiments like “how can I make the most heretical dish that I can still call chili and have it still be good?”

Other times, I’m indulging in fiction to explore notions that have occurred to me, notions like “what would it be like if a washed-up fortysomething dad suddenly got a long-overdue wish granted and became the best baseball player in the world?”

Heck, I’m even experimenting with the medium itself, trying out half-baked ideas like “could I create a ~~knockoff of~~ tribute to Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? and get people to compete in it via email?”

(That one was a lot of fun, but by the seventh week or so I was filled with some measure of regret over the work I had created myself. Nevertheless, I persist.)

In this context, the cocktails are simply the experiment with the lowest stakes. I love writing fiction (and I’d never dare let a robot do it for me), but writing is a lot of work. I don’t have to toil over a laptop or notepad, I don’t have to come up with cryptic clue-laden poems about restaurants around the country, and I don’t have to mess up the whole kitchen like I did when I thought “can I make chicken and waffles, but it’s a waffle that’s made out of chicken, like a big waffle-shaped chicken croquette?”

(The answer is no. That was a bad idea.)

Whenever I have a cocktail notion, I can simply step over to my bar, pull a few bottles, and run a test of the hypothesis in a matter of minutes. Sometimes, that ends in disaster, too! (I am not shy about pouring a misfire down the drain; it has happened many times before, and it will continue to happen for the foreseeable future.)

Occasionally, though, it results in something delightful and new, or at least new to me. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about balancing flavors from this chemistry-set-tinkering, gaining knowledge that has surely improved my non-alcoholic cooking: I’ve learned about balancing sweet and sour notes, herbal notes, floral notes, bitter ones, smoky ones, spicy ones, along with the impacts of temperature, timing, presentation, etc, etc.

Heck, I probably learn more from the ones that don’t work than the ones that do. That, too, is fundamental to the ethos of this newsletter—something I summed up in one of the first really-popular things I ever wrote here:

I’m not an expert mixologist. I’m just a guy who likes to mess around at home and see what I can come up with—and I enjoy sharing that with you.

Here’s a few successful experiments I’ve had over the years.

The whole run of stuff I’ve shared—at least since I started to get halfway-decent at it, a few years in—can be found on the Cocktails archive page.

(I also have a Recipes archive page. Both are for paid subscribers, and you should consider becoming one if you’re not already.)

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I’ve unlocked each of the ones below, though, as an enticement.

(That’s how I get ya.)

The Noon Kickoff

As a college football fan—and more specifically, a fan of a college football team whose limited national popularity often finds its games relegated to the dreaded 12pm EST kickoff time—I opted a few years back to craft a drink for those abbreviated early-morning tailgates: an eye-opener that combined dark rum, Aperol, lemon juice, cold brew and more for a surprisingly-harmonious result:

The Sea Serpent

This was the Pokémon evolution of a drink I’d been clued into by a longtime reader, one from a now-shuttered Ann Arbor restaurant that combined some dark and flavorful liquors into a smooth, wintery cocktail.

I introduced a few extra elements, brightening it up into a powerful punch:

The Triple Crown

I love to take a silly thematic idea as a jumping-off point, and then see if I can make something actually good from it. In this instance, I took the convergence of three events on the same weekend—the Kentucky Derby, Cinco de Mayo, and the coronation of King Charles III—as reason to craft a cocktail that would reflect each:

Waking Up In Vegas

I also like theatrics. This cocktail—an attempt to recreate second-hand and sight-unseen a drink a good friend recalled having at a fancy cocktail bar—featured notes of smoky Scotch, and was garnished with a candy cigarette and a dusting of activated charcoal for some ersatz degeneracy.

Fields of Gold

“Alright, what can you do with this, then?” is a challenge I love to be handed. Last fall, a reader gifted me a bottle of corn-flavored liqueur, and I set to make something that both showcased the spirit and kept it in check. I opted for a multigrain approach, bringing in wheated bourbon and some actual rice for a smooth, sassy sipper:

43andMe

I turned 43 last week, and that inspired me to employ the vanilla-y Spanish liqueur Licor 43 in a four-equal parts cocktail that turned out sweet, tart and wonderfully balanced—the feel-good hit of the current season: