Lou's Official Ruling on the Mixer Racket
I have the receipt in front of me. I have been looking at it for ten minutes. There is a line item on here that says "house mixer" and it costs four dollars and fifty cents, and I need somebody to explain that to me right now because I have been to this bar eleven times and I have never once seen the mixer. I have seen the gun. The gun is a thing they point at my glass and pull the trigger and out comes juice from a hose. That is not a mixer. That is plumbing. I am being charged for plumbing. I am paying to be hosed.
This is the thc old fashioned post. Technically. But we are starting here because someone has to.
A Complete Inventory of Things You Are Currently Paying For That Should Be Free
The mixer. Juice from a gun. Four dollars and fifty cents. I covered this.
The ice. Ice is frozen weather. Weather is free. I am not paying a cover charge for precipitation. The sky does not invoice me. The bar has decided it does. Somebody accepted this and now we all live in a world where ice has a price point.
The "hand-cut" peel. A bartender took a knife to an orange. They do this in every kitchen in the country for free, every day, without requiring a tip on a tip. At this bar it is a craft technique worthy of a line item and a brief explanation and eye contact, sustained eye contact, while they explain what an orange is.
The "premium well." There is no such thing. The well is the well. Premium well is two words that should not be touching.
The "signature old fashioned." I will get to this. I am going to spend a lot of time on this.
What They Did to the Old Fashioned and Why I Cannot Let It Go
The old fashioned is not a project. It is not a canvas. It is not an opportunity for someone who just finished a six-week spirits course to express himself. The old fashioned is bourbon. It is bitters. It is sugar. It is orange. That is the whole thing. That is the complete list. There are no bonus rounds.
I ordered one last month at a place a friend recommended because apparently I have friends who do this to me. What arrived was a glass with smoke coming out of it. Not the drink. The glass. They smoked the glass first and then put the drink in the glass as if the glass needed to be punished before it could be used. There was a sprig of rosemary on top. Rosemary. Like I ordered soup. There were also two large cubes, hand-cut, see above, resting in there like they paid rent. The bill was twenty-two dollars. I did not finish it. I went home. I thought about it for several days.
The old fashioned does not want your smoke. It does not want your rosemary. It does not want your dehydrated citrus wheel that has been sitting in a jar labeled "artisanal" since Tuesday. It wants you to leave it alone. The entire history of the old fashioned is one long request to be left alone, and nobody is listening.
What a Real Old Fashioned Actually Is (This Is the Part Where I Calm Down Slightly)
It is the drink that does not need your help. Classic. Stubborn. Not apologizing for anything. You know the feeling you get when something is exactly right and there is nothing to fix and the only thing left to do is drink it? That is the old fashioned. That has always been the old fashioned. This is not a controversial position. This is a fact they somehow made controversial by adding smoke.
Which is why when we made one, we did not change it. We made Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned, which is bitters, orange, oak, and 8mg of hemp-derived THC, in a can, no gun, no markup, no rosemary. Eight milligrams. The sweet spot. Strong enough to actually do something. Not so strong that you spend the rest of the evening having thoughts about the ceiling. Just right. Just the drink.
No bar tab. No line item for the ice. No sustained eye contact from someone explaining the barrel they found.
The Part Where I Make My Official Ruling
Here it is. Official. Final. Not accepting appeals.
You are being charged for the mixer because you are ordering at a bar that owns a gun and considers that gun a service. You are paying for the ice because somebody decided weather could have a margin. You are paying for the smoke because a person with a torch needs to feel that the torch was worth buying. None of this is your fault. But it is your problem, and you are going to keep having it every time you sit down and order off a menu that has a "classics" section and a "signatures" section and four prices where one price used to be.
The correction is in the fridge right now. Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned. One can. 8mg. No occasion required. No bartender required. No explanation of the barrel, the orange, the smoking process, the hand-cutting, or the philosophy behind any of it. You just open it. That's the move.
If you want to try a few of them, or you want to hand one to somebody who has also had a bad experience with a twenty-two dollar drink and a rosemary sprig, the Variety Pack exists for that purpose. All four cans. One of each character. Mary's M Train Double Espresso Martini is in there if you want something bold after dinner. Jane's Fancy Shmancy Pomegranate Cosmopolitan is in there if you want something that knows it is the best-looking drink in the room. Herb's Very Manly Peach Bellini is in there if you want to hear Herb explain for twenty minutes why the Bellini is the only drink with intellectual merit and also his idea. Eight milligrams, all of them. No guns. No markup. No smoke.
And if you want to hand one to a specific person who you think needs it, we have a way to do that too.
One More Thing About the Receipt
I still have it. I am going to hold onto it. Not because I am going to do anything about it. I am not going to do anything about it. I just want it nearby so I can look at it occasionally and remember what we are up against. Four dollars and fifty cents. For the gun. For the hose. For the juice that lives in a tube behind a bar and comes out when someone pulls a trigger pointed at your glass.
Straight up, classic, and a little stubborn. Just like me.
Damn right.
Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned contains 8mg hemp-derived THC per can. For adults 21 and over only. Available where legal. 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. Do not operate heavy machinery after use.
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