“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people.
What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.” — Charles Bukowski The above quote is what you’re met with on the very first page of Beta Cocktails and does a lot to signal what is to come.
Beta Cocktails, like its predecessor Rogue Cocktails , was nominally a booklet of 50 or so original drinks, but to call it a cocktail book is like calling the Communist Manifesto an economic paper. It was that, sure, but it was also a watershed, a call to action, and a shot across the bow. To set the stage: In 2009, bartenders Kirk Estopinal and Maksym Pazuniak were behind the stick at New Orleans’ seminal bar Cure, lamenting what they perceived as a lack of innovation in the cocktail world.
The 2000s were all about re-establishing the long-dormant rules of tending bar—when to shake, when to stir, how to use bitters, best practices for temperature, texture, ratios, etc—but to Estopinal and Pazuniak, all of this stifled creativity, and led to drinks with a persistent and frustrating sameness. Those rules can be valuable insofar as they help guide you towards delicious cocktails, but they’re not laws; as long as the final product is delicious, they reasoned, who cares how you get there? That a drink might have a tangerine and chaat-masala gastrique didn’t make it new, it just made it unreplicable. Real creativity was in breaking down the molds, using the same ingredients everyone else has, j.