Drinking for Chaps: How to Choose One's Booze (Gustav Temple & Olly Smith)

'Hot on the heels of Cooking for Chaps, published in 2014, comes an authoritative and definitive guide to getting plastered. [As if I need one - Ed.]

Drinking for Chaps is a collaboration between Gustav Temple and esteemed drinks writer Olly Smith. Together they embarked on a magical journey to the heart of each and every type of alcoholic drink imaginable, from cocktails to cognac and everything in between, in order to set out precisely how Chaps should approach each of them. From which particular jacket to wear when sipping white wine, what to nibble with a glass of vodka, how to mix a dry martini, and, crucially, how to deal with an awful hangover, Drinking For Chaps shows true chaps the way to the bar.

 Packed with history, background, a bit of technical information (but not too much), mythology and portraits of legendary boozers such as Oliver Reed, Sir Kingsley Amis, Winston Churchill and Peter O’Toole, there is plenty to read in this tome aside from which bottle of cheap plonk to take to a dinner party (though that’s in there too).

Endorsed by none other than Sir Roger Moore: “Fascinating, especially as I pop up all over the pages!” and Guardian drinks writer Henry Jeffries, who declared: “Tackling such important issues as whether it’s ever acceptable to wear a fez while drinking cocktails, it’s best read when slightly drunk. I can offer no higher praise.”'

Gin Glorious Gin

From the publisher:

'A colourful and fascinating history of our favourite spirit told through the life and times of our capital city.

Gin Glorious Gin is a vibrant cultural history of London seen through the prism of its most iconic drink. Leading the reader through the underbelly of the Georgian city via the Gin Craze, detouring through the Empire (with a G&T in hand), to the emergence of cocktail bars in the West End, the story is brought right up to date with the resurgence of class in a glass - the Ginnaissance.

As gin has crossed paths with Londoners of all classes and professions over the past three hundred years it has become shorthand for metropolitan glamour and alcoholic squalor in equal measure. In and out of both legality and popularity, gin is a drink that has seen it all.

Gin Glorious Gin is quirky, informative, full of famous faces - from Dickens to Churchill, Hogarth to Dr Johnson - and introduces many previously unknown Londoners, hidden from history, who have shaped the city and its signature drink.'

Cocktail Specifications

Cocktail Command Post

Summer Cocktails

Uncle Val's Botanical Gin

If I don't seem quite like myself lately, it's probably because I've been drinking a new gin.

The drink in question is Uncle Val's Botanical Gin from 35 Maple Street in Sonoma, California. I was first introduced to this gin at a local cocktail establishment and was instantly smitten. I keep a bottle on my cocktail cart.

How does it taste? It's very floral. It contains cucumber, lemon, sage, and lavender. But unlike Hendrick's Gin, in which the cucumber is very strong, here it's the lemon that predominates. As the website describes it:

'Raise your glass and you’ll notice crisp aromas of sage and juniper. Your first sip will bring out a bright lemon taste, which gives way to a warm, spicy, lavender finish, softened by the coolness of cucumber. Each sip bolsters the botanical flavors, along with a continuous presence of piney juniper.'

Uncle Val's reminds me of a more flamboyant version of Bombay Sapphire, my go-to gin. It's a superb spirit for your summer cocktails. I heartily recommend it. Enjoy.

Soup of the Day

Whiskey

Get Drunk !

Tintin et l'Absinthe

Only A Drop

Support Your Local Pub

Old Europa Café

Gin: The Driver's Choice

Vert d'Absinthe

absinthe supérieure

Brasserie Encounter

On my way home from the office last night, I stopped by a local brasserie for a cocktail. A G&T, to be precise. The bartenders are all friends of a friend and know exactly the way I like it.

I stood at the bar and calmly surveyed the talent, downing three drinks in 15 minutes. The place held a smattering of office workers, couples, Persian players, cougars, and escorts.

It was only then I noticed the people sitting next to me.

Tall, tanned, blonde, bloated, affluent-looking, the sort that probably attended USC and get annoyed when I pointedly assume they spent their college years in South Carolina.

"Oh, you went to the other USC..."

These people were staring at me with the same bemused, stupid, smug incomprehension the Indians must have had when the Spaniards landed upon these shores.

The head douchebag, an older man with red face, untucked stripey shirt, and denim, smiled at me and said: "Why are you wearing a tie?"

I turned and slowly looked him up and down.

"So I don't look like you people".

One of the advantages of being a tall muscled chap is that I can say such things and get away with it.

A younger guy wearing a baseball cap immediately stepped in, introducing himself as John, and offered to buy me a drink, which I accepted.

The evening ended without violent incident.

Evelyn Waugh's Noonday Reviver

Evelyn Waugh's Noonday Reviver

1 hefty shot of gin

1 (1/2 pint) bottle of Guinness

Ginger Beer

'Put the gin and Guinness into a pint sliver tankard and fill to the brim with ginger beer. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the attribution, which I heard in talk, but the mixture will certainly revive you, or something. I should think two doses is the limit.'

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (2008)

Evelyn Waugh on Wine

'...It is a little shy wine like a gazelle.'

'Like a leprechaun.'

'Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.'

'Like a flute by still water.'

'A prophet in a cave.'

'...And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.'

'Like a swan.'

'Like the last unicorn.'

'Ought we to be drunk every night?' Sebastian asked one morning.

'Yes, I think so.'

'I think so too.'

Young Fogey Tea Time

On Coffee

The word on the street is that I detest coffee. For once, they are right. The taste, smell, appearance, even culture of coffee leave me spluttering with rage. The US economy runs on coffee, turning mild-mannered office chaps into hopped-up arseholes of the highest order. Official statistics demonstrate that 67% of road rage incidents and 81% of homicides are caused by coffee consumption. Even worse, coffee houses provide habitats where suburban hippies and pretentious Brooklyn hipsters can gather, unmolested, discussing folk music and Jazz and spreading disease. This abhorrent beverage, sweat from the Devil's armpit, is now so ubiquitous a part of contemporary culture, that most can not even imagine an alternative. But there is, and it is Tea.

A Taste for Tea

As a very young man I drank tea at cocktail parties and family gatherings at which my presence was required, where I would be introduced to visiting international bankers and minor diplomats. Not that I wasn't fond of alcohol. I was. I was simply sensitive to drinking in front of my parents and their friends. The last thing I wanted was my face to turn bright orgasmic red from one too many cocktails or to start swaying at odd angles right in the middle of delivering my school report. But I'm sure they knew.

So I stood alone in my Polo blazer or Hackett jacket in Tweed, sipping tea, trying to catch the eye of the tea-lady for a refill, oblivious to the girls giggling at me, including the beautiful blonde daughter of a Brazilian diplomat stationed in London. My focus was on balancing the dozen or two scrummy canapés on the tea saucer. By allowing for maximum canapé consumption, the tea saucer is one of the advantages of drinking tea and not cocktails at parties--not that I would ever suggest such outlandish behaviour.

A Career in Drinking

I started drinking seriously at around age 15 in Chelsea in London. My chums and I would stand around the pub draining pint after pint of bitter and ale and lager and G&Ts and whiskys, quite literally holding on to the edge of the bar to keep ourselves upright, trying to engage in adult conversations with City bankers and solicitors in Savile Row suits and Tory hair. Afterwards if we were unlucky we were sick outside on the pavement, but not as unlucky as the lads caught urinating against the side of a mews house, or those poor chaps who were picked up and hauled away by the police squads that sometimes raided these establishments in white vans looking for underage drinkers.