The Dangers of a Good Cocktail

Hello Oliver Rawlings followers. I’m coming back to work after a weekend that saw me drink more than my fair share of cocktails and as you could probably guess, I’m feeling a little worse for wear. To be honest, even in my office alone, I’m hardly the only one. I walked in this morning to be greeted by a sea of miserable faces and pale complexions; however the show, so to speak, must go on, and I guess I’ll just have to power through and drink a lot of coffee.

Skittles make me angry!!! Rawwr!

I blame this all squarely on the new cocktail I tried this weekend. Known as the ‘Skittle’, I’m not entirely sure what it had in it, but it was a luminous green and tasted of skittles. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, and folks, it really was. I also discovered the lager cocktail, yes folks, you heard me right, the lager cocktail. It was called the flaming Doctor Pepper and was comprised of Amaretto, Vodka and Lager. You wouldn’t think so, but it went down a treat (as evidenced by the next day’s epic hangover). Now as I’m regretting everything and thinking about how it’s all the cocktails fault, I’m asking myself, what is it about the cocktail that makes it so appealing?

It’s time for a history lesson now. The cocktail, at least as we know it, was devised by bartenders in the 1920’s to promote alcohol to women. At that point, alcohol was thought to be the province of men. However, the 1920’s, which was a time of technological evolution and economic growth, saw women, for the first time, venturing out to bars and clubs and there was a growing market that alcohol professionals knew they had to tap  into. They did, and the cocktail was born. It has since gone from strength to strength, with the invention of such classic drinks as the Mojito, Sex on the Beach, Sidecar and many, many more, which have contributed to cocktails growing to become a billion dollar industry.

So, now we know that cocktails were created to appeal originally to women, we have to ask ourselves how this happened. The idea was that back then, it was thought that women couldn’t handle the harsh  bite of alcohol (sexism rears its ugly head),so it was thought that adding elements such as fruit juice and mixing two different types of alcohol together could produce a drink with a  sweeter, milder taste. It obviously worked, and more successfully than ever imagined, since it came to appeal to a centuries worth of alcohol drinkers.

At the end of the day, I may be moaning but it was a fantastic weekend, and it’ always good to try something new. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time; a cocktail may be more enticing than ever, but we’re all adults, we can make our own decisions, and we are responsible enough to live with the consequences. That’s why they invented coffee!