Max's (Other) Mistake — A Tropical Drink With a Genever Twist

Genever is  — or used to be — a hard sell at the Whiskey Forge where the usual hangers-on prefer American whiskeys and rum. Nothing wrong with those two, but this knee-jerk mistrust of genever bothers me because the stuff is delicious and I'm a bit bummed to the be only one who regularly reaches for it. Genever (or jenever) is a grain spirit from the Netherlands and Belgium. A few varieties are available, some even flavored with citrus, but they all are flavored with juniper, those little blue-black cannonball berries that give gin its characteristic taste. Knowing their weakness for rum I found last night a way to sneak genever into my drinking buddies' cocktails; use it in a tiki drink that calls for gin.

The result? They used almost an entire bottle of Bols genever on multiple rounds of a drink that San Francisco barman Martin Cate dubbed Max's Mistake. I admit the response to the stuff was a little more enthusiastic than I'd hoped.

The original drink uses gin, but an elision to the Dutch stuff was a natural, and tasty, move. Here's Cate explaining the drink and how its name came about on his new cocktail series for CHOW (recipe after the video):

Max's Mistake  

Martin Cate 

Smuggler's Cove, San Francisco 

1 cup of crushed ice
2 dashes of bitters
1 oz passion fruit syrup
1 oz lemon juice
0.5 oz honey syrup (a mix of equal parts honey and water)
2 oz gin [Bols genever]
2 oz sparkling lemonade

Blend 2-3 second and serve topped with ice cubes and fresh mint.

Goes well with:

• Regular readers will recognize Cate as the mad genius behind the koi pond-sized flaming tiki punch at Tiki Oasis (pictures and scaled-down recipe here).
• Bitterballen, little fried croquettes quite similar to Cajun boudin balls, are classic Dutch bar food, perfect for a few shots of genever, even if it is all doctored up with fruit syrups and juices. Here's my recipe. 
• Americans used to have a great thirst for genever, also called Holland gin or, simply, Hollands. Here's Samuel M'Harry's 1809 recipe for making a semblance of the imported article from very local American ingredients. 
• Drinkupny.com has both Bols genever and the barrel-aged version on sale now. This is a good deal, but shop around; liquor regularly goes on steep discount during the 4th quarter and you may be able to find even bigger discounts. 
• Have you a glut of genever? Then consider whipping up a batch of kruidnoten liqueur, a Dutch recipe combining the spirit with...cookies. Those without so much to spare can swap vodka. 

Amsterdamse Krulletter, a Script from Amsterdam's Brown Cafes

It's no revelation that I like booze. Sooner or later with new acquaintances, I pin Amsterdam as one of my favorite places in the world. But a quirk kept a little tighter to my chest is that I'm a complete typography and font geek.

Oh, I'll spend hours after I should have gone to bed, staying up staring at the glowing screen until tears of fatigue flow freely down my cheeks. I grew up in a house with not only a butter churn, but also printers' drawers; early exposure to block lettering instilled an abiding interest in minding p's and q's. More than once, as I've trawled through the offerings of online font vendors, trying out phrases, and learning how various designers have used this or that font, dawn has taken me by surprise.
 

Ramiro Espinoza has combined all three elements — booze, Amsterdam, and fonts — in one tale. Espinoza lives in Amsterdam where he runs the digital font foundry, Re-Type. Intrigued by the cursive, curly script he found on the city's "brown cafes" (i.e., neighborhood pubs) and concerned that they were disappearing as old facades succumbed to renovations and new owners, he set about tracking down why the pubs in particular used this distinctive hand-painted font.

In a way, my research into the ‘Amsterdamse Krulletter’ (Amsterdam’s Curly Letter) began eight years ago as I was walking down the streets of what is possibly the city’s most beautiful district, the Jordaan. As every local knows, this area hosts quite a few of the old, traditional pubs that the locals call ‘bruin cafés’ (brown cafés). In urban environments, type designers are always looking at letters, and especially at hand-painted ones. It didn’t take me very long to notice that many of the pubs in the area had their windows painted in a very interesting and beautifully executed script. Later I discovered they had been painted throughout other parts of Amsterdam too, notably also in the De Pijp area. 

