But it can be overwhelming, especially when selecting glassware, because there are so many types, styles, and price points. Maybe this all works well as subtext, but here, brought to the fore, it reads kind of cheesy.īut let me just add to this psychologization of the admen's drinks: Roger Sterling, totally numb after his mother's death, drinks a lot of vodka, that flavorless, aroma-free beverage.Putting together a well-stocked home bar is a chance to show off your personal style. Whiskey and wine = soon to be things of the past, along with their aficionados? I don't know. assignation with his lovely neighbor, a retreat into his womanizing ways of old.Īm I reading all of this too literally? Pot + coffee (and those who consume them) = wave of the future. (Hm.) The night ends-SPOILER ALERT!-with his secret 2 a.m. (Blast! I couldn't see the labels!) That's followed by shots of Galliano, which is today, interestingly enough, owned by Lucas Bols, the same Dutch distiller that produces Curacao. For the episode ends with Don and Megan's little New Year's Eve get-together with their neighbors, at which many bottles of wine, both red and white, are consumed. It may not turn out well, at least for the umbrella stand Don vomits on, but this is Don: retreating into a past via the most accessible time-travel device he's got-a bottle of whiskey.

to his Hawaiian hotel's bar for a nice rocks glass half-full of brown liquor, garnished with a curl of citrus and a maraschino cherry: That's gotta be an Old Fashioned right? Later, back in New York, he's deep into his whiskey, drinking it at home, digging it up at Roger Sterling's mother's funeral when even his hard-drinking colleagues can't find the bar. Is that how it really went back in the sixties? Was pot what killed off cocktail culture until its revival 15 or so years ago? Or was it the hippie culture's rejection of connoisseurship?Īnd in the middle of all this there is Don, retreating at 4 a.m. The creatives are smoking 'reefer' at the SCDP offices, the dropouts are lighting up in their East Village squat, and even Megan is smuggling joints in her bikini bottom, promising Don mind-blowing sex if they're both high. There's a lot of coffee in this episode-Bob Benson handing Don one of his two Greek cups in the elevator, Peggy Olson calling to her secretary because her coffee's cold-and, much more notably, a ton of marijuana. (Credit: Michael Yarish/AMC)Īnd in fact, this episode is replete with moments in which other substances encroach on the primacy of cocktail culture. The boys drinking classic New York bodega coffee. (It's worth noting that the Blue Hawaii was reportedly invented at the behest of a Curacao sales rep.) We've left our New York of hardcore cocktails and brown liquors served neat, and entered a Technicolor world of kitsch, as artificial, perhaps, as the demonstration of true Hawaiian culture organized by the corporate potentates who've contracted Don to run their ad campaign. In Mad Men terms, this feels significant. Naturally, it comes topped with some fruit and a little paper umbrella. It is, I'm guessing, a Blue Hawaii, a relatively recent cocktail invention, apparently: Created just a decade earlier, in 1957, by Harry Yee at the Hilton Hawaiian Village (the real-world analog to Mad Men's Royal Hawaiian resort, perhaps? Update: No, it's a real place!), it's a mix of rum, pineapple juice, sweet-and-sour mix, and the cerulean Curacao. The opening of season six was classic: A dying man's POV, fading to Don Draper reading Dante's 'Inferno' on a Hawaiian beach, interrupted-of course-by the arrival of a cocktail as blue as the South Pacific waters that lap at Don and Megan's feet.

Mad men whiskey glasses