Champagne Problems
We're going to a birthday party. It's your birthday party. Here's what to drink at it
I got a couple posts in the hopper, but I haven’t been able to finish anything recently while trying to keep everything else going. Is this a 40 problem? Not really, I’ve just been prioritizing some of the stuff that has nothing to do with sharing fun drinks with you virtually (and hey, some day, in person). You know the politics and the work and the other boards I’m on and all that.
I’ve also been dealing with some amount of existential questioning that I think goes along with any milestone birthday, and I’ve been dealing with it in a weird time where we cannot quite celebrate properly. Certainly I’ve attended well executed Zoom events in these times, and you can still bring people together as best any of us can, but I mean…it’s not the same. We all know this, no one is trying to fool anyway, but we are not in a dark, sweaty, loud karaoke bar, nor will we be for a while. This is the reality that we live in, and in that reality, we find new ways to celebrate.
To wit, some dear friends sent me a little champagne to help celebrate 40. I don’t normally keep much champagne around unless I’m hosting brunches (again, obviously has not been happening), which means…I don’t get an opportunity to make champagne cocktails all that much. Champagne cocktails are great and fun, and not just things you drink with brunch. So I popped open the little bottle and made myself the sublime and wonderful Death in the Afternoon. Named after the Hemingway novel because, well, Ernest Hemingway invented it, it’s a wonderfully simple bit of alchemy, with 1 part absinthe topped with 3 parts champagne. The chemical reaction is worth watching as it becomes opalescent as you pour in the champagne. On top of all of this it is far too easy to drink.
After downing one of those, I got to work trying to craft a tiki ode to this wonderful beverage. Champagne is not a common ingredient in tiki, and I only found a couple recipes in the books I own, as well as a couple others online (including this truly bonkers one that even I did not have all the stuff for sitting around), but I’ve made enough drinks at this point to be able to start putting this together. Tiki drinks don’t normally feature heavy doses of absinthe, but absinthe is important for adding depth and a bit of funk with all sorts of drinks, usually when combined with Angostura bitters, so obviously I pulled those out. The few recipes that I did find frequently mentioned darker rums (usually a dark Jamaican), which I could have easily done, but it’s my birthday, so I took it up a notch and pulled out the 151, apparently because you need to counter strong liquor with…more strong liquor. Lime is always the most obvious choice of citrus (though you could probably do some good work with a lemon here too), so I grabbed a lime. To sweeten it up a little? Just a touch of 2:1 simple syrup and falernum to add sweetness and a bit of spice. So what do you have here? Let’s call it…Death in the Evening:
1 oz lime
.25 oz 2:1 simple syrup
.25 oz falernum
1 oz overproof Demerara rum aka 151 (Lemon Hart here, like always)
1 oz absinthe (St. George, of course)
2 dashes Angostura bitters (or more, I have a heavy dashing hand)
Champagne
Combine everything other than the champagne in a Collins glass and fill it halfway with crushed ice. Give it a nice long stir, top with some more crushed ice, and finish it off with champagne. Garnish with some mint.
Be incredibly careful with this. It is…not weak, or as I perhaps more succinctly put it after drinking one, this drink will, in fact, fuck you up. But we all got things to celebrate, even during a pandemic, and it’s important to still do that. Even if we cannot physically be together, we can still be together, we can share a drink across the internet, we can find ways of coming together, and we still should. And until I can make one of these for you to celebrate something when we can get together again…safe drinking.
Another fun thing I did recently? Tried all of the Sippin Santa cocktails (thank you Ken and Adrienne for facilitating). You may have one more chance to enjoy them (website says they are available next Friday and Saturday still, though the hours have been…weird), so I’ll try to get my highlights of all the beverages out to you so you can make an informed decision.
This is Trader Jane’s, a periodic newsletter about drinks (mostly tiki) and other fun writing. Follow me on Substack for something once or twice a week (that’s the goal for now at least), and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more timely updates on my beverages (and for lots of other things of course!)
And, as with any good drink, feel free to share (responsibly, of course)