Cocktails in the Time of COVID-19: Support Small Businesses, Show Your Neighbors Some Love, and Drink Well

To me, one of the best things about cocktails is the way they bring us as humans together. I love bellying up to a bar, watching the bartenders do their thing, and striking up conversations with the other people around me. I love having friends over and mixing drinks, chatting and laughing as we while away the hours over delicious tipples. A solo cocktail is a fine thing, to be sure, but for me, the whole experience is so much better when it’s shared.

But right now, my friends, that sharing is on hold. As communities across the US (mine included) and the globe deal with sheltering in place and physical distancing, we need to press pause on raising a glass together out in the world.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are some easy ways you can partake of the joy of cocktails, support your local small businesses, stay connected with friends and neighbors, and level up your drinks game in the process, all while staying safe. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Seek Out Small Businesses for Cocktail Supplies and Inspiration

Here in Oakland, and throughout California, non-essential businesses are closed until at least early April, which is a real blow to the wallet for many small, local companies.

In addition to supporting your favorite local bars and restaurants by buying gift certificates you can use once things are back in action, or by ordering food (and here in California, cocktails!) for pick-up, here are a few ideas for how to show small businesses some much-needed love.

• Spice up your simple syrups, tinctures, and infusions by buying fresh spices from small spice shops. If you’ve gotta be cooped up inside for a few weeks, why not take this opportunity to experiment with making your own flavored syrups, cordials, and other cocktail ingredients? You might not have a spice shop in your area, but Oaktown Spice (based right here in Oakland) and Skordo (based in Portland, ME) are two fab options that deliver throughout the country.

• Hit up your local bookstore for a new cocktail tome. Yes, Amazon will bring nearly anything right to your door, but please consider buying from a local bookseller instead. Stores themselves might be closed right now, but many are offering free delivery or no-contact pick-up options. I just ordered David Lebovitz’ new Drinking French from East Bay Booksellers, an awesome local shop here in Oakland; it’ll be in my hands tomorrow, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m contributing to keeping a store I love afloat.

• Go local with your booze buying. Even if you normally stock up on liquor at Costco, a chain supermarket, or a store like BevMo, consider spending a few extra bucks to grab a few bottles from your corner store, a nearby independent grocer, or a local bottle shop that offers delivery or no-contact pick-up.

Raise a Glass with Friends and Neighbors

Even if those around you still look and seem hale and hardy, now’s probably not the time to get the gang together for drinks. But that doesn’t mean you need to drink alone.

If you live somewhere that makes this feasible, how about coordinating with your neighbors to all open your doors, step out onto your stoops, or poke your heads out the windows at the same time one evening to enjoy happy hour together from a safe distance? The same idea holds for far-flung pals: have everyone make a drink, hop on a video chat, and enjoy a temporary escape, a good cocktail, and the company of friends.

Want to take it a step further? Arrange with nearby neighbors or friends to do a batched cocktail “chain letter”: each person mixes up a batch of their favorite drink and leaves it in a bottle on another participant’s doorstep. Make it a one-time thing or keep it going for several evenings to get the chance to mix up and taste multiple different drinks. (Of course, it’s extra important to follow safe handling and safe prep procedures now, and to bow out of the round robin if you or anyone under your same roof feels at all unwell.)

Have Extra Time Right Now? Use It to Branch Out with Your Cocktails

Finally, if you’re sheltering in place or simply spending a lot more time at home than you normally do, you might find yourself with extra time on your hands. (You might also find yourself needing to keep any young ones who might be at home with you entertained and safely occupied for way longer than usual, in which case you’re quite possibly ready for a drink.)

How ‘bout devoting an hour or two (or forty-two: no judgment!) that you might’ve spent doing…well, anything out of the house to diving deeper into cocktail making?

I for one typically tend to breeze right past any cocktail recipe that involves anything homemade that’s more complex than simple syrup, especially in the midst of a busy week. But now, friends? Now is the time to make those multi-ingredient syrups, to delve into cordials, maybe to make a tincture or two.

It’s also the time to experiment with the bottles gathering dust in my bar (lookin’ at you, cachaça!) and to find creative ways of finishing off those with a lingering inch of booze remaining.

Make your own ice! Get fancy with the garnishes! Bust out the vintage glassware (ahem) instead of the plain glass tumbler! Master your shaking technique, or get in a mini workout by shaking up a Ramos gin fizz! The options and adventures are endless.

We’re in This Together

When the worst of this pandemic is behind us, things have stabilized, and we can once again get together in person (responsibly!), it’ll be so very awesome to physically clink glasses again.

In the meantime, let’s do everything we can to stay connected even though we’re keeping a safe distance. Cocktails can bring us together with our friends, our neighbors, and our local businesses, and can help keep us united and sane during these immensely uncertain times.

I raise a glass to you and yours and wish you health, happiness, and some new cocktailing skills.

5 Tips for Cocktail Party Success

We learn both from our mistakes and from our successes, and as someone who's thrown many a cocktail party, I've had plenty of both. That means there's lots I've learned, and lots I now do to make the experience of having people over for drinks a much less stressful and much more fun one.

Here are my top 5 lessons learned over the years about hosting cocktail gatherings.

1. For the love of your sanity, don't mix individual drinks. 

Yup, it's tempting to show off your cocktail-making chops by shaking or stirring each of your guests the tipple of their choice. But unless you're a professional (or at least very experienced) bartender and are serving a very small crowd, taking this route means you're basically going to spend most of the evening stuck behind the bar or in the kitchen with a shaker in your hands. Not so much fun for you, and not so much fun for your guests, who presumably came to your fête at least in part because they want to hang out with you. What to do instead?

