A Bartender...Excuse Me, Mixologist's Viral "Perfect Old Fashioned" Video Will Make You Pray For Prohibition
When drinking had its moment a few years back this is EXACTLY the guy who stepped in and ruined it. He's why your favorite bar all of a sudden took 30 minutes to get a drink, and why you couldn't ever get a reservation to one of the cool new speakeasy-type places, because they were constantly at capacity with people waiting for their first drink. The guy who only took the gig in the first place because he loved his grandpa's old tweed suit-vest but could never find a socially appropriate time to wear it out along with his handlebar mus-tachio. The guy who called it "mixology."
This is what they are all about. Gimmicks. Because it wasn't good enough to make good drinks with good quality ingredients, to bring back classic old recipes that the world forgot about, maybe even put your own simple twist on it. No. Because whiskey is cool — but have you ever had whiskey…billowing a housefire's-worth of smoke out of the glass after fifteen minutes inside the $1000 cocktail smoker that takes up half of the bar's surface area? What about whiskey with barley, wheat…and infused for 72 hours with bacon marinated in maple syrup and the blood of the pig after it was sacrificed during a pagan ritual beneath the full moon? That's what I thought. That will be $35, leave it open?
Here is the moment that I contacted my local congressperson and requested we reconsider Prohibition:
It's hard to blame Dorky McFuckface and all his "mixologists" for forgetting the point of going out and drinking with people when they don't have any friends to do it with and spend their weekend nights memorizing the PDT cocktail book recipes and watching YouTube videos of liquor bottle tricks.
What's a lot easier to blame him for is making arguably the worst old fashioned that's ever been captured on video. And for some reason uploading it to the internet, apparently on purpose. I don't know I'm not going to nitpick and be a snob. To do that I'd have to have the arrogance and lack of self-awareness of like, a guy who filmed a video called "Perfect Old Fashioned" where he systematically did each step of the most simple recipe of a three-ingredient drink completely wrong, one by one. And I don't but I hope to someday.
Meanwhile if you can find an Old Fashioned recipe that calls for 10 dashes of Angostura bitters and 4 ounces of club soda that isn't named like TGI Fridays please let me know.
Perfect garnish dude perfect size well done very well done.
PS,
I almost forgot to compliment the beginning of the video. In my opinion nothing was more fitting in his performance as a shitty bartender than having him wave away the perfectly good mixing and rocks glasses and instantly add 5 minutes to the wait.
If I'm imagining his bar menu for the night, this drink features something like "artisanal crystal drinkware made with locally-sourced quartz responsibly chiseled by the native woodspeople after the first rainfall of spring," to add a little “complexity” to the “cocktail” like "the essence of mountain air and rusty sifter," then deep-frozen at -100 degrees celsius, which does absolutely nothing because I'm making a drink with ice in it but it's called stagecraft, obviously; do you think I'm wearing these sunglasses inside because I want to and think they make me look cool?