Here's the second part of the Just Images Barware trivia post, in which I recap the quiz and expound on what I learned when I was writing and researching it.
(If you haven't looked at the quiz yet, go here and check it out, then meet me back here. It'll make more sense.)
1. Some drinks (Hurricanes, Zombies, Margaritas, Collinses, and others) are traditionally served in their own glassware. What capital drink is shown here?
Answer: MOSCOW MULE
Correct Answer % at LearnedLeague: 96
I wanted to kick off the quiz with a pretty easy one - of the drinks with their own glassware, perhaps the most tied to its servingware is the Moscow Mule. It’s got great visual appeal, and like a Mojito, when you see a tray of them making their way across a crowded bar, you just want to order your own.
The origins of the Moscow Mule are, like lots of cocktail origin stories, murky - by definition, everyone involved was drinking. It was popularized at the Cock & Bull restaurant & bar in LA, but stories vary widely on whether it was invented there by a bartender hoping to move more of their homemade ginger beer, or cooked up at New York’s Chatham Hotel by a Smirnoff executive in conjunction with the Cock & Bull owner and a Heublein executive. Stories also vary on the origins of the serving ware, but all seem to center around someone trying to move a shipment of copper mugs. And of course, you absolutely must serve the drink in the copper mug…especially if you listen to people who sell copper mugs.
There aren’t a lot of classic cocktails made with vodka (which was, up until 2020, legally required to be free of “distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color”). The Moscow Mule was essentially based on the Mamie Taylor, which uses Scotch instead of vodka, and can be described as a Scotch rickey with ginger beer. (It’s also refreshing and delightful.) Other variations on the Moscow Mule have followed - the Kentucky Mule uses bourbon, the Gin Mule is self-explanatory, et cetera. (Wikipedia has a long list.) I favor Audrey Saunders’ Gin-Gin Mule which adds mint and drags it in the Mojito direction.
I made a note for scorers to accept other MULE variations, as a lot of these will come in the mugs as well. I also had scorers accept BUCK and variations thereof - as ace bartender Jim Meehan has noted, a buck is a highball with ginger ale and lime, though some others have drawn a distinction between ginger ale and ginger beer, holding that a buck has ginger ale while a mule has ginger beer.
Interestingly enough, at one point Smirnoff moved away from the ginger beer/buck distinction and redefined the "Smirnoff Mule" which consisted of Smirnoff vodka, lime, and...7-Up. They even came up with a jingle (recorded by Skitch Henderson and Carmen McRae) and accompanying dance!
2. What spirit is traditionally prepared using these somewhat misleadingly named "fountains"?
Answer: ABSINTHE
Correct Answer %: 73
Yes, these are absinthe fountains, which don’t dispense absinthe themselves - they are designed to veeeeeerrrrryyyy slowly drip ice-cold water onto a sugar cube suspended over a glass of absinthe (on an absinthe spoon/grille), in the old French ritual method of absinthe preparation:
(I won’t speak of the Czech absinthe “ritual” involving setting the sugar cube on fire, or any of the other myths surrounding absinthe.)
Absinthe, like many other anise-flavored spirits and liqueurs, turns milky-white when water is added, a phenomenon known as “la louche” or the “ouzo effect.” The fountains’ measured drizzle means you can very carefully calibrate the speed at which this happens in your glass.
I asked scorers to accept PASTIS, because it is also French/Swiss in origin like absinthe, and is also traditionally drunk by diluting it with water. Despite the name of the “ouzo effect,” I don’t believe the fountains are typically used for it, so I asked scorers to not accept OUZO, or the similar AGUARDIENTE, SAMBUCA, ANISETTE, ARAK, or RAKI.
3. This variety of citrus squeezer is sometimes known as the Mexican __________. What body part's name fills in the blank?
Answer: ELBOW
Correct Answer %: 50
I don't know if this type of juicer originated in Mexico but I believe it's called an "elbow" due to it looking like an arm with a joint in the middle. They certainly sell them in the Mexican-products aisle of my local grocery store.
It is a hand-operated juicer, but I’ve never heard it referred to as a “Mexican hand”, to address one of the more common wrong answers.
4. Don't get mixed up when making cocktails. Some drinks call for citrus or herbs to be pressed in the mixing glass or shaker to release their flavorful oils. What's the name of the tool that's used for this?
Answer: MUDDLER
Correct Answer %: 86
These are all muddlers. As with all bar gear, they can take different forms, but I go for an unfinished wood muddler (you don’t want flakes of varnish in your drink) for muddling mint and other herbs, when you want to lightly press them (don’t hammer the bejeezus out of them, as they’ll turn bitter) against the sides of the glass. For muddling citrus to extract their peels’ oils, I tend to use one with a diamond-patterned hard plastic head so I can really grind the peels onto the sharp sugar crystals.