Espinoza tracks some of the examples to Leo Beukeboom who began painting for Heineken Brewery in 1967 and who hand-lettered signs for pubs sponsored by Heineken. "But," he writes, "the history of the style goes back further than that." Espinoza lays out his detective work on this beery lettering with additional connections to Amstel Brewery and 17th century Dutch calligraphy.

Read his ILoveTypography.com article and check out additional photos here.

Edit: Thanks to Jacob Grier for reminding me that the ancient Dutch distiller Bols uses some now-familiar lettering on its genever bottles. It is used again here (right) on the 2011 release of its barrel-aged genever. The regular version comes in a smoked-glass bottle while the barrel-aged genever is sold in tall but hefty traditional stone jugs. It's a nice nod to Amsterdam's drinking history.

Feh. Mistakes when I'm alone are bad enough, but making them here in this public forum is deeply embarrassing. The why of it doesn't matter, but I posted copy without checking facts. Sorry about that. Good news, though: we've heard from ReType Foundry more about the Bols script. Seems we should be looking toward England rather than the Netherlands for this one:

A note on pronunciation: Americans tend to pronounce this malt-wine spirit "GEN-uh-ver" but every Dutchmen I know calls it "ye-NAY-ver." On his show The Layover, Anthony Bourdain either plays it safe or forgets; he uses both.

I'm going with the cloggies on this one. Grab yourself a bottle or two. Good stuff to hand on hand.

Kruidnoten Liqueur, A Genever Recipe

Hiram Walker makes a gingerbread liqueur, biscotti-flavored cordial is not unheard of, and in his The Joy of Mixology Gaz Regan gives a recipe for a Jägermeister-spiked Oatmeal Cookie cocktail. Americans, though, simply don’t make cookie-flavored cocktails and cordials at home. Not often, anyway.

Fitting then, that the Dutch — who, after all, ran the first commercial still in America in the 17th century and gave us our word cookie — have a recipe combining the two. In a post last month, Lizet Kruyff relates a recipe for kruidnotenlikeur from Maak van de noot een deugd (roughly “Make a virtue out of nothing”), a new Dutch cookbook devoted entirely to cooking with kruidnoten.

Kruidnoten are tiny gingerbread cookies, cousins to the Christmastime specialty peppernuts. A direct translation is "spice nuts" but "nuts" refers to their diminutive size; they are no more likely to contain nuts than are peppernuts (or doughnuts, for that matter). Typical spices in the little cookies include ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, white pepper, cloves, and coriander, but such things vary with the baker.

With the help of Renée de Vries, an internet specialist at the University of Amsterdam, I tracked down online excerpts from the book. Why? Well, because Kruyff’s blog calls for 12 liters of genever, a Dutch spirit enjoying a modest renaissance in the US. Even counting my personal stash of current and vintage bottlings, there are probably not 12 liters of the stuff in our entire neighborhood. Plus only 500 grams of sugar to make a cordial with that much liquor? Something is not right. A look at the original reveals that her "12" liters is actually "1/2" liter. Big difference.

My somewhat loose and streamlined translation follows. For sticklers, see the original recipe below. Kruyff suggests both using white rum as an optional base spirit and, if you're so inclined, adding a splash of cream after the maceration. The original recipe notes that you can use cane sugar for a "warmer" taste and darker color.

Kruidnoten Liqueur

1/2 liter jonge genever or vodka
3 handsful of kruidnoten
200ml water
500 grams of cane sugar

Push the kruidnoten through the bottle's opening. Put the bottle away for about six weeks in a dark closet. Give the bottle a shake now and then to show it who's boss and so that the flavors can blend. Do not worry if it looks nasty.

After six or seven weeks, strain through cheesecloth or a clean tea towel into another bottle. Do this again if you doubt whether particles remain.

Make the syrup. Put the sugar and water in a saucepan with a thick bottom. Bring to the boil, stirring. Stir until all sugar is dissolved. Let cool, mix with the kruidnoten infusion and pour into a pretty bottle.

Proost!

Karin Sitalsing, Marije Sietsma en Helga de Graaf (2011)
Maak van de noot een deugd: koken met kruidnoten
120 pages (hardback)
Loopvis
ISBN: 9081764802
€ 17,95

M’Harry’s Holland Gin

In 1809 Pennsylvania distiller Samuel M’Harry published his Practical Distiller, a small tome intended to set forth, as plainly as the language of the time allowed, directions for American distillers using the materials available to them to create American spirits and, in some cases, to emulate spirituous liquors from abroad. The book was, in not very subtle ways, very pro-American.

