Cheap Booze

The dark art of selling nothing

I want to make something clear from the start. I’m a Berry Bros. & Rudd No.3 kind of guy. I’m the sort of man who seeks out bottles of High West Bourbon, of Eminente Claro rum. I love my hand-crafted Valentia Island vermouth that they don’t even import to England and the Noilly Prat Extra Dry that I have to get a friend in France to ship over because it only goes to the Americas. Arcane, prestige booze ‘R’ us. I am a man of wealth and taste, and happy to express it by spaffing insane amounts of cash on branded ethanol. It seems I’m a sucker for liquor with a narrative - no matter how fictional.

But I also love “Rail Booze”.

You know when you’re sitting at your bar stool and you look behind the barkeep’s head and you can see all the expensive stuff. Carefully arrayed on the backlit glass shelves. All those premium brands at a suspiciously similar £50 a bottle pricepoint?

I love every bottle of it. I’ll pay to drink a world class gin. I mean... seriously... do you think I wear a Rolex because I want to know the time?

But if you go in to an ordinary bar, with a decent barman annd you ask for a martini. The barkeepdoesn’t reach up to the glistering shelves, the premium bottles. He (or she) will reach down, into the Well, or the Rail. The place where the commodity spirits lurk. And here’s the thing. If they’re even half damn good, they’ll make a cocktail that will blow you away.

Top notch restaurant cooking is all about finding the most exclusive and expensive ingredients and combining them in innovative ways. If ‘Chef’ recommends a carrot, you’ll be told how one part time farmer in the arse end of nowhere, coaxed it into life by hand, in a bed of volcanic sand flown in from Hawaii. Your steak will be infinitely better if the cow had a name and a home address. It’s all about the obscure and the artisan.

But cocktails aren’t like that. The very best cocktails in the world are made from bulk manufactured, industrial products, marketed and sold by large companies. The best have had the same flavour for a hundred years. The best martini in London is made of components designed and manufactured to exactly the same tolerances, at the same scale and with the same attention to technology and brand science as a Big Mac.

I buy small-batch gins with semi-artisanal cues in the packaging, with a narrative about a 200 year old family recipe of curated aromatics, of a hand-built and extremely small still, in a barn somewhere attractively rural... but we’re talking about something made in a large machine. A product that the the government has an unreasonable amount of legislative control over. If you like, you can build a still, grow your own juniper, and lick your own labels, but the Revenue still hold you to the same rules as Diageo... which is quite possibly why an alarming number the ‘curated’ small batch liquors out there are actually made on contract, by the industrial giants.

And, truth be told, if you tinker with your flavour profiles enough that I can tell it’s not regular gin then you’ve created something that I might, occasionally enjoy as a novelty but will ultimately screw the classic cocktail I actually want.

A couple of weeks ago I bought my usual bottle of BB&R #3, I mail ordered my bottle of Eminente Claro, so I would have Martinis and Daiquiris in abundance and at will £40 for the gin £32.50 for the rum. Then, alongside I picked up bottle of Beefeater (£21.50) and Havana Club (£21.50)

So the idea of a martini actually should be “To create an astonishingly good drink out of utterly standard booze. Anyone can mix £50 a bottle “curated” gin with £50 a bottle “curated” vermouth and make a martini I’ll pay for... but what really floats my boat is the kid who’s got Beefeater and NP dry on their rail and can turn that into a creditable martini.

It can be done. It’s the most glorious secret of the cocktail world that the ingredients of the The Best Martini in The World are in stock, right now, at your corner offie.

The really scary thing is that any single element that distinguishes your premium product from the rail stuff actually diminishes its utility. Blue gin? Gin that tastes of chrysanthemums and a hint of Yuzu? You might be able to make one interesting and entirely evanescent proprietary cocktail with it, but you’ll never supplant what a culture sees as the kind of ‘throughline’ of gin. The throughline that rail gin is evolved to express perfectly.

This makes things interesting. Food and wine can rely on this idea of scarcity and exclusivity of ingredients and, if they get it right, can subsequently set price as high as the market will take.

But I recently noticed quite a number of premium gins are marketing on simplicity and purity. BB&R have been assiduous with signifiers of ‘old-school and un-messed with’. The peerless Boatyard Double is offers no fancy claims of innovative, complex flavours but has become a huge cult success with the almost self-effacing positioning that it’s designed for Martinis. Even faithful old Tanqueray Export now flags on the label that it’s made with ‘only 4 botanicals’.

To anyone interested in brand science, this is, how to put this... a head-fuck?

The messaging that they’re actually managing to pull off is “Our state-of-the-art, premium product... tastes unadorned, simple, honest. Like Rail Gin”

Imagine. “Romanée Conti. Tastes how you remember commodity red wine. Designed for mulling”.

“Big Tosser Craft IPA. Made in small batches in our Dalston microbrewery to taste exactly like a really cold can of Hofmeister in 1986”

The funny thing is, though, that this is not the first time the booze industry has addressed this brilliantly. Vodka only really appears on the American market in quantity in the 40s. They could sell it on its strength, the fact you could drink it and not smell like a total lush when you went back to work, and (at least until McCarthy) on a certain fur-coat-and-big boots, Dr Zhivago exoticism. What they didn’t have was any narrative or scarcity, exclusivity or complexity of taste. It was cheap, strong, clear and made by Commies. How do you turn that round?

Remember Absolut? Strong, pure, utterly clear and tasteless. Made in neutral Sweden and great in a Cosmopolitan. Absolute balls-of-steel marketing.

So I find myself in a fascinating position. I’ve got BB&R #3 in my freezer, right next to a bottle of Beefeater. I’ve got Eminente Claro in the drinks fridge door right next to the Havana Club and about 90% of the time, I’m damned if I can express a preference.

And no, I’m not going to toss the premium stuff in favour of rail booze because all those quality luxury cues are as pleasurable a part of the drink as really good glassware. I can make a premium gin martini exactly as good as a rail gin martini and love them both equally.

This is a gorgeous martini. This is a gorgeous expensive martini. This is a gorgeous expensive martini in a £75 glass.