From the Editor’s Desk: Drink (Premium)

In October 2018, Mary Jo Foley and I visited Dublin, Ireland for work, and my wife came along so we could explore the city as well. We’d visited several times in the past---the first time in 1993---but Dublin has evolved at a heady clip in recent years, and there’s always something new to see. And we enjoyed some old favorites, of course, like Trinity College, Grafton Street, and the Guinness Storehouse. But we also had some new experiences, among them a visit to the Jameson Distillery, where the three of us went on a tour.

That tour was quite interesting, and I wasn’t surprised that I preferred their Irish Whiskey over the other bourbons and whiskeys we tried in a blind taste test. But it ended, predictably, at a bar in the distillery where we could use a coupon to get a small glass of whiskey or one of a few Jameson-based cocktails. Ever the purist, I chose the whiskey, but Mary Jo and Stephanie went for the cocktails.

I immediately regretted my decision. Not only could I have a shot of Jameson at almost any time in almost any place on earth, but the two cocktails that came out were pretty, distinctive, and tasty. I was also quite taken with the cocktail accouterments that the bartenders used to create these concoctions. It was like watching a 19th-century chemist in a laboratory, with various liqueurs, syrups, bitters, dried fruits, and other items melded with whiskey and frothed egg whites into something unique and wonderful.

By this point, my wife and I had spent plenty of time at bars, but it was mostly to eat and drink a few glasses of wine. That alone was a major step up from our early alcohol experiences, which involved an escalating evolution in the quality of the beer we drank. I recall, for example, being taken with darker beers like Nut Brown Ale in the early 1990s, at a time when most of my friends were drinking weak American beers, and then by such things as Hefeweizens and various Belgian and German brews.

This is a great example of how life escalates, how one’s tastes mature and change over time. The dark side of this, of course, is that it’s hard to go back. Once you’ve moved on from the Budweisers of the world, you don’t want that thing anymore. You want something better. And better, almost universally, is more expensive. But alcohol is worse. Alcohol is not good for you.

When I did the Keto diet in 2017, I lost a lot of weight, but I also experienced a curious and unintended side-effect: I lost my taste for beer. Not just cheap, terrible beer, but all beer. I can’t really explain this, other than to say it happened, and while I have tasted some beers since then, I have never had a full glass of beer even once. I have, instead, had a lot of wine. And, more recently, many, many cocktails. Too many cocktails.

The wine escalated as ev...