Liquor Snob explains the Spirit of Exploration
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We’ve spent a lot of time in the Liquor Snob offices lately, discussing the spirit of exploration and what it means. We started simple, thinking about famous boundary breakers we’d read about in school. Marco Polo. Ponce de Leon. Meriwether Lewis. Ford Prefect. Arguably great explorers all, even if the people of their times might have thought they’d gone a bit nutty. But does exploration mean solely the act of taking a physical trip? We thought not.
To broaden our horizons, we did what we usually do when faced with a difficult concept — we made our interns look it up on Wikipedia. We liked the science-y slant of the definition, which called exploration “the act of searching or traveling for the purpose of discovery.” It added another nice flavor, but we knew we weren’t at the meat of the answer so we pressed on.
Our next stop was, of course, the liquor cabinet. We often go there when we’re trying to work through life’s problems, and not just because we can often use a stiff drink. We go there because of possibilities that lie among the bottles, to free our minds and experiment. The individual spirits, the bitters and mixers, the sweet and savory treats we find there are the tools of our trade – the palette for our palate, if you will. It’s the place where we can push our own boundaries, unfetter our creative minds, and catch a nice little buzz, all at the same time.
We like to think of ourselves as cocktail artists. On one occasion we might paint broad, brightly colored swaths across our tongues with brash and brassy cocktails that get us girl-drink drunk. The next, we might be a bit more restrained, creating minimalist libations for a refined sensibility — dry martinis, please. But most often, we tend toward the abstract, with a desire to push the envelope of sense with combinations of colors and textures unlike anything we’ve previously tasted. The meaty goodness of a WhiskeyBurger, or the champagne-with-an-edge vibe of a Death in the Afternoon â¦those are the drinks that get our juices flowing. Sometimes they taste good, sometimes they don’t, but at least we can say we tried them.
What commonalities did we see across explorers and scientists, artists and bartenders? They’re the ones who can see the future, and they’re willing to do what it takes to make that future a reality. Exploration may manifest itself as human nature’s desire to see what’s over the next hill, across the next ocean, or at the bottom of the next cocktail shaker. If you ask us, the spirit of exploration is a cocktail of art and science, a concoction spiked with whimsy and discipline. At its heart, however, it’s a willingness to stand on the edge of folly because you like the view.
Jake Jamieson
LiquorSnob
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May 30 2008 08:00 am | Sapphire Drinks
