Cocktails in a Time of Plague

Featured Cocktail: The Penicillin

Our featured cocktail is, fittingly, the Penicillin.

This cocktail narrowly fits into the category of what many folks call “Modern Classic” cocktails – which is a great topic for a Bar Cart Foundations episode, so we’ll hopefully return to the category in greater depth down the road – but basically these are post-prohibition drinks that have become popular enough to appear on cocktail menus around the world right next to true Prohibition-era and Pre-prohibition drinks.

The Penicillin was invented in the early 2000s by New York bartender Sam Ross, famous for his work at the establishments Milk & Honey, Little Branch, Pegu Club, and Attaboy. To make it, you’ll need:

• 2 oz. blended Scotch whiskey

• ¾ oz. fresh lemon juice

• ¾ oz. honey syrup

• ¼ oz. smoky Islay single-malt Scotch whiskey (Laphroiag 10 year and Ardbeg 10 year are great options)

• 2-3 quarter-sized slices fresh ginger

In a cocktail shaker, muddle your ginger then add all your liquid ingredients EXCEPT FOR THE ISLAY SCOTCH. Shake over ice until it’s well chilled and diluted. Then double strain into a rocks glass with ice. Float that quarter ounce of smoky scotch right on top, and garnish (optionally) with a couple pieces of candied ginger on a cocktail pick.

If you break down this drink, it’s just a whiskey sour. It’s got that 2 oz to ¾ oz to ¾ oz ratio of booze to sweet to sour. However, what makes the Penicillin a really special cocktail is the way it extends what a whiskey sour can be. It gives you two looks at the whiskey with the blended scotch being relatively mellow and the Islay float being super smoky and possibly briney, rubbery or iodine-like. And then the ginger adds spice and vigor to the equation. Together, these two additions to the classic formula act like bitters without actually BEING bitters. They add depth to the drink and offer interesting complements and counterpoints to the other, more standard ingredients.

Want to know how to invent a modern classic cocktail? I can’t think of a better example to follow than the Penicillin. As long as you can get your hands on some fresh ginger, it’s certainly a cure for what ails ya.

Show Notes

[Narrated by Modern Bar Cart CEO, Eric Kozlik)

Timeline: DC Bars and Restaurants Shut Down

First off, let’s review what’s going on here in Washington, DC, my home town – which we can largely generalize to what’s going on bicoastally and in many major cities here in the US. This episode should drop sometime during the last week of March here in 2020, and so far, the timeline of this virus and its impact on my local booze world has been as follows:

Wednesday, March 11

On Wednesday, March 11, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a state of emergency in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus (and so you know, we’re going to use those two words interchangeably from here out). Four days later, she followed that state of emergency with a set of heavy restrictions on bars and restaurants that included completely eliminating bar seating and placing capacity restrictions and spacing constraints on table seating for all DC food and drink venues.

As you can imagine, this order generated both praise and criticism. Proponents launched the hashtag #ShutUsDown, which circulated on social media a great deal in the few days following Bowser’s restrictions. This hashtag was accompanied by a fairly lengthy justification for why these bar and restaurant owners desired to be closed, which mostly boiled down to the fact that open bars and restaurants would fly in the face of the social distancing directive that slows the spread of this virus. A number of these venues announced that they would be voluntarily offering carryout instead of dine-in fare as a way to still serve their customers while being socially responsible.

Critics of Bowser’s new rules included one notable restaurant group that refused to follow this order because it did not create a fair playing field for small businesses. The owner has since published a retraction and an apology.

Wherever you stand on this “closed vs. open” issue, it’s worth noting that both the proponents and critics of Bowser’s orders were reacting in large part to the need to pay their people. On the one hand, an open establishment can generate enough cash flow to pay its staff, and on the other hand, a closed establishment can more easily lay off workers than an open one, allowing them to more quickly file for unemployment.

