Undergraduate Drink Mixes
Offered in lieu of a longer piece I am still working on about friendship and virtue, here are some of the alcoholic beverages my friends and I consumed during undergrad, often on multiple occasions:
Peach schnapps, vodka, orange juice — this was a mainstay in first year for pregaming parties. Drank out of a set of tea cups that my friend gifted me and that we affectionately referred to as “the drunk glasses,” as they were deceptively large, and thus we would get drunk very quickly using them.
Wild Vines — fun, fruity summer drink. Consumed “ironically.” It was the 2000s so that almost goes without saying.
Wild Vines, with sugar added — an acquaintance tried to make this a thing at a dinner party that got kind of rowdy, but to the best of my knowledge it never took off after everyone tried it and had nasty hangovers the next day.
Champagne mixed with vodka — which we christened with the portmanteau, “champodka.”
Bitters shots — admittedly, this one was on a dare, but also not the worst drink ever.
Cognac and tonic water — forgive me Father, for I have sinned, this one was entirely my own invention, and I spent a couple of months choking it down at parties because I thought cognac was sophisticated but I was unable to manage drinking it straight. In my defense, it had been necessary to take an extra year to finish my undergraduate degree and I was going through it (in no small part because I had decided I should write my thesis on Hegel).
The cheap fruit cider that comes in 2L jugs — I’m pretty sure this was just flavoured malt liquor. Very chemical aftertaste.
Smirnoff Ice — we all remember bros icing bros. This was a mainstay of parties during the summer of 2010, and in retrospect, it was pretty fun, except for the one time it resulted in a very drunk guy on our roof at 2 am refusing to leave and howling about the stars.
Soy Milk White Russian — the mainstay of one of my roommates the same summer we were all contriving to ice each other. Mouthfeel left something to be desired. Occasionally curdled a bit.
Pernod — I’d recently seen The Last Days of Disco and thought it would be funny to start drinking Pernod.
Box Wine — this one is only on the list because at parties there were a few people who were known to take the inner bag out from the box and drink directly from the tap, as though from a wineskin. You haven’t lived until you’re fending off someone in the throes of a bacchanalian frenzy brandishing the wine bag at you and shouting “slap the bag! Slap the bag!” — squeezing it like some sinister bagpipe and squirting wine into the crowd.
Moustache Wine/Chateau d’A— Shortly after finishing undergrad, I moved in with a new roommate (with a moustache), who immediately prevailed upon me to get in on a few barrels of “brew your own” wine. “It’s two dollars a bottle, you in?” I assented, not, at this point, knowing that my new roommate was extremely cheap, and entirely forgot about the matter until two months later when he returned with some other friends and several cases of the wine now self-bottled from the brewers. We uncorked a bottle to try, and predictably, it was some of the most disgusting wine I have ever drank. Tasting notes of soap, and an acrid, astringent aftertaste. “We need to super-aerate it,” said his one friend who had taken a wine-tasting class. “Super-aeration”involved putting the wine in a blender and pulsing it for a minute or so. It did not improve the flavour at all. During the two years I lived in that house, we would bring the wine out at the end of parties, hoping to get rid of it, but even when everyone was extremely drunk, or when it was mixed into sangria, nobody wanted to drink it. To the best of my knowledge, the last of the thirty-odd bottles we’d kept were finished a year or so after I moved out.