I get the thinking with “pestle”, but my favorite wrong answer was “confuser.” Barkeep! A lightly confused julep over here!
5. A _________ bag is a canvas bag used for crushing ice.
Answer: LEWIS
Correct Answer %: 13
A fairly quick and easy way to crush ice is with a Lewis bag - the canvas tends to wick away moisture and leave you with relatively dry ice. Plus, they’re fun to use - grab a mallet and whale away at the bag and pulverize your frustrations - then you’re set for a cobbler or julep.
Speaking of juleps, it’s always fun to link to this amazing video of master bartender Chris McMillian putting a Lewis bag to its best use.
Despite the high volume of of Mint Juleps he makes on a daily basis, McMillian hand-crushes ice per order using an oversized wooden mallet and a canvas Lewis bag, which he believes results in a much drier ice as the bag wicks away most of the extraneous water. There’s also no denying the element of theater involved in wielding a giant wooden mallet. “We could argue that my single greatest contribution to the global cocktail movement, whether people believe it or not, is the revival of the Lewis bag and mallet, which I’ve been doing for 20 years now,” says McMillian.
Why is it called a Lewis bag? Who was Lewis? Simply put: no one knows. As drinks writer Robert Simonson noted, while bartenders absolutely crushed ice in cloth long ago, no one apparently sold the canvas bags or gave them the “Lewis” moniker until the late 1990s, when Franmara started selling theirs.
6. These tools for measuring liquid ingredients are available in many different designs. What are they known as?
Answer: JIGGER(S)
Correct Answer %: 86
Jiggers for measuring cocktail ingredients can take many forms - for home use, I’m partial to the little Oxo 2-ounce angled measuring cup (in which I’ve scratched a ¾-oz measurement) or the Standard Spoon recreation of the antique stepped-sided Napier jigger. Lots of people like the double-ended hourglass variety, in conical, bell-shaped, or elongated Japanese styles. I think tipping jiggers are interesting, and the one at lower left in this image is a “pony” jigger.
7. These twigs, from the Quararibea turbinata tree, are used in the Caribbean to mix drinks with crushed ice. In Martinique, they're known as "bois lélé." What alliterative name are they also known by?
Answer: SWIZZLE STICK(S)
Correct Answer %: 50
These share a name with the little plastic stirrers that come in some drinks, but those are named after these twigs. You "swizzle" a drink by taking one of these and rolling it between your palms with the business end in the glass with crushed ice - a proper Swizzle (my favorite is the Queens Park Swizzle) is very refreshing and has frost on the outside of the glass. Testers seemed intrigued by this - the twigs are usually dried and stripped of bark. They don't really add any flavor to the drink, but they do have a nice woody spicy scent on their own.
The swizzle sticks used to be impossible to find without going to the Caribbean where the swizzle stick tree grows, but now a few places import them, and have even recreated them in stainless steel.
My favorite wrong answer? “Twizzle twigs.” So close!
8. There are three types of shakers shown here. From left to right, what are they called?
Answer: BOSTON, COBBLER, PARISIAN
Correct Answer %: 9
I think this was another question where the pros and real cocktailians showed themselves, i.e. a really hard question given that I asked for all three types of shaker. (Apologies to the scoring team for all the variety of submissions to sort through.)
The leftmost is a Boston shaker, and while I didn't include a picture in the quiz, I should note that in a surprisingly short amount of time about twenty years ago, almost all pro bartenders have moved to an all-metal version of the Boston shaker using two "tins" rather than a large mixing tin and pint glass/mixing glass as shown here. (It used to be hard to find the tins on their own as they’d often come with a pint glass. Now it’s harder to find the glass-and-metal kind.) It's nice to see what you're measuring into the glass part, but glass can chip or the bottom can pop off. I was once cautioned by a pro that if I'm using a glass-and-metal version of the Boston shaker, always have the glass part pointed away from the guest, as even tempered-glass versions can fail, and the drink and broken glass should go over your shoulder instead of into the guest's face.
You can work faster with a Boston shaker than the other varieties, you can double-shake with a shaker in each hand if you’re sufficiently coordinated (read: not me), and they can be both sealed and unsealed relatively easily - a tap on the top will seal a Boston shaker, and a whack on the side in just the right spot will unseal it.