Monday, March 16

Then, on Monday, March 16, Bowser announced a complete shutdown of all bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. She also loosened some restrictions around filing for unemployment so that the displaced workers would be able to make ends meet until the panic is over. Bars and restaurants are, however, allowed to sell takeout food, beverages, and cocktails – usually of the batched and bottled variety for ease of distribution.

One interesting and kind of sad consequence of this is that Jack Rose, the DC whiskey bar that’s housed the largest whisk(e)y library on this side of the Mississippi, basically conducted a fire sale on their collection to help weather this storm. I saw a ton of stuff about this on social media, and it was truly bittersweet. On the one hand, it’s great to help businesses like this by purchasing what they have to offer, but on the other hand, it is really sad to see a truly beautiful collection sold off out of need.

Now, at the current date, there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the service industry about what these new rules and unemployment relaxations mean and how precisely to take advantage of them. I’m a member of several local bartender and restaurant Facebook groups, and there have been ongoing discussions and scheduled workshops designed to provide clarity and speed of access to money, but it’s safe to say that everyone is still slightly-to-moderately disgruntled by the whole situation – as they should be.

Maryland and Virginia

In Maryland, the situation is much the same. Bars and restaurants closed. But so far there have been no orders from Virginia Governor Ralph Northam that have forced service establishments to shut their doors. [EDIT: As of Monday, March 23, Virginia Closed Dine-In Restaurants.]The result is that folks who have decided to err on the side of caution are casting a critical eye upon those who have remained open and vice-versa, creating a culture of distrust within the industry that feels fittingly ominous as the coronavirus continues to pervade our social consciousness.

Distillers Creating Hand Sanitizer

But there are a few bright lights to be found. I can count more than a dozen distilleries here in the Mid-Atlantic that have risen to the challenge of making hand sanitizer to support both the general public and vital health workers and first responders. Cotton & Reed distillery here in DC is handing out free hand sanitizer with bottle purchases, and other operations that are too numerous to list here are pushing sanitizer out in bulk to service hospitals and other health care facilities.

How to Help Bars, Restaurants, and Distillers

That brings us largely up to speed on the changes this pandemic has triggered in the spirits and cocktail landscape in my neck of the woods. Most of it’s not good. But as you can see there are a lot of folks working very hard to fight the good fight so that things can get back to normal as soon as possible.

Our main ask to you, dear listener, is to keep in mind that all bars and restaurants and most small distilling operations are heavily dependent on cash flow to keep their lights on and pay their staff. So please, if you have a stake in how the industry is able to recover, and if you have the money to be able to contribute, think about doing one or all of the following. You could:

• Purchase gift cards from your favorite establishments to be used at a later date

• Get takeout from bars or restaurants that are offering that service

• Or buy local spirits from your liquor store so that distributors are forced to place new orders from distillers in your area. Otherwise, your money is just gonna go to large international conglomerates that will weather this crisis just fine.

So pull out your phone and start looking at how you can become part of the solution instead of remaining a bystander while this great industry struggles to figure out what comes next.

Resources and Further Reading/Listening

• The Shift Drink Podcast – especially, “Opie Crooks & Jill Tyler: #ShutUsDown, But Not Out”

• District Industry Facebook Group

• Maryland Whiskey Facebook Group

Four Thieves Vinegar

We’ll begin with a legend – albeit of questionable provenance.

The year is 1347. The setting, Marseilles, a primary port city in the south of France flanked by the rich farm country of Province to the north and the Mediterranean sea to the south. Due to exposure with afflicted Italian merchants, the Black Plague has ravaged the city, leaving at least half the populace dead or deathly ill.

You are a humble laborer charged with processing and packaging sweet and savory herbs from Province and receiving exotic spices from the Silk Road. The sights, sounds, and smells from the Genoese ships creaking into port have been grim indeed: literal skeleton crews with boils, ulcers, and affectations so gruesome that many vessels have to be turned back and burned at sea with their living and dead still aboard.

