Friends Don't Let Friends Drink Fake Whiskey

This week in sh*t Amy doesn't like.

Happy Friday, y’all!

We made it to Cocktail Hour. 

I’ve got a short missive for you this week because I’ve got childcare duty for my niece and nephew this afternoon, and we’re expecting a big snowfall – what Lovey calls “romance from the sky.” We’ve laid in snacks (so much cheese!) and drinks and firewood, so if Detroit gets the big spring dump we’re hoping for, we are ready to cozy up. 

I can tell you one thing we absolutely will not be cozying up with: Ritual Zero-Proof Whiskey Alternative. I don’t like to be negative; I tend toward the don’t say anything if you can’t say something nice camp. But friends don’t let friends drink fake whiskey.

My mother-in-love, Nancy, emailed me a few weeks ago after she read about the whiskey alternative in the New York Times. She wanted to know if I’d tried it and whether it was worth the money. (At $29.99 for 25.4 oz., it’s about the same price as a mid-range bourbon like Bulleit.) Being the good daughter-in-love, I bought a bottle and figured I’d do it for the newsletter. 

Then I promptly forgot about it at the back of the bar. Until I received an email from Ritual informing me that my next bottle would be arriving soon. Somehow I’d managed to sign up for a subscription. Zoinks! I immediately emailed and, to their credit, Ritual immediately fixed my mistake and credited my account. The bottle was already enroute, so they told me to enjoy it or pass it on to a friend.

The opportunity for a taste test presented itself last week when The Bestie™ was in town and Friend Joanne stopped for a visit. While we tried to figure out our dinner plans, I figured I’d make a little pre-game cocktail.

I uncorked the bottle, passed it around and we all nearly gagged. 

Joanne had the best description: dental fillings. You know that sharp, formaldehyde-y scent that pervades every dental office? Well, that’s the smell of silver fillings, which are made with a mixture of mercury and metals. And she would know: Her dad was a dentist. 

Mix that scent with a top note of apples and a back burn of red pepper flakes, and you’ve got Ritual Zero-Proof Whiskey Alternative. 

But I am a woman of science. If the bottle was open, we had to try it. 

I gently poured a few drops into each cup and passed them around. Lovey nearly gagged. Joanne refused but eventually relented to her eternal regret. I had to immediately rinse my mouth out with real bourbon. 

It’s like those veggie burgers from the 1990s that all your vegetarian friends tried to convince you were just like a hamburger when everyone knew it was just a mouthful of mush. But, bless those friends’ hearts, they swore they liked those fake quarter-pounders. So, I figured, I’d give Ritual another try with friends who rarely drink. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference? 

And because this is science, we didn’t forewarn them. You can’t spoil the study! 

Their response was lukewarm but polite: “It’s like cardboard and apples,” our neighbor, Noah, said.  

Which struck me as odd since the previous taste test was a unanimous and violent Fuck no! So I took a sip. It had mellowed. It may be a drink that needs air. Even so, going from dental fillings to apple cardboard isn’t a ringing endorsement.

I’ve got an extra bottle if anyone wants it. 

Since we’re on the theme of shit Amy doesn’t like, I can tell you what I’m no longer reading: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. 

I’ll admit, I don’t have the deep well of knowledge about classic literature. Yes, I took AP English in high school. No, I don’t remember Grapes of Wrath. Maybe I’ve never read it? I’ve also never read To Kill a Mockingbird. I passed despite refusing to read A Death in Venice or Heart of Darkness. I much preferred Dostoyevski and Catch-22 and my real love was Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. 

When I got to college, I never took a creative writing or English lit course because I covered most of my English requirements with AP credits. I was more focused on economics and journalism and getting a job. So the holes in my knowledge of the classical canon are actually deep craters.

Maybe that’s why I’m widely annoyed and disappointed every time I’m a part of Capital L Literature discussions and conferences. It feels like gatekeeping; that if you haven’t spent $50,000 on a graduate degree to think about dialectic materialism within the context of Infinite Jest, you aren’t worthy. For me, books are world openers. They are meant to be savored and loved. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand what all the lit majors know.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Steinbeck. Somehow, in all my interest in stories about belonging in America and road trips and great explorations, I missed Travels with Charley until last week when some algorithm suggested it to me. I immediately ordered a copy. 

I’m 80 pages in and every single one has been a slog. I’ve learned that Steinbeck is a man and women only want men, not man babies. And anyone who is aging or has emotions might be a man baby. And he is no man baby. And we know this because he does things like chop wood and anchor his boat in the bay before a hurricane, and take off on a road trip around America. 

Honestly, I could forgive that. I understand that it was 1962 and the world had yet to agree that women are people, too. (Honestly, it’s 2023, and all evidence suggests we still haven’t agreed on that, so…) The bigger sin is that the book is boring. It’s like Steinbeck wanted to be Kerouac and was jealous of On the Road’s success a few years earlier, and thought, Hey, I’ll hit the road and write about it, too. How hard can it be? But while Kerouac’s book was propulsive and throbbed with energy and life, Travels with Charley plods along. Steinbeck tells about his love for historical markers. (Sorry, Lovey: I know you, too, love a historical marker.) While Kerouac gives us the rhythm of the road and a life lived. And bars and fights and chaos.

So I’ve given up. I rarely fail to finish a book, but I’ve decided life's too short to read boring books. I have better things to do. Like read Wolfish, a new essay collection by Erica Berry. Or The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest by Jon Lauck. Or even American Mermaid, a forthcoming debut novel by Julia Langbein. 

But it also got me thinking: Do women ever get to write the road novel or journey into the heart of America? Or are we always the ones being left to keep everything together while men go off on the great adventure? There’s Thelma and Louise, for sure. But they end up running from something; they are in reaction rather than in control over the narrative. And it’s fiction. I’m most interested in when women get to chronicle and tell the stories of women, rather than men doing men shit with other men and wondering what it means about the state and fate of America. So much is left between those cracks. 

Tell me, is there any nonfiction – or fiction – like Travels with Charley that is written from a woman’s perspective? Leave your suggestions in the comments. Maybe what I’m meant to do is pack my truck and my dog and hit the road, looking for stories in the great American Midwest.

Ok. Before I go, I’ll leave you with three great reads. 

1. “Our Lady of the Rockies: The 90-Foot Sentinel of Butte, Montana” by Leah Sottile in High Country News

2. “How one cocktail bar helped a small Ohio town overcome its inferiority complex” by Robert Simonson in Imbibe magazine

3. "How to embrace ‘wintering’ when your ambition is tapped” by Alicia Adamczyk in Fortune

 Have a great weekend. I’ll see you on Tuesday with the March Bar\Heart Book List – 10(ish) new books you can’t wait to read. 

And I swear, soon there will be both the Story of Plaguesgiving and the Story of the Paczki. Although that one is currently at 4,000 words and growing, so I’m doing you a favor by delaying it until my thoughts are more cohesive.