At the same time, M’Harry sought to clear away the myths and secrecy surrounding distilling and to advance it as an understandable science rather than a mysterious process that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. His techniques and recipe styles—even if improved upon by later advances in still designs—informed American moonshining for the better part of two centuries.

His recipes for working with corn, rye, apples, and peaches would be as familiar to Appalachian moonshiners even into the 1970’s. They can be forgiven if his buckwheat spirits failed to continue in American folk distilling. I’m curious about it myself, but have not yet come across even modern home distillers who are experimenting with buckwheat. Perhaps it was a Pennsylvania thing.

His recipe for “Holland” gin—that is, the jenever or genever coming back into tentative vogue—gives an idea of how distillers these 200 years ago sought to emulate popular foreign liquors with very local ingredients (remember, Pennsylvania has long been rye country).

How to make a resemblance
of Holland Gin out of Rye Whiskey

Put clarified whiskey, with an equal quantity of water, into our doubling still, together with sufficient quantity of juniper berries, prepared; take a pound of unslacked lime, immerse it in three pints of water, stir it well—then let it stand three hours, until the lime sinks to the bottom, then pour off the clear lime water, with which boil half an ounce of isinglass cut small, until the latter is dissolved—then pour it into your doubling still with a handful of hops, and a handful of common salt, put on the head and set her a running; when she begins to run, take the first half gallon (which is not so good), and reserve it for the next still you fill—as the first shot generally contains something that will give an unpleasant taste and color to the gin. When it looses proof at the worm, take the keg away that contains the gin, and bring it down to a proper strength with rain water, which must previously have been prepared, by having been evaporated and condensed in the doubling still and cooling tub.

This gin when fined, and two years old, will be equal, if not superior, to Holland gin.

The isinglass, lime water and salt, helps to refine it in the still, and the juniper berries gives it the flavor or taste of Holland gin.

About thirteen pounds of good berries are sufficient for one barrel.

Be careful to let the gin as it runs from the worm, pass thro’ a flannel cloth, which will prevent many unpleasant particles passing into the liquor, which are contracted in the condensation, and the verjuice imbibed in its passage thro’ the worm.

* Yeah, yeah: the genever bottle label is from the wrong century. It's one I picked up for a pittance at a paper ephemera show a few years back. It is, however, the kind of label that would have been printed in bulk and slapped on—gasp—American emulations of foreign spirits.
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Bar Food: Rowley's Bitterballen

Bitterballen are the quintessential Dutch bar food. Hot, crunchy, salty, meaty; they are tastier (and more appetizing) than dried little bar pretzels that everyone at the bar has been pawing at before you. The size of small meatballs, these snappy little hors d'oeuvres are miniature croquettes (kroketten in Dutch) which are, in and of themselves, particularly beloved by the cloggies. Plus, a bar manager’s delight—they drive you to drink, hence spend, more.

If you’ve been taken with Genevieve, Anchor Distilling’s take on genever, but aren’t quite sure what to do with it, the most approachable way to introduce it to your guests is with a batch of these little buggers. A dollop of hot mustard (Dijon, for instance) is standard.

Rowley’s Bitterballen

Béchamel/White Sauce
2 Tbl unsalted butter (30g/1oz)
3 Tbl flour (1.25 oz/35g)

1 cup milk or stock (250ml) (I like to use a 1:1 mixture of the two)
Salt, pepper, and whole nutmeg freshly ground to taste
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Make a very light roux by melting the butter in a saucepan, then adding the flour. Cook the roux, stirring until it just starts to turn golden.

Add the liquid, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer, stirring the sauce until it’s smooth, using a whisk if necessary. Simmer for 10-15 minutes, stirring often, until the mass is thickened.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Stir several ounces of the sauce into the beaten eggs to temper them, then add the new mix back to the remaining sauce. Cook the whole thing just to the boiling point, stirring all the while.

Take off the heat, add several gratings of fresh nutmeg, correct the seasonings, and set this sauce aside while making the filling.

