A Proper Drink

I spent the first half of my twenties – 2006 thru 2010 – living in Boston, working at Walgreens, and cycling through hobbies and affectations. The three pillars of my self-identity during this period were synthesizers, cocktails, and “dandy” menswear; while working the long, slow night shifts at Walgreens I would hide in the photo lab and sketch out my fantasies of a “speakeasy” where I’d serve craft cocktails and host electro-pop shows, presumably while dressed like Beau Brummel or whatever.

This, unsurprisingly, never came to fruition. While I amassed quite a horde of keyboards, liquor and ascots (I have no idea how I managed this on a Walgreens salary) I never pursued any of these seriously; I never worked as a bartender, or played a show, or even really blogged about any of these topics. (The handle “modernserf” comes from a lifestyle blog I was intending to write but never got past the “purchasing a domain” stage.) Within a year of moving to New York I had gotten back into programming, which became both my career and primary creative outlet, and my emotional investment in these avocations shrunk down to a level commensurate with the effort I was willing to invest in them.

I never fully stopped making cocktails – I still maintained a formidable home bar, and I’d make drinks for parties and social gatherings – but it lost its prominence in my life. Subsequently, most of my drinking in New York has been at bars. I can think of a multitude of reasons for this: I have enough money to go out all the time, I have developed a taste for beer, I live alone and rarely have guests over, I don’t have to worry about missing the last subway home, and (perhaps most importantly) the standard for mixed drinks in 2010s NYC is vastly higher than that of 2000s Boston.

COVID threw all that out the window, and at a time when I most desired intoxication. So while my friends were discovering the joys of sourdough, I rediscovered the joys of mixology. I didn’t do this by half-measures; I dove right into Beachbum Berry’s “Total Tiki” and started working through every drink I could find the ingredients for. Soon I was purchasing multiple cases of booze from Astor Wines and a crate of bitters & barware from The Boston Shaker, a Somerville cocktail supply shop that opened the last year I was in Boston.

This project has been resurfacing some long-forgotten memories of my early twenties, particularly after reading Robert Simonson’s history of the early-2000s cocktail renaissance, “A Proper Drink”. Though Boston was a bit of a backwarter in this period (all of Boston gets half a chapter, while individual NYC and London bars get multi-chapter arcs), much of the story takes place on the blogs and forums I was frequenting. It is a little strange to consider how much of what I think of the time I was living in Boston was really the time I was living on the Chowhound forums.