The panic in the city is total, and seemingly every household is engaged in the task of tending the sick or burying and mourning their dead. The bishop has proclaimed the illness a scourge from God, sent to punish sinners.

Most who come in contact with the victims of this plague seem quickly to succumb to their disease, but you and three of your fellow herb packers from the docks seem to have some sort of luck or protection against this invisible evil. You’ve slept in homes where the sickness has entered and even helped each other bury relatives and loved ones who were taken, but not a boil has appeared on your or your companions’ skin.

As days turn to weeks, things only get worse. Food becomes scarce, news from the outlying lands is bleak. One day, you and your charmed compatriots are watching from a doorway as the funeral procession for a prominent priest limps morbidly by.

If this truly is a plague sent by God, then why are the holiest among you also being struck down? Alas, it can only be the work of a power far more evil than even His grace can conquer. And if that is the case, then there is no hope of divine redemption – just this living hellscape filled with empty homes and fresh graves, both waiting to be looted.

You begin by working your way each night through the abandoned homes of friends and neighbors, combing through and divvying up the trinkets and belongings they left as they fled or perished. Then, knowing that many of the wealthier deceased are being buried with adornments far richer than anything you could hope to scrounge from a peasant home, you resolve to keep track of the most prominent deaths and take up spades while the graves are still fresh.

It’s on one fateful, miasmatic night, the moon, a thin sliver veiled by clouds, the air thick with death and fresh earth, that the constable and his men discover you and your band knee deep in the grave of a perfectly forgettable mid-grade merchant.

In times like this, justice is delivered swiftly. You know you need to act fast if your life is to be spared, and so you quickly propose to the constable that if the four of you reveal your secret for warding off the plague, he must spare your lives. The constable, being a man of good wits, sees no alternative but to agree and so lets you live in exchange for your secret.

End scene.

What you just read was a highly stylized and embellished version of a story that’s probably already mostly false – the legend of four thieves vinegar, or, en Francais, vinaigre des quatre voleurs. This is essentially a vinegar infused with herbs and spices that is rumored to have originated in Marseilles during one of several plagues that swept the region during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Clearly, the resolution of the story is that these dock workers turned thieves took the botanical profile of the herbs and spices they were covered with daily as a consequence of their occupation and turned them into a vinegar infusion that may or may not have helped the user to avoid contracting the plague.

More realistically, if this story has any truth to it, the herbs probably repelled the fleas that TRANSMITTED said plague, which were carried from port to port on rats.

According to Wikipedia (and I’ll be the first to admit that this is not a very reliable article), the following recipe for Four Thieves Vinegar was on display at a museum in Paris in the 1930s and was claimed to be an original copy of the recipe that was posted on the walls of Marseilles during an outbreak of the plague. It reads as follows:

“Take three pints of strong white wine vinegar, add a handful […] each of wormwood, meadowsweet, wild marjoram and sage, fifty cloves, two ounces of campanula roots, two ounces of angelic [what we call Angelica], rosemary and horehound and three large measures of champhor. Place the mixture in a container for fifteen days, strain and express then bottle. Use by rubbing it on the hands, ears and temples from time to time when approaching a plague victim.”

During the late middle ages, the medical canon operated based on the humoral view of the human body. Essentially, you’ve got these four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm – and physicians at the time would attempt to diagnose your malady based on an imbalance between these humors. Then, on the remedy front, they would often create various infusions, tinctures, poultices and what-have-you using herbs, spices, and roots that would hopefully serve to correct the imbalance in question.

This is how the legend of the four thieves vinegar connects us back to the spirits world. Based on what we know from our experience with Shrubs and switchels, vinegar is an effective extracting agent – definitely good enough to get the flavors and oils from certain herbs and spices into a liquid medium – but perhaps not so effective as actual spirits at pulling out and preserving flavor compounds.

Alcohol and medicine also have a pretty fortuitous intersection at the end of the middle ages with the invention of distillation by the Arabs in the 9th century – which then spread to Europe and China with additional advances like fractional distillation coming by the 13th century. And if you think about the absence of things like mechanical transportation, printing, and remote communication – that was actually a really fast spread.

