Herb's Official Complaint About Why Your Tonic Water Costs More Than His Mortgage (And the Can That Made Him Stop Checking the Bill)

Herb's Official Complaint About Why Your Tonic Water Costs More Than His Mortgage (And the Can That Made Him Stop Checking the Bill)

I have the receipt in front of me. I have been looking at it for four days. I am not letting this go.

Last Thursday, Lou and I sat down at a bar that I will not name because their lawyer is probably younger than their cocktail menu. We ordered two old fashioned THC drinks. Except they did not have those, because the bar had not yet figured out that the future exists. So we ordered two classic old fashioneds, the kind that are supposed to cost a reasonable amount of money and arrive without a lecture attached. What we got was a bill, an experience, and what I can only describe as a personal betrayal from the hospitality industry.

I am going to walk you through this line by line. I do this professionally. I am an accountant. This is what I do.

The Audit: A Bar Tab, Reviewed Under Oath

Line one. Tonic water. Seven dollars. For tonic water. Do you understand what tonic water is? It is carbonated water with quinine in it. The British invented it to make malaria medicine drinkable, and somehow it has graduated to a seven-dollar line item that I am subsidizing in the year I should be thinking about retirement. I did not ask for premium tonic. I did not ask for small-batch tonic. I asked for tonic. This is a moral failure.

Line two. Ice. The ice is folded into the "craft cocktail fee," which the menu explains in a font so small it requires a man to put on his glasses in public, which I refuse to do on principle. Ice is weather. It is frozen weather. It falls from the sky and we chip it off our windshields every February, except apparently in this establishment they carve it by hand from a glacier and charge me twelve dollars for the privilege of having my drink cold. My drink being cold is not an amenity. It is the minimum standard for a functioning civilization.

Line three. The garnish. A "hand-expressed orange peel." Nineteen dollars for the drink with this garnish, versus seventeen dollars without. I want to know whose hand. I want a name. I want to understand the certification process. I want to know if this person is unionized and what their benefits package looks like, because they are apparently the highest-paid employee at this institution and they are squeezing citrus at me.

Line four. A "smoke element." Someone came to our table with a small wooden box and put smoke in Lou's drink. Lou looked at me. I looked at Lou. The bartender, who goes by the title "mixologist," which is a word I am actively campaigning to have removed from the dictionary, waited for our reaction. Lou said, "Did my drink just get put out?" The mixologist did not think that was funny. I thought it was the funniest thing Lou had said since 2019, and I am including the thing he said at my cousin's wedding.

Line five. The tip line. At twenty-two percent, pre-calculated, circled helpfully by the server so that I did not accidentally commit the crime of tipping less than a man who charged me seven dollars for weather and two dollars to watch someone squeeze a piece of fruit. I tipped twenty-two percent. I am not a monster. I am just a man who is going to tell the entire internet about it.

What a Classic Old Fashioned Is Actually Supposed to Cost You

An old fashioned is whiskey, bitters, sugar, and an orange peel. That is it. That is the whole list. It was invented in the 1800s by people who did not have the time or the patience for a smoke element because they had a country to run. The word "old fashioned" is in the name. It is telling you something. It is a warning. It is saying: do not mess with this. Do not put rosemary in it. Do not carve the ice into a sphere. Do not stand at my table and make theater out of a box of wood chips while I sit here wondering if I should have eaten dinner first.

Somebody at our table once put a smoked rosemary sprig in Lou's old fashioned and handed it to him like she deserved a medal. Lou looked at it for a long moment. He said, "Is this on fire?" She said it was a smoked garnish. Lou said, "I did not order a campfire." I have never been prouder of him.

You do not improve an old fashioned. You do not elevate it. You do not reimagine it through a contemporary lens or source its bitters locally or clarify its whiskey using a technique you read about in a newsletter. You make the drink. You give the man the drink. You take a fair price for the drink. This is the entire social contract of the bar, and the modern hospitality industry has shredded it, pressed it into a cocktail, called it "deconstructed," and charged me eighteen dollars.

The Line Item That Actually Makes Sense

I want to show you what a correct financial decision looks like. It looks like Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned. Eight milligrams of THC. Bitters, orange, oak. Classic. Correct. Named after a man who has never once asked for a smoke element and never will. A four-pack is sixteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. You know what that comes to per can? Four dollars and twenty-five cents. For an old fashioned THC drink that hits in minutes, cleans up with no hangover, and has never once asked me to watch someone carve ice.

I ran the numbers against last Thursday's bar tab. Do you want to know the result? I am not going to tell you the result because it will make me angry again and I am trying to finish this piece. What I will tell you is that the math is not close. The math is not even in the same ballpark. The math is one of those situations where you show a person the spreadsheet and they go quiet and stare at the wall for a minute.

No craft ice surcharge. No garnish fee. No mixologist standing at my table making eye contact while he does something unnecessary with fire. No tip line pre-calculated at twenty-two percent for services that included, I will remind you, charging me seven dollars for tonic water, which is weather.

If you have not tried it, and if you are still handing over twenty-dollar bills at bars for the privilege of watching a person squeeze citrus, I want you to know that the can is in the fridge right now. The price is on the label. The math is not complicated. I did the math. I am an accountant.

And if you want to see what started this whole crusade, Lou wrote about it with more poetry and considerably less receipts in Damn Right It's an Old Fashioned. He is less angry than I am, which is why he handles the emotional arguments and I handle the audit. It is a good system. We did not design it. The women in our lives designed it. We just kept believing we had.

If the old fashioned is not your grievance, we have other cans for your other complaints. Mary's M Train Double Espresso Martini for the nights that need to keep going. Jane's Fancy Shmancy Pomegranate Cosmopolitan for the person who wants an entrance and not a bill for it. Or just get the Variety Pack and stop paying for someone else's hand-carved ice one night at a time.

The bar tab is in the recycling. The receipt is not, because it is evidence. Lou says I should let it go. Lou's watch stopped in 2009 and he considers that a feature. We will agree to disagree.

Twenty-two percent. For weather.

Herb & Lou's Canned Laughter is hemp-derived THC. 8mg per can. For adults 21 and older only. Not available where prohibited. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Please drink responsibly and know your local laws.