Filling
½ c minced onion (60g)
2 Tbl. unsalted butter (30g/1oz)
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1.5 cup ham, minced or ground (180g/6oz)
1 cup cooked chicken or veal, minced or ground (120g/4oz)
1 Tbl flat-leaf (aka Italian) parsley, finely chopped
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp dried thyme
¼ tsp hot sauce such as Tabasco, Crystal, or Texas Pete’s
Salt and pepper to taste

Dried bread crumbs (or panko for greater crunchiness)
2 eggs, beaten

Melt the butter in a skillet, and sauté the onion until it’s soft. Add the garlic and sauté until it’s fragrant, but not browned. Add the meats and heat through. Add remaining ingredients, including the roux, but excluding the eggs and bread crumbs, and set aside to chill.

Scoop about a rounded tablespoon of filling and shape each into a ball about an inch across. Repeat until the filling is used, setting each aside. Roll the entire batch in breadcrumbs, then dip the balls into the beaten eggs and roll once more in breadcrumbs. Allow to rest 30-45 minutes for the breading to dry some and adhere better once they are fried. Freeze any you don’t intend to use within the next day, then deep-fry the rest in vegetable oil at 350°F/177°C until they are a deep golden color. Serve piping hot with mustard and ice-cold shots of genever.

Makes around two dozen.

Goes well with:

• Het Jenever Museum
• Het volkomen krokettenboek, a comprehensive book of croquette recipes (in Dutch) by culinary journalist Johannes van Dam. Van Dam may contradict me, but many croquette recipes may be converted to bitterballen simply by making the shape smaller and round. Lobster bitterballen, anyone? Country ham?
• Chef John Folse is a juggernaut of Cajun cookery. His recipe for boudin balls isn't all that dissimilar to bitterballen and would fit in just fine in a bar food snack-off.

I gotta go. I'm hungry.

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Tasting Notes: Anchor's Genevieve, an American genever

…don't quit your job, but do make whiskey and genever.

~ David Wondrich, out of context

The last time I started writing about Anchor’s Genevieve, I ended up mangling my left hand. Here’s to keeping knives sharp: catch my fingers in raking light and you can tell where parts are missing, but I’m amazed at how well they’ve healed. Understandably, I haven’t been keen to approach these tasting notes since I felt they needed to be accompanied by a recipe that called for wielding the same knife.

Ah, but what the hell.

Anchor Distilling in San Francisco has made a limited release of a Dutch-style genever (also spelled jenever in Dutch) called Genevieve. Make no mistake: this is cause for celebration, not just among cocktail geeks whose clamoring for the stuff only hit fever pitch after the publication of David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, but for spirits enthusiasts in general and expat Dutch who have groused about the imports recently available in the US.

A little background: Genever is sometimes called “Dutch gin” but that’s a misnomer. While it shares some qualities of gin—notably a healthy dose juniper berries as flavoring—calling it Dutch gin is akin to saying a mint julep is akin to a mojito “only it has bourbon.” There’s more to it than that. It’s the gastronomic and cultural precursor to gin, the drink on which English distillers based their famous spirit. As such, it’s an earthier, less refined-tasting spirit. I once wrote that I’d kill someone in his sleep—in front of his mother—for a regular supply of good genever. A minor exaggeration. Seriously, though. In front of his own mother.

For our purposes, genever can be separated into two primary categories; old-style (oude jenever) or newer-style (jonge, or “young” jenever). The names have nothing to do with the age of the spirits, but with the manufacturing process. Oude jenever methods predate modern distilling techniques that allow for greater separation of ethanol from other flavorsome components in a still. Pot-distilled oude jenever, therefore, is heavier, tasting more of malted grains. Jonge jenever, on the other hand, may be made with sugar from beets or molasses and only a small portion of the moutwijn (“malt wine” in Dutch) that characterizes an oude jenever. Korenwijn ("grain wine" often translated as "corn" wine, but not necessarily made of maize) is a third category that helps inform our tasting and we’ll get to that in a bit.

I started off by pouring Anchor’s 17th-century style oude jenever two ways: room temperature and straight from the freezer. Each dose came in a small traditional schnapps glass known as a borrel or tulp (for its tulip shape—tulp in Dutch).

The nose is unmistakable. My regular sidekick, Dr. Morpheus, studied oncology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and his reaction was immediate and the same as mine: “Yep, that’s genever.” Score one for Anchor.