Spiritous Associations

Now, think about the word, “spirit” for a second. How did this word come to be associated with distilled alcohol? Well, the way those medieval Islamic alchemists thought of it didn’t really have much to do with our contemporary sense of the word. Because Islam is a dry religion, the Arab scientists who conducted some of these first forays into distillation weren’t interested so much in drinking as they were interested in what chemical compounds the condensed vapors of their distillates contained.

Right? These vapors were the “spirits” of whatever materials created them. And so, in typical alchemical fashion, these scholars went about looking to “refine” substances by taking their spirits and blending them into something more perfect or desirable than the sum of its raw parts. You could also make an argument that the Four Thieves Vinegar that came about a few centuries later borrowed from this idea of taking the properties of numerous elements and then combining them in the correct ratios to produce something verging on magical.

Another etymological sense of the word spirit is the Latin root word “spirare,” meaning breath or the breathing of air, especially as that function is related to life and what would centuries later come to be called “homeostasis.” This is where we get associations with spirits and the ubiquitous “water of life” moniker. From the Celtic “Uisce Beatha” to the French Eau de Vie to the Portuguese Aguardiente, these traditions all tie distilled spirits to the ability to draw breath on this earth, and I think the connection there might be a bit stronger than some people are willing to give credit for in today’s world of antibiotics and modern medicine.

This also ties us back to the world of organized religion in that breathing and breath is associated in Christianity with the Holy Spirit, and so you can see how all these forces – from alchemy, to distillation, to botany, to humoral medicine – converge to create a rich sense of the word “spirit,” one that is diametrically opposed to death, pestilence, and plague.

Aqua Mirabilis

Let’s take a look at a couple of distillates and infusions that became important medical treatments during the late middle ages, starting with a little dram called “Aqua Mirabilis,” or “miracle water.

This is one of two recipes that piqued my interest in a document called “The London Distiller,” which was published in the mid-1600s, and which I came across second-hand through a contemporary distillation experiment that I’ll mention in just a minute.

Here’s the recipe for Aqua Mirabilis, and fair warning, it contains a lot of herbs and flowers you may have never heard of:

“Take melilot, cardamum, cubebs, gallingale, cloves, ginger, mace, nutmegs, of each a dram (which is a measure that ends up being a little less than 2 grams), the juice of celandine, half a pint; mingle all these together, bruise to powder with the juice, and a pint of Aqua Vita, and three pints of white wine, put them together into a glass-still; let it stand all night, and in the morning distil it with a very gentle fire. It is excellent against the palsy, and very restorative. In the summer one spoonful may be taken in a week, fasting, and in the winter two spoonfuls.”

Now, there are some CRAZY things that this little recipe reveals about the sophistication of distilling knowledge (or at least distilling instincts) during the late middle ages.

Simulating Low Wines

Offhand, I got curious about what kind of ABV we’d be looking at with the pint of Aqua Vitae, three pints of white wine, and half a pint of celandine juice. So I ran some speculative numbers and it turns out that we’re looking at a compound somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% ABV, which is what many modern distillers will end up with as low wines after conducting what’s called a stripping run. Following that stripping run, they’ll perform a second distillation to get what ends up being pretty close to their finished product.

But keep in mind, Aqua Mirabilis wouldn’t have been made using even a pot still – it would be a glass alembic-style still with no condenser – just an arm to catch the distilled vapors. This is about the least efficient form of distillation out there, and so it’s really cool to me that this recipe is set up for success at the get-go by mimicking the low wines produced by a more sophisticated method of distillation.

Process and Dosage

Other cool stuff about this recipe – the author recommends muddling the spices with the celandine juice and then letting it steep in the 20% ABV solution with the wine and the aqua vita overnight, which is the same method used to make many modern liqueurs, cordials, and amari.

