The House Round: An Old Fashioned THC Drink That Actually Makes Sense
I am going to explain the house round to you. I am going to explain it slowly, because apparently thirty years of being conned has not been enough for people to figure this out on their own, so somebody has to say it out loud, and that somebody is me, Lou, and I am saying it now.
The house round is a trick. It has always been a trick. It was a trick the first time some bartender slid four glasses of something pink and fizzy across a bar and said "this one's on us" with a smile that cost you forty-seven dollars by the end of the night. You did not order it. You did not want it. You were already drinking something you liked. And now you have a glass of something that tastes like a candle in a color that does not occur in nature, and you are expected to be grateful.
Grateful. For the drink you did not ask for, that you now have to finish because it was "free," that is going to add forty-five minutes to a night that peaked an hour ago. You are grateful. Incredible.
How the Con Actually Works
Here is the mechanism. Pay attention, because they do this to you every time and you keep falling for it.
Step one: you are comfortable. You have your drink. You are settled. You are at the exact correct altitude, which took you twenty minutes to achieve, and everything is fine.
Step two: the bartender arrives with something unsolicited. He calls it a specialty. He says the name of it like it is a person he respects. It has four words in the name and at least one of them is a place you have never been.
Step three: you drink it. You drink it because it was "free" and because everyone at the table is already picking theirs up and you do not want to be the one who handed it back. You are a grown adult and you handed your decision-making over to a stranger with a shaker because you did not want to seem rude.
Step four: you are now drinking something you did not choose, at an altitude you did not pick, heading in a direction you did not plan, and the bill at the end of the night reflects none of this because the round was "complimentary" except for the four rounds it inspired and the tip on all of them.
That is the trick. That is the whole trick. And you fell for it again last Saturday.
The Smoked Rosemary Problem
And while I am here, while I have the floor, I want to address something else. I want to address what they have done to the old fashioned.
Somebody put a smoked rosemary sprig in my old fashioned and handed it to me like they had done something. Like I was supposed to say thank you. Like they had improved upon a thing that required no improvement and I was going to be happy about it. I looked at the sprig. I looked at the bartender. I put the glass down and I said, "What is this." He explained it. I let him explain it. When he was done, I said, "Take it back." He did not take it back. He told me it was "part of the experience." I told him I had been having the experience since before he was born and it did not involve herbs from a garden.
You do not smoke a rosemary sprig and put it in an old fashioned. You do not garnish an old fashioned with a dehydrated wheel of anything. You do not serve it in a rocks glass that has been "smoked" with a little wooden lid like a magic trick. You put bourbon in a glass. You put bitters in the glass. You put a piece of orange peel in the glass, expressed, because that is how it is done, and you hand it to the person and you walk away. That is the whole job. The job is not that complicated and yet somehow every bar in a twelve-mile radius has decided it needs to be reimagined by a twenty-six-year-old with an Instagram and a blowtorch.
Classic is classic because it works. That is what classic means. It is not a starting point. It is the destination. If you are improving upon a classic, you have misunderstood what the word means.
What I Actually Drink Now
I will tell you what I do now. I stay home. I sit down. I open a can of Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned, which is an old fashioned THC drink with 8mg of hemp-derived THC, no alcohol, no bartender with opinions, no house round coming at me from the left, and no smoked rosemary in sight. It tastes like an old fashioned because it is built like one: bitters, orange, oak. Real cocktail flavors, not syrup, because the people who made it actually know what they are doing. Eight milligrams is the right amount. Enough to take the edge off without putting you on the floor, which is all I ever wanted from a drink in the first place. Nobody ever gave me that at a bar. They gave me a second round I did not order and a check I did not understand.
The 8mg hits in minutes because it is nano-emulsified, which Herb has explained to me seventeen times in a parking lot and I have told him to stop. The point is it works fast and it stops cleanly and you are in control of the whole thing, which is the way it should be. You should be in control of your own night. That is a radical idea, apparently.
If you want to try the rest of the lineup while you are at it, the Variety Pack has all four of them, including Mary's M Train Double Espresso Martini and Jane's Fancy Shmancy Pomegranate Cosmopolitan, which I do not personally drink but Jane seems very pleased about and I have learned not to argue with Jane about things she has already decided.
The Fridge Is Right There
Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned is in the fridge right now, if you want to try the experiment yourself. Crack one open. Sit down. Nobody is going to walk over and hand you something you did not ask for. Nobody is going to explain a sprig to you. Nobody is going to add a specialty to your bill as a gesture of hospitality that somehow costs twenty dollars.
You pick the drink. You pour nothing. You open the can. You are done.
That is the whole system. The system works. It has always worked. The bars just needed you not to figure it out, because the house round does not pay for itself.
Herb thinks he invented nano-emulsification. He did not. But the can is still good, and the old fashioned THC drink inside it is better than anything a man with a blowtorch handed you last Saturday. You know I am right. You knew before you started reading this. I am just the only one who said it.
Damn right.
Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned contains 8mg hemp-derived THC per can. For adults 21+ only. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Please check the laws in your state before ordering.
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