A cobbler shaker is named after the cobbler family of drinks - shaken drinks served with straws in a large glass of crushed ice and decorated liberally with fruit and mint leaves, the most famous of which is the Sherry Cobbler. Cobbler shakers tend to be used most by home bartenders (often because of the built-in strainer and sometimes built-in citrus reamers or jiggers) - pros often find the built-in strainer to be lacking, and they can be very difficult to open once sealed and shaken with ice, which can slow you down when speed is of the essence. (I once had to destroy one with a hammer to get it open. Never again.) They also tend to be smaller and have less capacity than Boston shakers. However, it's favored by many Japanese bartenders, one of whom developed a technique called the hard shake using a cobbler shaker. I have a small cobbler shaker at home (a freebie from Cointreau) that I sometimes use for really pulverizing egg cocktails; it's plastic so it's easier to open than an all-metal one. Otherwise, I exclusively use the all-metal Boston shaker.
Drinks historian David Wondrich wrote about the cobbler shaker in Imbibe!:
The Parisian shaker is kind of a halfway step between the cobbler and Boston types, though it's an ancestor of the cobbler shaker. It is two pieces, like the Boston, but they fit seamlessly into each other, like the cobbler. They tend to be a little easier to open than a cobbler shaker, but I personally don't really see the point of them (other than that they look cool.)
I asked scorers to accept FRENCH or CONTINENTAL for the PARISIAN shaker, as they’re often called that in the UK. (I still wanna play with a yo-yo shaker.)
Incidentally, two people submitted “Larry, Curly, Moe”, two more submitted “Curly, Larry, Moe”, while four submitted “Larry, Moe, Curly.”
9. Here are two kinds of strainers. What, from left to right, are they called?
Answer: JULEP, HAWTHORNE
Correct Answer %: 15
Most people, when they think of cocktail strainers, think of the Hawthorne type with the coiled spring. Interestingly enough, many original patents and ads for coiled-spring strainers refer to them as "julep strainers" - the assignor of the 1892 patent for the most familiar one was the owner of the Hawthorne Cafe in Boston. Some of the original ones had the holes perforating the disk spelling out the word "HAWTHORNE", and the name eventually stuck, differentiating it from what we now know as a julep strainer.
Classically, stirred drinks (tending to be all-spirit drinks) are stirred in a mixing glass, and strained with a julep strainer. (Juleps and other drinks were, for a time in the 19th century, served with a spoon or the strainer in the glass - see this illustration from 1888 - and the customer would drink through them to protect their teeth and mustache from an onslaught of ice.) Shaken drinks (with citrus or egg) are strained with a Hawthorne strainer, as the spring enables them to fit different size shaker tins. The spring also gives you a bit more control, as you can manipulate the strainer with your index finger to allow larger or smaller openings around the spring vs the perforations; pros call this "opening the gate" or "closing the gate." (Sometimes bartenders will double-strain with a small fine-mesh tea strainer, especially if there are bits of mint leaves or extra shards of ice in the shaker tin.)
10. What holiday drink popular in the Upper Midwest - somewhat akin to a boozy hot eggnog - is traditionally served in these bowl-and-mug sets? Early bartender and author Jeremiah P. Thomas claimed to have invented the drink and to have named it after two of his pet mice, but it actually predates him.
Answer: TOM AND JERRY
Correct Answer %: 32
Tom and Jerry is a very old drink, having recipes in print since at least 1827, and it's kind of a soothing, boozy hot eggnog that's rich and delicious. In a 1932 short story, "Dancing Dan's Christmas," Damon Runyon praised it:
This hot Tom and Jerry is an old time drink that is once used by one and all in this country to celebrate Christmas with, and in fact it is once so popular that many people think Christmas is invented only to furnish an excuse for hot Tom and Jerry, although of course this is by no means true.
It was all the rage through the second half of the 19th century, but fell out of style around the turn of the 20th. It takes some doing; you separate eggs and make kind of a batter with the yolks, sugar, spices, and booze, then lighten the batter with the beaten egg whites. To serve, dollop a generous spoon of the batter into a mug, add rum and brandy and top with not-quite-boiling milk. A lot of work? Sure. Festive? Indubitably. Bad for you? Of course. (David Wondrich said it’s like “sucking the tailpipe of a crosstown bus, healthwise.”) I like Audrey Saunders’ variation best, and miss drinking it at the Pegu Club (RIP) on snowy evenings.