Also, there’s a dosage prescription – one spoonful in the summer, and two in the winter – taken fasting (which simply means on an empty stomach). Why that is, I couldn’t tell ya, but I assume someone has their reasons.

Plague Water

Another, perhaps more complex infused spirit that comes out of the Middle Ages is a thing affectionately referred to as “Plague Water,” which was actually created as a treatment for the plague, rather than as a more general remedy like with Aqua Mirabilis.

The recipe for Plague Water is a bit too long to list here, but it has a couple interesting departures from the process I just described a moment ago. First, it’s actually sweetened, moving it one step closer to modern liqueurs, and second, it contains a couple ingredients that are themselves compounds made of many other ingredients. These include Venice Treacle and Mithridate, which contain questionable ingredients like viper flesh and opium tears, respectively.

According to The London Distiller, the instructions for administering Plague Water are to:

“let the party infected take of this water 1 ounce, mingled with warm Posset drink, (or any proper water in that case) and be kept very warm and sweat well thereon.”

Both Aqua Mirabilis and Plague water were re-created recently by a contemporary distilling company called Tattersall, based out of Minneapolis. And of course, to be compliant with modern safely regulations, Tattersall Distilling had to omit things like viper flesh, opium, and ambergris, which is the hardened bile of a sperm whale.

I can’t locate any of these products available on the market today, unfortunately, because it appears to have been a small batch and local collaboration with the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. But the sheer fact that we’ve got distillers in the here and now breathing new life into recipes that were all but banished to the dark ages is incredibly exciting to me.

It means we’re not done learning, and I’m very excited to see what further excavation of historical distilling records will yield in the years to come.

Plague Doctors: Harbingers of Change

Before we return to our own Coronavirus plague, I do want to offer up just one more little botanical oddity from the late middle ages for your consideration – the case of the Plague Doctor.

Many of you will be familiar with this creepy looking costume with an overcoat, a cane, and a beaked mask. It’s remained popular at halloween gatherings and masquerades through the years, but you might be surprised to know a few pointed details about this ominous occupation and the impact it’s had on the world.

A Beak Filled with Herbs

First, and most importantly, the big ol beak on the mask wasn’t just there to wig people out. In many cases, it was filled with sweet smelling herbs and spices like juniper, rose, mint, camphor, and cloves to help the wearer literally mask the smell of decay and putrid flesh, which was very much a daily reality in times of plague. And, if we learned anything from our encounter with Four Thieves Vinegar, it’s that many botanicals also have antimicrobial properties that can help to ward off plague vectors like fleas. Certain plants evolved these properties as defense mechanisms against attack from insects, so it makes sense why the fleas might have responded with aversion.

Eye Protection & Social Distancing

Another thing to note is that later versions of the plague doctor mask integrated glass eye protection, which is a really smart thing to do, since the plague could be transmitted through bodily fluids, and many plague victims had this pesky little habit of coughing up blood and mucous. The cane carried by most plague doctors also helped keep them at arm’s length from the people they were hired to inspect, which is, in light of today’s predicament, an O.G. example of social distancing.

Empirics: Heralds of a New Age

Which brings us to the one thing that plague doctors share in common with everyday folks like you and me scrolling our news feeds reading about COVID-19 – we’re not doctors, and neither were they, by and large. In fact, Plague Doctors were hired by towns or cities where the plague had become a major problem. Some of these contractors did treat patients, but their more official role was to gather demographic data about who was affected and/or dying. Because of this, in many places, they were referred to as “Empirics.”

And this is very important because for more than a millennium leading up to the outbreak of plague in Europe, most medical practitioners were members of the religious class, and because of the interdependence between sovereign monarchs and the church, the best medical treatment would always be reserved for wealthy landowners. But, because of their contracts with the municipality they were hired to serve, Plague Doctors were able to help everyone, regardless of their class or social status.

