Lou's Official Dispatch on the Old Fashioned THC Drink Situation and Why Nobody Asked for Your Opinion Except Me
Somebody handed me a smoked rosemary sprig last Thursday. In a bar. At nine o'clock at night. It was sticking out of my old fashioned like it was planted there by a person who had read one sentence about cocktails and decided that was enough education. I looked at that sprig. I looked at the bartender. I looked back at the sprig. Nobody called the police, but I am still thinking about it.
This is a post about the old fashioned THC drink that I personally made happen, because somebody had to. But first we are going to deal with the bar industry, because thirty years of selling pipe taught me one thing above all else: if you let something go without saying anything, it gets worse. And it has gotten worse. It has gotten spectacularly, embarrassingly, smoke-and-mirror worse, and I have the receipt.
The Bar Did Not Invent the Old Fashioned. It Is Currently Destroying It.
The Old Fashioned is whiskey, sugar, bitters, orange peel, and ice. That is it. That is the whole list. A ten-year-old could write it on a napkin and still have room for a drawing. There is no step seven. There is no "and then you reach for the kitchen torch." The recipe is not a suggestion. It is not a starting point. It is not an invitation for you to express yourself.
But here is what the bar thinks it is. The bar thinks the Old Fashioned is a canvas. The bar thinks the Old Fashioned has been sitting around for a hundred and fifty years waiting for someone with a culinary school certificate and a handlebar mustache to finally fix it. The bar is wrong. The bar has been wrong for twenty years, and nobody who works in the bar will admit this because they are too busy smoking things that should not be smoked near a glass.
I have been served an Old Fashioned with:
- Smoked rosemary (a cooking herb. For chicken.)
- A dehydrated orange wheel the size of a coaster
- Activated charcoal, which I believe is a medical procedure
- Foam. Actual foam. On an Old Fashioned.
- A card explaining the whiskey's "origin story," as if the whiskey is a superhero and I am here for the lore
Not one of those things improved the drink. Every single one of them was an apology. You put rosemary in an Old Fashioned because you are not confident the Old Fashioned is good enough on its own. It is. It has always been. You are the problem.
The "Mixologist" Situation
I need to address the word mixologist before I can move on with my life. A bartender makes drinks. A mixologist tells you about making drinks for so long that you finish the drink yourself out of self-defense. I have nothing against bartenders. Bartenders are working people doing a job and doing it mostly fine. Mixologists have decided that the job was not complicated enough and have added a second job, which is performing the first job at you while you sit there trying to have a conversation with whoever you came with.
You do not need a lecture. You do not need provenance. You need the drink to taste like the drink is supposed to taste and you need it in a reasonable amount of time. That is the whole transaction. I am not being unreasonable. I am being correct, which is a thing I have some experience with.
Why Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned Exists and Why It Has Never Required a Torch
Here is what happened. We made a drink. We called it Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned. It has 8mg of hemp-derived THC. It has real cocktail flavor built from the same ingredients and extracts that bartenders use, not syrup, not "cocktail-inspired flavoring," actual ingredients. It is an old fashioned THC drink that tastes like an old fashioned and behaves like one and does not come with a card explaining itself.
The 8mg is the right number. Not a microdose, not a knockout, the sweet spot where the room loosens up, the edge comes off, and you become, measurably, funnier. That is not a coincidence. The terpene blend in every can, linalool, beta-caryophyllene, citronellol, is in there because it connects with the receptors that make you social. We engineered the laugh. Herb will tell you more about the molecules if you ask him and also if you do not ask him. I have heard the speech. It takes about forty-five minutes. The short version is: we know what we put in there and we put it in there on purpose.
No hangover. No alcohol. No rosemary. No apology.
It is in the fridge right now, if you want to try the experiment yourself.
The Rest of the Bar, Since We Are Already Here
While I have your attention and you cannot leave: the bar also charges for ice. Ice is weather. Weather comes from outside. Outside is free. I am paying for a phenomenon that happens in the sky and has done so reliably for several billion years without my financial support. I am not doing it anymore. I have made my position clear on this and I will continue to make it clear every time it comes up, which is every time I see a drink menu with an "artisanal ice program."
The $22 cocktail. The tiny pour. The room that is too loud to have the conversation you came to have. The speaker playing music you cannot identify but are also not allowed to dislike because it is "curated." All of it. A coordinated effort to take something good, which is sitting at a bar with someone you like, and surround it with so much production that you forget why you came.
That is the bar's great achievement of the last twenty years. Congratulations to everyone involved.
What an Old Fashioned THC Drink Is Actually For
It is for the conversation. It is for the room loosening up. It is for the night getting better without the part at the end of the night that makes you not want to do it again for a week. The drink is a vehicle. It is not the destination. It has never been the destination. Anyone who has made the drink the destination has missed the point entirely and is probably currently sourcing a new variety of artisanal bitters to "push the profile forward."
If you want to read more about why the classics are the classics and why we built a can around that exact argument, go read Damn Right It's an Old Fashioned: A Case for the Classics, which says some of the same things I just said but with slightly more structure because Herb got involved and he cannot help himself.
The short version is this: the Old Fashioned does not need your help. It did not need it in 1880. It did not need it in 1990. It does not need it now. What it needed was someone to take the alcohol out, put 8mg of THC in, and leave everything else exactly where it was. That is what we did. It took restraint. Restraint is underrated. Nobody in the bar industry has tried it recently but I recommend it.
And if the Old Fashioned is not your thing, fine. Mary's M Train Double Espresso Martini is right there at 8mg and ready to go. Jane's Fancy Shmancy Pomegranate Cosmopolitan exists for people with better taste than me, and I mean that as a compliment to Jane. Or grab the Variety Pack and fight about it at home like the rest of us.
But if you know what you want, and you have always known what you want, and you have spent years watching someone try to put rosemary in it: Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned. Straight up. Classic. A little stubborn. Just like me. Damn right.
My watch stopped in 2009 and it has been right twice a day ever since. The Old Fashioned was right in 1880 and it has been right every day since then. Some things do not need improving. Some things just need to be left alone by people with kitchen torches and a certificate.
That is the dispatch. I am done. Go get a drink.
Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned is an 8mg hemp-derived THC cocktail. For adults 21 and older only. Not available in all states. This product has not been evaluated by the FDA and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Please drink responsibly and know your local laws.
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