The Business of Booze
“In your last article, you said that cocktails often contain olefin, corn syrup, and coloring. Why would anyone do that? Isn’t that illegal? There’s no way my bartender’d do that to me.”
Jamie
Portland, Oregon
Well, Jamie, it’s like this: the alcoholic beverage industry is just that, an industry. It is designed to make as much money as possible for those who own it. Not that that’s bad; all business owners usually wish to make money, myself included. The booze brokers, however, have to convince rational people with working taste buds to drink poisonous tasting poison.
There is one easy way to do this: wait until the drinker is older. Our taste buds age and become less sensitive to such things as cigars, spices, and whiskey. That’s why Scotch is typically seen as an older persons’ drink, as are gin Martinis. To young mouths those drinks are too strong (before you write letters, yes I do know how cool you are and that you drink Scotch at twenty-two. I never insinuated that it was an affectation and that you are a poser).
But what of the eighteen to thirty year-olds? How can the business of booze sell alcohol this demographic? With mixers! Fruit juice and soda pop are by far the most popular mixers. They are consumed by the hogshead in any bar, an absolutely essential tool to increasing sales or, indeed, having any sales at all. I have always suspected that sweet cocktails were introduced during Prohibition to cover up the taste of the cheap, nasty booze that was available then, the only way to drown out the harsh flavors that come from too little pride in one’s product. This is just a pet theory of mine.
Let’s pretend for a moment we are bar owners. How do we make the most money? How can we get the most profit per cocktail? First thing: use cheaper booze. Very few customers order by brand; most order by cocktail name. The guest orders a Cape Cod, not a Grey Goose with cranberry juice. The bar will generally buy the cheapest booze it can for the nonspecific “well drink.” For the consumer, it is generally never a good idea to order off the well, but to order the best product one can afford.
Why?
Higher quality spirits take higher quality ingredients to produce. Higher quality spirits take more time to produce. Higher quality spirits take more care to produce. This quality costs the producer money, so the producer charges the customer more. What does the consumer get out of this? Number one: flavor. Higher quality spirits taste better. Number two: purity. Higher quality spirits contain fewer impurities, because the producer has taken the time to get the impurities out. Alcohol is a poison; the consumer wants the cleanest poison possible. It is the impurities that cause nastiest hangovers, the impurities which can make the difference between high and sick. No caring producer is going to use cheap or impure ingredients. Their name rides on the quality of their product.
As bar owners, how else can we make money? Use cheaper mixers. Cheap mixers, like cheap alcohol, are lower quality. They contain high fructose corn syrup, coloring, preservatives, and artificial flavors. The producers seem to value consistency of product over quality of product, even though juice is an agricultural crop and will vary from year to year.
Also, as bar owners we need to spend as little as possible on fruit, used for both juice and garnish. After all, garnish is disposable, isn’t it? We buy fruit from around the world that has been picked unripe, dyed or painted, gassed, irradiated, waxed with a petroleum distillate like olefin or paraffin, boxed, stored, container shipped, and stored again.
Yuck!
Another way a bar can save money is on water filtration. There are cities full of bars without filters, and this lets municipal tap water into your drink. This water is clean and deemed safe; I am not saying anything to the contrary. I personally use it for everything but drinking. I don’t even mind the taste, but I can taste it. It’s preserved with chlorine and fluoridated. Filters remove that taste, but filters are expensive.
Jamie, your bartender does not hate you, I swear. The bar owner is just trying to stay in business, a business that has a fifty percent failure rate, a business with a very narrow profit margin, a business in a highly changeable and volatile environment. Everyone else does business this way; why shouldn’t he? After all, you’re still buying his product. He won’t change until you ask him to; so ask him to.
If you want better drinks, go to better bars. Ask what liquor they’re putting in your cocktail, and make sure the ingredients meet with your standard of quality. Just as there is a plethora of restaurant dedicated to fresh, high-quality ingredients, there is a plethora of bars dedicated to the same.
Also, when making drinks at home, check the quality of your ingredients. Use organic produce whenever possible. Use good booze. Use filtered water, even for ice. The quality of drinks you can make at home should far exceed the quality of drinks you can get at a bar because you have both complete control of the ingredients and you have the luxury of time to prepare them. You will be amazed at how crisp and clean your drinks taste. It’s often not what is in a cocktail, but what is absent that makes it perfect.
Enjoy.
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