And you know what, when you get thrown into the belly of the beast like plague doctors did, you get a lot more reps, a lot more data points than those ivory tower physicians who only treated a small percentage of the population. More data points makes it easier to identify trends in what works and what doesn’t – even when significant trial and error is involved – and so I’m personally not surprised that Plague Doctors were contemporary with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and the anatomical dissection theatres of the Renaissance that led to major breakthroughs in the medical field.

These so-called “Empirics” were literal heralds of empirical science and the scientific method, and though they carried the herbs and spices of a fearful and superstitious world in their masks, their methods and fearlessness created space for science to flower.

What We Can Learn from Past Plagues

Taken together, the case studies of Aqua Mirabilis, Plague Water, and of course, Plague Doctors, show the medical field in the late middle ages bending away from the humoral view of illness and toward one that valued complex chemical formulations and a more sophisticated understanding of the body. The way I see it, the advent of distillation and the subsequent ravages and responses to plague in Europe were a sort of proto-awakening that paved the way for the renaissance, and the subsequent ages of enlightenment and revolution that would ultimately shape our modern world.

Was this time period sexy? No – it was ugly, and it was brutal. But as a result of confronting an invisible enemy and striving to overcome it, the seeds for many important paradigm shifts were sowed.

This is why I believe that spirits and cocktails in a time of plague have their role in the here and now. Yes, of course we know so much more about our invisible enemy than four legendary thieves covered in herb dust, but if there’s one thing a pandemic forces you to do, it’s to really re-assess your basics: food, water, and security. And in this way, you and I are very similar to the peasants huddled around fires hearing stories of stinking corpses and ruined villages. We know we’re not safe, and consequently, we’re forced to dedicate a ton of mental resources to merely surviving, rather than flourishing.

It’s a little sobering to think of ourselves as sharing some sort of emotional DNA with those wretched victims of the Black Plague. Part of you thinks, “we’re better than that now. We can weather this,” but then there’s another part of you that sees how little our institutions have changed from those days when the wealthy elite held absolute sway over the many.

Just like live news coverage of the Vietnam war disillusioned many Americans from supporting the initiative to send our servicemen overseas for a war without end and without virtue, I think we’re seeing an echo of that on our news feeds today, except the enemy is not a camouflaged guerilla army on the other side of the world – it’s a virus that could be hiding in plain sight on any person, object, surface, or atmosphere you encounter.

That’s why I’d like to round out our historical investigation into plagues and their effects on what we drink with one of the oldest accounts of mass illness passed down to us by Lucretius, the Roman poet responsible for translating and interpreting the work of Epicurus – one of the first thinkers to advocate for an atomistic view of the universe, way back in the 3rd century BCE.

The Importance of Being Hopeful

Lucretius’ epic poem, De Rerum Natura – The Nature of Things – includes an account of The Athenian Plague of 430 BCE, and although there’s widespread uncertainty among historians as to what precisely caused this plague, by all accounts, it was bad. In his translation of Epicurus’ text, Lucretius writes:

In these matters, what was saddest and most cause for gloom

Was that, when someone saw the plague upon him, he would start

Thinking like a man under sentence of death, and would lose heart

And lay there listlessly, his mind sunk deep in morbid thought,

And dwelling on his death, gave up his spirit on the spot.

Almost 2500 years after those words were penned, here we are in a similar predicament. But in those moments where it seems tempting to give up your spirit without even having contracted the virus, I think it’s important to remember that our distilled spirits and cocktails are still here for us. It’s important to remember that they are derived from life-giving traditions and can be used carefully to soothe and comfort in times of great uncertainty.

In fact, now is a great time for you to think about which spirits remind you most of the medicinal and empirical traditions that arose to combat plague and pestilence, and perhaps find a way to share a restorative drink with a friend via phone or video chat. Know that you share the same anxieties as those victims of plague from many centuries past, but know also that we have built upon their struggles and are now stronger because of their ingenuity and bravery.

That’s the point of everything I’ve said so far, and if you’re still listening, you deserve to hear it.

