Alcolog

Of those countries that have a holiday to celebrate paternity, the plurality of them celebrate it on the third Sunday in June. In other words, five days from today. But the dull roar of merchants suggesting gift ideas for "Dads and Grads" pretty much started the Monday after Mother's Day. The drinks industry, whose laser-like focus on males as the only half of the species that drinks, has ponied up many suggestions on what to give your dad this year.
Not wanting to feel left out, I decided that there should be an Alcolog gifting idea for dads. I promise to offer up similar suggestions next May for the mother that bucks the trend and enjoys a drink; but shy of backdating a post, I can't really offer that for Mother's Day 2007.

So the first suggestion to help figure out what to get dad is to actually look in his liquor cabinet. Are the bottles fresh? Fancy? Does it look like your dad buys stuff because of the shape of the bottle or the color of the liquid? Father's Day gifts that don't match your father's taste are likely to be re-gifted or given away at the next party. Get your dad something he'll drink.

Second, get something that you'll both drink. Part of the pleasure of giving someone alcohol is that they're probably going to open it and offer you some. Even if you finish it that night, the experience of the evening and the enjoyment of the gift is what matters. If you want to give your dad a gift that sits on a shelf, go with something safe like ties or underwear.

So armed with taste, the next big step is plunging into the local liquor store's collection and finding something. Walk through the entire store and try to match areas with the bottles you saw on the shelf. If your dad's bottles had labels peeling off and imperial volume measurements, it's better to ask for help from a manager. Preferably one who was drinking before 1980.

Liquor stores are smart in that they classify their selections fairly nicely. If you find all of your dad's bottles in the same basic shelving area, good money says that the bottles on those same shelves will probably be cool for him. Even if he opens the gift and he says, "Oh man, I can't drink this because of a college party in 1965..." he might try it again and revisit those days with you.

Next big tip: you've located his bottles, so now you tilt your head up one or two shelves. Those are your gifts for dad. They'll be more expensive, but it's a special occasion courtesy of Dick Nixon, so you might as well celebrate it.

So what if you don't have the time to do the pre-work and you're not sure what your dad likes? Go generic and get bar tools. A corkscrew or hipflask are good bets. Just don't guess - alcohol is a consumable gift, and the last thing you want to do is sift through your late father's worldly belongings to find the unopened bottle, label peeling, and contents undrinkable because it sat on a shelf for decades.

Normally someone would have a tasting to show off the diversity of flavors associated with a kind of alcohol. Vodka aspires to be tasteless, so it's not like you're going to get much diversity from it. So it's better to look at a flight of vodkas as being a test - who can be the most tasteless of the bunch.

This is probably one of the factors about why I don't post about vodka. Another factor has to do with its popularity. Practically everyone who drinks hard alcohol will have had vodka at some point in their drinking lives. It's as common a mixer as coke and the primary ingredient in most martinis service today. Vodka shots go down quickly and when chilled tend to pour like water. Not that anything is wrong with this popularity - it just seems easier to abuse something you can't taste.

Take the fine drinking stock of the Russian people. Last week, The Lancet released a study that claimed 43% of deaths in their sample were attributable to hazardous drinking. These habits were both garden-variety overconsumption as well as drinking non-potable forms of alcohol in cologne and cleaning solvents.

But best be wary of wagging a finger at the Russians. The cheapest bottle of the hard stuff is almost always vodka. With a low price point it becomes a cheap default for people who want to get drunk.

Ironically enough, vodka is tarred with the same problems gin had over 100 years ago. In so many ways, vodka is the new gin.

Sorry for the tangent - this actually has a point. Since we aren't supposed to taste vodka, here's a test. Four vodkas of various origins to see if there's a way to draw out taste.

The first part is to get the stuff out of the freezer. If vodka is "frozen", you aren't likely to pick up any volatiles or impurities. That's one of the big reasons you keep the stuff in the freezer. Once it's at room temp, open the container and take a huge snort of air from the bottle. That'll be the alcohol fumes and possibly anything else that's going to be volatile at room temperature.

Now pour some into a wide-mouthed glass like a rocks glass or a brandy snifter. Swirl it around and take another noseful of the aromas. It should smell similar to the noseful from the bottle, though this time it might be easier to pick up the source of the ethanol. The most popular are wheat/rye and potato, though nowadays you can get vodka made from things like maize, grapes, barley, soy, and soon from pineapple juice. And it's not that each of those sources creates a different ethanol. They just have different volatiles that act as a signature for the kinds of ethanol in the vodka.

After a good swig of water to clean your mouth, take a sip. Don't swallow it; the point is to let the ethanol fume into your nose and let what's left stay on your tongue. This is the start of when flavors come out of the vodka. They might be a subtle banana flavor or an odd butter tone. But these are the things that made it through the distillation process and ended up in the bottle.

Finally, one last abuse to the vodka to really bring out the things you shouldn't taste: salt. Refined salt does not impart taste, it enhances tastes present in foods and drinks. As a result, a dash of salt into a relatively tastesless substance like vodka and you'll have those subtle flavors jump out at you. For example, the "3" Vodka made from soy starts tasting more like a rum or tequila. Which makes sense since soybeans are more on the sugar end of the spectrum. The other three came from wheat so they have a bit of a pot-distilled gin flavor to them. Their excess flavors are a bit more subtle, but the salt does help distinguish some of the differences between them.

And the least flavored of them all? Reyka. There might be some wisdom in filtering your vodka through lava rocks.