Looking like any uncolored gin, vodka, or white rum, the spirit is clear but has a slight oily sheen that glistens on the surface. Chilled, it gets a noticeable haze. Both room temperature and ice-cold, Genevieve’s taste is strikingly different from the American and British gins you may know. It’s got a round, full-bodied feel to it and a delicious nose-crinkling funk. The base grains—especially rye—pop. I love that. They even hit my nose before I took my first sip. Score another.

My favorite way to have jenever is straight up and chilled. If you're going Dutch, you can serve the borrel filled to the brim. In fact, when it's filled just barely bulging over the brim, the surface tension keeping it in the glass, it's what's known as a kamelenrug (a camel's back). Genevieve does nicely here. Bitterballen, the classic accompaniment, are little meatball-sized croquettes found throughout Holland, but rarely in these parts. Stay tuned: recipe's a-comin'. [edit: recipe is posted here]

For those who want to try their hands at recreating 19th-century American cocktails, this is a fantastic gin to incorporate in your drinks cabinet. In fact, that’s what Wondrich exhorts drinkers to do in Imbibe! Modern gins, he explains, are too light and crisp to properly capture the experience of the types of gins available in the US prior to the late 1800’s. See recipes at The Cocktail Chronicles and The Underhill Lounge.

There’s a bite, though, to this spirit, a hotness that I’m not wild about, that catches at the back of my throat. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hate it. Far from it. But I did pull a little moue at the taste of what I found to be the lone fault of the spirit itself.

This is such a good product and I am delighted to have (about half) a bottle, but I can’t help think that putting some of the Genevieve up in oak barrels would do wonders to round off the rough edge (surely 17th century spirits were stored in barrels—I’ve seen the gaugers’ pocket vademecum guides that allowed excise men to estimate their capacity). Korenwijn, which I mentioned earlier, is in the same class, but is often aged in wood. That could be what’s called for here.

Kudos to Fritz Maytag and the distillers at Anchor for putting out Genevieve. If you can score a bottle, do it. At around $30 retail, two is better. Keep one in the freezer at all times. I’ve only seen one bottle at a bar in San Diego, but it’s around San Francisco and Los Angeles. New Yorkers seem to have the best luck finding it on retail shelves. I was in Kansas City twice last month. Nobody's heard of it there.

If you live in KC, or any other place with no retail access, order Genevieve online.

• Hi Time Wine
• Beverage Warehouse
• Vintage Wine & Spirits
• DrinkUpNY.com
  

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Lacking in the Finger Department

My knives are sharp and my hand steady. Outside a few burns, I've never hurt myself in the kitchen. Yesterday I made up for it in spades when, with the well-steeled heel of an 8" Wustof chef's knife, I crunched through my thumb and took off a chunk of my middle finger.

Yep; it's sharp.

Never in my life have I put my Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage through such a rigorous pacing. If something other than four-letter words, their derivatives, and cognates spewed from my mouth, it was quite unintentional.

I was dicing a few slices of Allan Benton's amazing country ham with plans to prepare some American bitterballen to go with tasting notes for Anchor's American genever. Don't know bitterballen? They are deep-fried ping-pong ball-sized croquettes (not all that unlike cajun-style boudin balls for that matter) that are classic accompaniments to genever in Dutch bars. I figured an American take on one deserved another.

The bleeding's (mostly) stopped, but the insane pain of typing and occasional waves of nausea mean I'm taking a brief hiatus on both typing and knife-wrangling. Stay tuned for tasting notes, a bitterballen recipe, moonshine videos, and a review of C. Anne Wilson's Water of Life: A History of Wine-Distilling And Spirits; 500 BC - AD 2000. 

Edit 6/8/12:

• The bitterballen recipe is here
• The review of Wilson's book is here.
• The rest of my thumb and finger are...somewhere...around here. I'm sure of it. Unless I threw them down the kitchen sink. Entirely plausible.
  

Anchor Distilling shines with Genevieve genever

Now, it is not true, as it's been alleged, that my baby bottle was a stone crock of Dutch whiskey with a rubber nipple slapped on top. But it's no secret that the fruit of the still has long held a particular allure for me. I will always champion distillers small and large who put out quality products. The smile on my face this week, however, threatened to split my head nearly in half. Anchor Distilling, authors of Junipero Gin and the Old Potrero whiskeys, has developed a pot-distilled American genever called Genevieve.