2. Make friends with punches and other batched drinks.

If "punch" brings to mind that little blue-and-red Hawaiian dude mixed with a bottle of 7-Up and some bottom-shelf vodka, think again. There are endless recipes online for punches that are both easy and tasty, with actual decent ingredients—stuff you'd be happy to drink and proud to serve. 

Almost as easy as filling a punch bowl with deliciousness is batching simple cocktails. With the right equipment (a good mixing glass, a spacious cocktail shaker, a sturdy barspoon, etc.) and the ability to scale up ingredient lists, it's basically a tiny step from mixing one Manhattan or one Paper Plane to mixing half a dozen. Just be sure to steer clear of anything that's high maintenance (cough Mojitos cough Ramos gin fizzes), and do yourself a favor by doing some basic prep work like juicing citrus in advance.

3. Don't forget about the food and the booze-free drinks.

Sure, it's a cocktail party, so it makes sense that your focus is on the tipples. But having the right—and enough—food is just as important as having delicious stuff to sip. Here, too, do right by yourself and plan for stuff that doesn't require you to be laboring over the stove or remembering when to pull things out of the oven. An awesome cheese plate is always your friend, as are dips you can make in advance and serve at room temp. Serve 'em with bread and crunchy stuff (chips, crackers, crudité), and don't forget something sweet.

Also don't forget that you'll need at least one thing to drink that's sans alcohol. If you know for absolute certain that everyone attending your fiesta will be enjoying whatever cocktails you're serving, you can get away with stocking up only on water (bubbly and still) for when folks need to take a break. But if there's even a chance one of your guests is abstaining from the hard stuff, be a champ and offer something more exciting. I often make a punch bowl full of non-alcoholic sparkling basil lemonade, with a bottle each of good vodka and gin on the side for folks who want to spike their own glass.

4. Enlist help.

Several years ago, after a long stretch of being a one-woman show when it came to hostessing, I hired a bartender to handle the drinks at my birthday party. And OMG, it was a revelation: suddenly, I didn't have to be the one to watch the levels in people's glasses and offer refills as needed, or to gather the glasses left hither and yon, or to deal with washing all of those glasses (et al) at the end of the evening. Instead, I got to actually hang out with my guests, have someone make me drinks, and basically have a grand old time.

Even if you're hosting a small crowd, consider hiring or enlisting someone (a bartender, a trustworthy neighborhood college kid, your roommate or SO...) to pitch in with stuff throughout the party: refilling chip bowls, opening bags of ice, fetching empty glasses, and the like. It makes a big difference to have another pair of hands, and another set of eyes watching to be sure things are running smoothly.

5. Decide—and communicate—how strict you're going to be with your party's end time.

Finally, well before you open your door to your first guests, do some thinking about how long you actually want people milling about your house, and let them know what you decide. Don't mind the idea of folks lingering until the wee hours? Say something like, "7 p.m. on" in your invite—and just be prepared for the chance that at least a few people will be refilling their glasses and scraping the last bits off the cheese plate even when your eyelids start to droop.

On the flip side, if you want to be sure guests get the hint that you're not going the Lionel Richie route, make that clear—something like "The drinks will start flowing at 7, with last call at midnight." And then be prepared with a few subtle but firm hints as the witching hour approaches—going into clean-up mode, actually cranking up the Lionel Richie, putting away the booze, what have you—so you don't have to end an awesome evening on a bummer note with folks who just won't leave.

Happiness Is (Drinking with) Other People

Americans are relentless in our pursuit of happiness, and there's been no shortage of books over recent years telling us how to succeed in that pursuit. While most of these books advise us to look inward to find our happy place, Ruth Whippman takes a different tack: true happiness, she says, comes from our interactions with others.

In her book America the Anxious: Why the Pursuit of Happiness Is Driving Us Crazy and How to Find It for Real, Whippman, a Brit now living in the U.S., makes the argument that the self-help books we love so much are leading us astray. In our self-reliant American way, we try to tap into our own inner wellsprings of happiness, but what we should really be doing, Whippman suggests (with studies and research to back her up), is finding our bliss via meaningful relationships with others.

In a recent article in the New York Times, Whippman writes, "[W]hile placing more and more emphasis on seeking happiness within, Americans in general are spending less and less time actually connecting with other people. Nearly half of all meals eaten in this country are now eaten alone. ... The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey shows that the average American now spends less than four minutes a day 'hosting and attending social events,' a category that covers all types of parties and other organized social occasions. That’s 24 hours a year, barely enough to cover Thanksgiving dinner, and your own child’s birthday party."

The antidote? Less time making that attempt at happiness a solo pursuit and more time with others. While there are, of course, endless ways of being with your tribe, I am duty-bound to suggest having folks over for cocktails as one of the best. 

Go wild and have a full-blown cocktail party, complete with hors d'oeuvres and fancy drinks. Text a few friends to come over on Friday for whatever you feel like mixing up, accompanied by some chips and dip. Gather your housemates, set down your phones, and raise a glass. And if you're far from the people you want to have a drink with? Round them up on Skype or Hangouts or FaceTime, grab your drink of choice, and connect with them virtually. 

It doesn't matter how simple or elaborate your gathering is, or whether you're clinking glasses in person or via webcam; what matters is that you gather. These connections, these interactions with others—these, says Ruth Whippman, are the true key to happiness.