Having Fun While Socially Distancing

As we wrap up this episode, I’d like to end on a lighter note and give you a few ideas for how to deal with quarantining and social distancing while staying sane and maybe even catching a much needed buzz.

As you can imagine, with a week off from the podcast for logistical reasons, I’ve had a lot of time to think about creative ideas for how to make this self-imposed lockdown more doable, or, dare I say, enjoyable.

Idea 1: Chopped-Style Cooking/Mixing

I mentioned earlier going back to basics – food, water, sanitation. But for those of us who have walked into grocery stores with bare shelves recently, well…we’ve had to face up to the cold reality of the bottom shelf of the pantry and the back of the freezer. Although it stinks when you can’t make your usual chicken or Sunday roast, consider doing a “Chopped”-style meal with a set of very disparate ingredients that have been on your shelves or in your fridge for way too long.

I recently made a venison goulash with orzo, which isn’t exactly a common dinner in our repertoire. But it was great because I was able to line up all these weird ingredients on my counter and try to weave a through-line between them, almost like a bartender does when someone asks them to make a custom drink. Keeps the skills sharp and gives our overburdened food supply chain a little time to recover from the rush on milk, eggs, and toilet paper.

Idea 2: Cull Down Your Liquor Cabinet

This is also a great time to cull down your liquor cabinet a bit. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got bottles that are mostly finished, so think about what kinds of cocktails you can make with that half ounce of fancy Scotch, that bottle of Bailey’s you forgot about and the fancy hot chocolate your sister sent you for Christmas. See what you come up with – if you’re a regular listener, I completely trust you.

Idea 3: Stock Up Intelligently, But Responsibly

The nice thing about thinning the number of bottles on your bar is that it lends itself to new growth, which leads me to my next recommendation: keep an eye on which areas of the world have been most drastically affected by the Coronavirus, and consider stocking up intelligently on bottles that you really love from those regions.

Now, I’ll probably regret saying this when all the shelves get picked dry, but I’ll give you a real world example. Because Fernet Branca is primarily produced in Milan, which has been hit really hard by the pandemic, I decided to pick up two bottles in the past week. It’s not something you go through super quickly in a cocktail context, so I don’t consider this hoarding, but I do want to make sure that if something bad happens, I don’t have to completely forget what Fernet tastes like.

As we’re able, we’ll also try to schedule an interview or two with folks who can maybe shed some more light on the global impacts this virus is having on the booze industry, and maybe that will allow you to plan more strategically. To be clear – I’m not advocating booze hoarding, and my previous directive to support local distillers and bars stands – but this is basic investing logic – if you can see the writing on the wall, best to buy while you have the opportunity.

Idea 4A: Schedule a Digital Happy Hour

Another thing you can and should do is make plans to catch up with friends and family who are also socially isolated during this pandemic. I joined my squad for a virtual happy hour last Friday via video chat, and it was awesome to share a drink in solidarity while making sure the people I really care about are holding up okay during these difficult times.

Idea 4B: See Who Can Invent the Best Toast

If you want a fun party game to play during your virtual happy hour, message everyone ahead of time and see who can come up with the best custom toast pertaining to Coronavirus or a theme of your choosing.

Idea 5: Leave us a Podcast Review

Finally, I have to be a little selfish here and recommend that tepid days quarantined in your home are a great time to pull up your laptop and leave a sparkling podcast review for us on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or wherever you like to leave reviews.

Now, I’m sure it would be unethical to offer compensation for reviews – so I definitely won’t do that. But if you do happen to leave us a review and reach out by emailing podcast@modernbarcart.com to verify it was you…you never know. You just might find yourself richly and unexpectedly gifted with something.

CC Attributions

• Sentinel by Kai Engel is licensed under an Attribution License.

• Gregorian Song by Hicham Chahidi is licensed under an Attribution License.

• Song Sparrow Serenade (Instrumental) by Chad Crouch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

• Awakenings by Ketsa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.