A say what? You heard me, an American genever. Also known as Hollands or Schiedam (even, incorrectly, as "Dutch gin"), genever or jenever is a malt distillate flavored with juniper berries.

I came to appreciate the drink while in Amsterdam during my days as a museum curator. Bart Cuperus, who, along with Joop Witteveen and Johannes Van Dam, founded the collective library of cookery books known as De Stichting Gastronomische Bibliotheek, introduced me to varieties, glassware, and ways to serve the drink. At the time, it had a reputation akin to bourbon in the United States—an old man's drink, but enjoying a renaissance among a younger crowd.

Over the past few years, American cocktail geeks have yearned for samples, but have been stymied by very small range of imports into the US. I insisted all my friends going to the Netherlands bring back a bottle, if not for me, then for themselves.

With Anchor's new product, I can stop (but probably won't) asking them to schlepp back my favorite oude jenevers (that is, "old style" genevers rather than just old ones). Apparently, a mere 700 bottles of Genevieve were released until production gets up and running.

You can be excused for not having ansinthe, Parfair Amour, or falernum in your liquor cabinet, but when you find genever of this quality and craftsmanship in the US, grab it, chill it, and serve it neat in small glasses.

From Anchor's website:

Genevieve™ Genever-Style Gin is an offshoot of our research into the history and evolving production methods that led to modern gin. In the late 19th century, technological advances enabled distillers to produce neutral spirits at very high proofs. When re-distilled with complex blends of juniper berries and other natural botanicals, these neutral spirits were transformed into what we know today as modern “distilled dry gin.” The earliest gins, however—which came to be known as “genever” (or “Geneva gin,” or “Hollands gin,” or “Schiedam-style gin”)—were a very different product. To be sure, juniper berries and other botanicals are used in both styles, but 17th-century “genever” gin was distilled in primitive pot stills from a grain mash. Genevieve is our attempt to re-create this ancient and mysterious gin style. We use a grain mash of wheat, barley, and rye malts, which is distilled in a traditional copper pot still with the same botanicals we use in our modern “distilled dry gin,” Junípero Gin. We hope you will enjoy comparing these two unique products, the alpha and omega of the gin story.

Goes well with:

• David Wondrich's fantastic Imbibe!, an erudite and damn funny delving into the life, work, and influences of 19th-century bartender Jerry Thomas, author of America's first bartending guide. Though I prefer my genever neat and ice-cold, Wondrich gives several recipes for its use in cocktails.
  
• Het Genevercollege Nimmer Zat (an informal discussion of a group of Dutch genever enthusiasts, also with links to proeflokalen—tasting houses where you can sample Dutch moutwijn, korenwijn, and genevers in the Netherlands).
  

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The Depth of a Drink

A bar I used to frequent served $3 martinis at happy hour. Blessedly, happy hour was two hours long. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, it came around again at 9pm. Woe to those who soldiered through both. Now, the martinis weren’t very good. In fact, they were little more than well spirits colored with fruit juice and synthetic flavors; cosmopolitans, sour apples, chocolate who's-its. Hell, they weren't even martinis. But the crowd was always a blast, so we came back for more. Gimme a break. You never drank anything you regretted? On Mondays, the steaks were buy-one/get-one, so for $20 a head, you could get full and buzzed while still tipping well.

The bartenders, though, poured drinks to the brim of the glass. Drinking in Amsterdam, I’m all for a small glass that holds enough chilled genever or korenwijn that it bulges over the lip. There, you’ve got a more leisurely pace that allows you to take a sip before even moving the glass. But in a loud, bustling bar that’s packed elbow-to-elbow, you’re asking to wear your drink.

So I smiled in appreciation when I came across George Ade’s reminiscences on pre-prohibition saloons from over eighty years ago.

Regarding the glass into which the slug was decanted, there were certain unwritten rules of etiquette meant to regulate the pouring, but these rules were not always observed. What was known as a “gentleman’s drink” never approached the rim. Probably an ounce and half of dynamite in solution represented the portion which would not cause the clerk to give the buyer a hard look or gently inquire, “Will you need a towel?” The implication being that preparations were under way for the taking of a bath.

George Ade (1931) The Old-Time Saloon:
Not Wet—Not Dry—Just History.
Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc. New York.

Let’s all hear it for gentlemen’s drinks in smaller servings bigger glasses.


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