The Tom and Jerry was arguably the first drink with its own associated barware, and the bowl-and-mug sets can be found on eBay and in antique stores. Here’s the unredacted picture from the question:
This is pretty much a regional drink in the Upper Midwest these days, where grocery stores carry a premixed batter sometimes. None of the testers had heard of it, and one suggested cluing it to the cartoon cat and mouse. I decided to bring Jerry Thomas’s name into it for an extra clue, and to mention his pet mice; in his 1862 book, he says that “this drink is sometimes called Copenhagen, and sometimes Jerry Thomas.” But in 1880, he claimed in an interview that he had invented it in 1847 (when he would have been 17 or so years old!). This interview was quoted in his 1885 New York Times obit:
As Dr. Wondrich notes in Imbibe!, the earliest known citation of the drink was in 1827:
It was likely named after a hit play (“Life in London; or The Day and Night Scenes of Tom and Jerry in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis”) that arrived in New York in 1823.
11. This glass, named for the Scottish crystal company that developed it, is widely used for tasting whisk(e)y. What's it called?
Answer: GLENCAIRN
Correct Answer %: 24
The Glencairn glass is ubiquitous at distilleries - every Scottish distillery uses them for tastings, and I’ve seen them at many US distilleries as well. And that’s for a reason; they’re really good. The tapered chimney shape concentrates the aromas and lets you really evaluate a whisk(e)y, and the snifter-like bowl base increases surface area in contact with the air.
12. Time to celebrate - you've made it to the end of the quiz! The gadget shown here shares its two-word name with a nickname for a successful lumbar puncture, which extracts cerebrospinal fluid with no red blood cells in the sample. (Some med schools have a tradition in which the supervising neurologist rewards a trainee with a bottle of bubbly the first time they accomplish this.) What's that name?
Answer: CHAMPAGNE TAP
Correct Answer %: 7
This one was pretty esoteric, as no one really uses these pieces of Victoriana anymore (Champagne bottle stoppers are cheap and effective.) They’re a nifty piece of kit, though, and not unheard of among collectors of corkscrews and other historic barware. They screw through the Champagne bottle’s cork (some of them have you bore a hole first with a gimlet or trocar) and then have a little valve on them so you can open a tap and pour out your bubbly without opening the whole bottle.
Here’s the box that mine came in:
I was trying to get you there with the “celebrate” and “bubbly” clues, as well as the mention of the med-school nickname, which I ran across in researching taps.
From this study:
Champagne, a sparkling wine produced from grapes grown in the Champagne region of France, is the requisite drink of celebration, symbolizing all things congratulatory from new years to new unions. A “champagne tap” colloquially refers to a lumbar puncture (LP) with no cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) red blood cells (RBCs), which appears colorless (reminiscent of its clear bubbly namesake) and signifies a technically perfect procedure. . .Traditionally, supervising physicians will reward trainees who perform a champagne tap with a sparkling beverage in recognition of procedural success. This anticipated and sought-after reward fosters a supportive community during training, potentially protecting against resident burnout.
I also found discussion on Reddit, and the University of Washington’s neurology residents even use it as their Instagram handle!
I wasn’t expecting SUCH a low get rate, though - 54% of recipients said “spinal tap,” making it by far the most-common wrong answer. (I also liked “epidural screw,” submitted by three people.) I probably could have phrased this better.
I cut three questions from the original lineup; here they are:
This style of mixing glass, originally favored in Japan and embraced by cocktail revivalists, is named for the cut (or molded) pattern. What's it called?
This was kind of a YEKIOYD, and while there are certainly going to be several of those in Just Images quizzes, I thought there were fewer ways into this one, and it ultimately wasn’t as interesting. Testers found it very difficult as well.
These smallish stemmed cocktail glasses are narrower and deeper than coupes or traditional Martini/cocktail glasses. What moniker, after an alliterative 1930s screen pairing, were they given in 1987?
[NICK & NORA]
This was one of the first questions I came up with, but as several testers pointed out, this was used in LL97MD23Q5 back in June. As much as I love this question, as much as I love the Thin Man movies, and as much as I enjoyed putting together the photo collage (adore those Riedel N&Ns at bottom right!), I had to kill the question.
Here’s the story of the N&N and its revival, and here’s a guide to Martini glassware.
A _________ knife is used to cut long strips of citrus peel for garnish.
[CHANNEL]
This one was another one that was less interesting, and I couldn’t figure out a good way to keep ZESTER out as an alternative. (the gizmo on the right side of the left pic is a combination zester (the little rings on top) and channel knife (the ring on the left side.) It proved confusing to some testers. Also, you don’t often see the big long strips of peel that are created by channel knives, though they make a striking garnish for a Horse’s Neck.
Thanks once again for playing, and for getting to the end of this too-lengthy recap! Mix yourself a drink!
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