My 3 Favorite Drinks

[1]

🥉 Grandma Clark’s and Tim Ferriss’ Energy Drink

I grew up on a small dairy farm in Northern New York. Which meant that each summer, for 2 week out of our vacation from school, when all of my friends were tubing down the Salmon River, or taking day trips into the Adirondack mountains, or watching Saturday morning cartoons, I was baling hay, along with by brother, my dad and my grandpa.

We had 30 acres of fields on our 300 acre family farm, and each square foot of timothy grass or alfalfa was cut, dried, baled, stacked on a wagon, hauled to the barn, tossed on a hay elevator, then packed into the hot, dusty haymow by the 4 Clark men. It was hard work that left me sweating and covered with dust and bits of hay, and indignant that my friends got to play while I scratched the ever-living fire out of my wrists because the ends of the baled hay stalks were stiff and sharp enough to leave hundreds of small scratches on my wrists and forearms as I manhandled them. But you know, I also remember really enjoying being with the men in my family, working hard, sweating, laughing, and seeing how high we could stack the hay on the wagon to cut down on the number of trips that we would have to take from the fields to the barn. The wagon would sway precariously when a wheel would drop down into a hole in the farm road, and Gary and I, riding high on the wagon would laugh and cheer, hanging on as best we could to the rocking, shifting hay under us.

On those dripping hot days, when we had to take occasional breaks in the leeward shadow of the hay wagon to cool off, our grandma would sometimes appear in the distance, slowly bumping up the farm road in my grandparents blue Ford pickup truck. It crawled towards us on the gravel road, then across the field until the engine quieted a few feet from where we are sweating and tossing the hay bales up. Grandpa turns off the tractor engine, and all is abruptly quiet, I can hear muted the sounds of the river flowing a hundred feet away in the valley, and the hot wind is whistling through the short cropped hay stalks.

Grandma climbs out of the brown leather(ette) seat, carrying a picnic basket, which is piled with sandwiches. Sandwiches made from white bread, bologna, American processed “cheese food”(?), mayonnaise and yellow mustard. And next to them a plaid-patterned old thermos, the ice inside jostling and rattling as she moves it. Some paper plates and Tupperware cups complete the haul, and we all find a spot in the only-slightly-cooler shadow of the hay wagon and sit down. Grandma hands out the plates filled with sandwiches, and fills each cup with an ice-cold brown liquid. It is about the same color as a beer, and I pretend that it is beer as I take a sip. The drink is surprising on my tongue. Tangy, spicy, sweet and cold. It stings my throat when I swallow.

That drink, a staple of my hot summer-time boyhood, Grandma called “switchel”. Now 4 decades later I remember this drink from my childhood, but don't remember what it was or how she made it.

Then sometime last year, I was searching online for things to help me sleep better, and ran across a recommendation from the podcaster and body-hacker Tim Ferriss. He recommended mixing unprocessed apple cider vinegar, honey and ginger with warm water and drinking that before going to be to help you sleep, or else in a kind of ironic contradiction, before exercise to give you energy. I decided to give it a try one night before bed. We were out of honey, so I replaced it with maple syrup, and I didn't feel like a hot drink that night, so mixed it with some cold water and put a few cubes of ice in it. Gave it a brisk stir, watching the particles of ginger swirl around, suspended in a cyclone in my glass. I took a sip, the cool, spicy, tangy drink filling my senses with surprise. I was transported back to that boyhood hay field, taking a break with my brother and dad. My grandma and grandpa, now long dead were there for a moment too.

I called to my wife, “Gracie, this is crazy! This drink Tim Ferriss recommended reminds me of this weird drink my grandma made when I was a kid that she called switchel.”

I pulled out my phone and Googled “switchel”, and was not surprised, but I was delighted to find the recipe for switchel was what I had just put together in my cup as a soporific.

It is a strange, kind of addictive taste, and you should try it.

[2]

☕ David and Gracie’s Pre-Powernap Stimulant, the “Cafecito”

I named my company Barista Building Company after buying an espresso maker. Years ago, I had made a latte for a friend who immediately suggested, “You should name your company something like ‘Coffee Construction Company’”. And I thought, “Yes, I should!”

I now have a fairly complete café setup in my house, mainly for the purpose of coaxing my wife out of bed in the morning. Over the years I have learned to make a lot of drinks, but Gracie and my favorite is something we call a “Cafecito” (pronounced café-see-toe). It is this tiny micro-latte that is an intense burst of flavor that we like to drink right before taking an afternoon nap (when we get the chance to take one). We call these “caf-naps” because we drink a Cafecito, then promptly lay down for a quick power nap. The combination of caffeine kicking in right as we are waking up from a 15 minute nap is one of our life-hacking techniques. This is a drink for people who like the flavor of espresso, so fair warning.

The intensity of the espresso, the hazelnut, layered with the fat content of the milk and whipping cream is delightful. The flavors linger on the tongue because of the binding with the fats in the dairy, and you fall asleep meditating on the joys of coffee.

[3]

🥛 My Perfect Gin and Tonic

And for those who want something a bit more powerful, perhaps for those days when you want to get home from work and just relax, there is the Gin and Tonic. But not just any Gin and Tonic. The G&T is such a straightforward simple drinks that to really get at the heart of it, you have to work with the very best ingredients possible. While I enjoy a variety of different drinks, from simple bourbon over ice to a concoction I came up with called the “Salted Key Lime Chapala” which has 7 ingredients, over the years I have settled on the G&T as my go-to drink. The bitterness of the tonic mixed with the flavorful juniper and almost sweetness of the gin poured over ice is extremely refreshing.

Then I “met” Ryan Reynolds and his gin company. I guess I knew about him because he is super famous and I enjoy his acting, but somehow one day as I was procrastinating and surfing around YouTube I ran across Ryan's “Aviation Gin” commercials, which are laugh-out-loud funny…and I watched them enough that they did their job. Walking around Windmill Beverages one day, I saw a row of Aviation Gin bottles, and thought, “Okay, Ryan, you've convinced me.” At home, I poured a bit over ice, and sipped, and Ryan was not wrong…it was the best gin I had ever tasted. So at the grocery store, where I normally get whatever store brand tonic water is cheap, I decided to elevate a bit, and picked up a 4-pack of Fevertree Elderflower tonic water. Elderflower flavoring has long been one of my favorites, so it seemed an obvious choice.

At home, I placed 3 cubes of ice and added 4 ounces of the tonic water to 2 ounces of the gin, added a splash of key lime juice because: why not? and took a sip. What was in my mouth at that moment was, for me, the perfect drink. Cold and refreshing, with a hint of sweetness, a hint of tang and the pleasant bitterness mixing with the pine aromatics burst on my senses with strong simplicity, and that has since become my signature go to drink on warm summer evenings.