Lou's Official Field Report: The THC Cocktails Audit Nobody Asked For (You're Welcome)
I have been sitting with this for three weeks. I have the receipts. Literally. I kept them. My wife thinks I have a problem. She is wrong. I have a spreadsheet.
Here is what I need you to understand before we go any further: I am not a cheap man. I tip. I tip well. I was in sales for thirty years and I know what it means to work for your money. But I am also a man who reads a bill, line by line, the way God intended, and what I have been reading lately has made me question everything I thought I knew about the arrangement between a customer and an establishment.
You are paying for the bartender's parking. You know this, right? You just never said it out loud.
The drink is eight dollars of ingredients, maybe. The glass is a glass. The ice is weather, which I have said before and will keep saying until someone thanks me for noticing. But the rest of it, the markup that takes a twelve-dollar cocktail to twenty-two dollars, that is overhead. Rent. Insurance. The neon sign that has one letter out. The bartender's commute. His parking garage. His monthly transit pass. His Uber on the nights he cannot find a spot. You are not ordering a cocktail. You are co-sponsoring a stranger's Honda Civic, and nobody put that on the menu.
The Full Audit, Presented Without Apology
I am going to walk you through what you actually paid for last Saturday night. I will use round numbers because I am not a monster.
First drink: twenty-three dollars. They called it a "smoked maple old fashioned." There was a dehydrated orange wheel on the rim. A dehydrated orange wheel. Somebody took a perfectly acceptable piece of fruit, removed all the moisture from it, the actual good part, and placed it on my glass as a garnish. This is not cooking. This is vandalism. I did not send it back because I am a civilized person. I am filing this report instead.
Second drink: nineteen dollars. It came with a cocktail napkin that had the bar's logo on it. I am now paying for their marketing materials. I am the customer and I am also, apparently, the distribution channel for their brand awareness. Nobody asked me. Nobody offered me a cut.
Third drink: I did not order a third drink. I did the math and went home.
This is why THC cocktails, made correctly, at home, in a kitchen that you already pay for, represent what I can only describe as a genuine breakthrough in Western civilization. Not a trend. Not a phase. A correction.
What a Correct Drink Actually Costs
I keep a four-pack of Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned in my refrigerator at all times. Eight milligrams of THC. Real cocktail flavor, built from the same ingredients bartenders use, not syrup. No alcohol. No morning-after nonsense. No dehydrated fruit. No parking surcharge hidden inside the price of my evening.
You crack one of those, you are paying for the drink. Just the drink. Nobody's lease. Nobody's tip pool, which by the way I support in principle but should not be what drives a twenty-two-dollar old fashioned. Nobody's artisanal ice program. Yes. Some places charge for the ice specifically. I am aware of this. I have chosen not to discuss it today because I only have so many words and I need to stay focused.
Eight milligrams is the number. Stronger than a microdose, which does nothing and exists only to make people feel like they are doing something. Lighter than the kind of thing that ends a night prematurely and has you explaining yourself the next morning. Eight milligrams is the sweet spot, and the terpene blend in these cans is chosen specifically to make the room loosen up, to get the conversation going, to make everyone a little funnier, which in my case requires minimal assistance but I appreciate the support.
If you want to shop around before you commit, The Sample Can is exactly what it sounds like. One can. Try it. Stop subsidizing a stranger's commute first, then decide.
A Note on the "Experience" You Are Allegedly Paying For
Someone will tell you that you are paying for the experience. The ambiance. The trained professionals. The craft.
I have sat in enough bars to tell you what the experience actually is. You are sitting on a stool that is slightly too tall. The music is slightly too loud. The person next to you is on a first date that is going badly and you are now involved in it emotionally whether you want to be or not. The bartender is good at his job, I will grant him that, but he is also making twelve drinks at once and yours is fourth in the queue, and the smoked maple old fashioned takes an extra four minutes because someone has to light something on fire, and that someone is not going to rush.
That is the experience. You are welcome to it. I am at home.
Mary is somewhere on the other side of the city right now, probably stopped on a bridge looking at the lights, drinking Mary's M Train Double Espresso Martini and declaring it an adventure. Jane has strong opinions about the proper glassware for Jane's Fancy Shmancy Pomegranate Cosmopolitan and she is not wrong but she is also not paying twenty-three dollars for the privilege of being correct. Herb is in his chair, probably, telling someone about terpenes. He is right about the terpenes. He is insufferable about the terpenes. But he is right.
We have all figured out the same thing at roughly the same time: the drink does not require the overhead. The overhead was never part of the drink. We were just paying for it because that was the only option available, and now it is not.
The Field Report Conclusion (Final and Non-Negotiable)
I am not telling you never to go to a bar. Go to a bar. I go to bars. I like bars. I have opinions about bars that I will share with you in a future report, unsolicited, as is my right.
I am telling you to know what you are paying for. Line by line. The drink is the drink. Everything else is somebody else's problem that got quietly transferred to your tab, and the transfer happened so slowly and so gradually that you stopped noticing it, which is exactly how these things work.
One of our THC cocktails is in the fridge right now. The old fashioned, specifically, is in my fridge. It cost me a fraction of what I paid last Saturday for a drink someone set on fire in front of me as if that was a service. It has eight milligrams of THC and zero parking garage fees and no dehydrated fruit anywhere near it.
If you want the full lineup, The Variety Pack has all four. One of each. Try them all. Figure out which one is yours.
My watch stopped in 2009 and it is still right twice a day. That is better than most bar tabs, which are wrong every single time.
Report filed. Lou out.
For adults 21+ only. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Hemp-derived THC. Check your state and local laws before purchasing.
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