I’m drinking more during this pandemic than I ever had: I’m up to having a cocktail 3-4 times a week. Pre-pandemic I’d have perhaps two a month, so this is statistically a serious increase, but does not yet concern me or my wife.

There aren’t a lot of cocktails that I like, although there are many that I’ll drink. I actively enjoy Negronis, but now I feel obliged to point out that I started drinking them about 6 months before they became hip. I can promise you I am not hip. Well, in my own way…never mind.

But here’s a drink I invented in the sense that people have undoubtedly been drinking them forever but no one told me. I call it:

The Orange Bee Martini

Pour a good slosh of Barr Hill Gin into a class larger than that slosh. I’m not (just) being a snob here. Barr Hill uses honey as a “botanical”, giving it a honey flavor without actually being sweet. That makes it a lousy gin for a plain old non-hip martini that the squares drink, but it’s good for my new ultra-hip libation.

Add less of a slosh of white vermouth. Until I achieved adulthood around the age of 55, I disliked martinis because I thought you were supposed to drink them in the sophisticated “dry” fashion by asking the bartender to drink a shot of vermouth and then breathe out through his nose into the shaker. It turns out that I’m not that crazy about gin, although the olives were good.

So now I put about half as much vermouth as gin into my martinis. I can do that because I’m no longer a child of 54.

Then add even less of a slosh, but more than a hint, of the orange liqueur that you bought to bake with and haven’t used since because how often do you make a cake soaked in orange liqueur? If your answer is more than twice a year, then you have a problem. With orange cake, not with alcohol.

Mix it all in a glass and put the glass in the freezer for an hour because alcohol tastes terrible.

Enjoy!

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Inspired by fabulously wrong paint colors that Janelle Shane’s generated by running existing paint names through a machine learning system, and then by an hilarious experiment in dog breed names by my friend Matthew Battles, I decided to run some data through a beginner’s machine learning algorithm by karpathy.

I fed a list of cocktail names in as data to an unaltered copy of karpathy’s code. After several hundred thousand iterations, here’s a highly curated list of results:

Then I added to the original list of cocktails a list of Western philosophers. After about 1.4 million iterations, here’s a curated list:

Yes, we need not worry about human bartenders, cocktail designers, or philosophers being replaced by this particular algorithm. On the other hand, this is algorithm consists of a handful of lines of code and was applied blindly by a person dumber than it. Presumably SkyNet — or the next version of Microsoft Clippy — will be significantly more sophisticated than that.

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Here’s a recipe for a Manhattan cocktail that I like. The idea of adding Kahlua came from a bartender in Philadelphia. I call it a Bogotá Manhattan because of the coffee.

You can’t tell by looking at this post that it’s marked up with Schema.org codes, unless you View Source. These codes let the search engines (and any other computer program that cares to look) recognize the meaning of the various elements. For example, the line “a splash of Kahlua” actually reads:

<span itemprop=”ingredients”>a splash of Kahlua</span>

“itemprop=ingredients” says that the visible content is an ingredient. This does not help you as a reader at all, but it means that a search engine can confidentally include this recipe when someone searches for recipes that contain Kahlua. Markup makes the Web smarter, and Schema.org is a lightweight, practical way of adding markup, with the huge incentive that the major search engines recognize Schema.

So, here goes:

Here’s the Schema.org markup for recipes. author url

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