If I order a Blue Hawaiian at the local biker bar, I will get surly if the bartender neglects to put in the little umbrella!
For me, it was always a perfectly unisex drink. Girly drinks are more like frozen drinks, fruity or chocolate “martinis.” Cosmos. Fuzzy nipples. Most brightly colored drinks. Amaretto sours were particularly popular for women at my college. That sort of stuff. Hard alcohol + soda were unisex. If you wanted to put on airs of a man from the first half of the 20th century who wanted a mixed drink, you’d order a Scotch and soda (seltzer.) I put that explanatory seltzer in there as I was once served on with 7-up.
Well, most of my college drinking was outside of bars and few people were mixing chocolate martinis or Grasshoppers in their dorm rooms/apartments. Not that I’d have trusted a good mixed drink from any of the local college dives selling 5¢ Natty Lite anyway. Rum & Coke was the simple go-to drink for any young woman who wasn’t doing wine coolers. It’s nothing I have strong feelings about or give a shit what a guy is drinking now but I recognize the above mentioned association with Rum & Coke as a “girly” drink.
Rum & Coke is my default drink when I’m in Vegas and on the floor (of the casino!) Hard for the waitress or bartender to screw up, and even when they short measure you the rum is cheap-ass anyway, so I augment the drink with a shot from my flask, which is usually loaded with Pyrat.
Ok. I guess it was normal enough for women to ask for a rum and Coke at a dorm party, but it was just as normal for a guy. It just doesn’t occupy that part of my mind reserved for “girl drinks.” Our experiences differ.
Hefeweizen I completely don’t understand. A fruit lambic may be somewhat girly, but just a plain old wheat beer? Is it the lemon that is often served with it? In my crowd, guys were by far the most likely to order a Hefeweizen. (Ditto on rum and Coke in this respect.)
Yeah, that one is strange to me as well. I’ve heard of ciders being considered girly (which makes people from the UK amused), but never hefeweizens.
Yeah, (alcoholic) ciders definitely were considered a bit girly here in the US, and maybe still are, but they weren’t that popular drink to begin with until the last decade where there’s been a marked uptick in interest in ciders and local cider production. With that expanded interest, I feel like they’ve shifted to the unisex status, perhaps still a little on the feminine side, but only just so.
I posed this to some online friends out of curiosity and one suggested that it was less “rum” so much as “Malibu”. No one in my sphere was making dorm room rum & cokes using Bacardi or Captain Morgan, it was always coconut Malibu. Which maybe made it more “fruity” and thus more “girly”.
Of course, if you guys were all drinking Malibu, maybe not. But he’s right that when I’m thinking “rum & coke”, I’m really remembering Malibu & coke.
Ah, yeah, Malibu. Can’t stand the stuff. That would push it towards the feminine end of the spectrum. (I mean, I don’t care. I used to like amaretto sours in college, myself. And I still enjoy a nice cosmo, though it’s been ages since I’ve had one. The only real girly thing about them is they’re pink. What I don’t get is that mojitos are basically considered girly drinks. I never really thought of them as such, but the Internetz tells me they are. I never order them, though, as they’re a bit of a pain in the ass for the bartender to make. I’ll make them at home, though.)
A lot of times when I was roped into going to a bar, I’d have a Tom Collins. Where does that fall on the b-g spectrum?
Not girly, but “old timey” IME.
Yep. That’s a centenarian’s drink at this point. It’s a drink I associated with senior citizens back in the 80s and early 90s. The old times Greek diners stuck in time would have it on their menus along with Sloe Gin Fizzes, Pink Ladies, Grasshoppers, brandy Alexander’s, etc. There may have even been a Harvey Wallbanger on there for something more “modern.”
I think it was more that in my group of friends, the girls switched to wheat beers- specifically the hefes and milder American wheat beers as soon as they became available, while the guys were generally trying the new ales and IPAs, if they weren’t doggedly sticking to the ONE beer they drank (we had several guys who each had a single type/brand they’d drink and they wouldn’t branch out).
So it kind of fell into girly territory by happenstance. I personally love witbiers, but that’s about the only wheat beer I actually like- I can’t do the bubblegum and clove stuff in hefeweizens, and most of the rest that aren’t witbiers are kind of insipid.
Which is absurd, considering it’s essentially a fizzy lemonade with a shot of gin. And a mojito is basically a fizzy limeade with mint and rum.
But I think my point still stands; there’s a lot of toxic masculinity (IMO) bullshit that prevents many men from ordering drinks that aren’t “macho”, and that actually taste good. That’s why the Old Fashioned got such a huge bump in popularity after “Mad Men” - Don Draper drank them, so they can’t be girly, and they taste a lot better than just straight bourbon.
To be sure. That’s just my associations with those particular cocktails. And they got cool old timey names to go with them. I’m sure there are pricey hipster versions of them at craft cocktail bars. My somewhat old timey summer of cocktail of choice a few summers ago was the gimlet (with gin). That’s a good one that is known enough, but I’ve never seen anyone but myself order it.
I found this page on Wikipedia a while ago (The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks - Wikipedia) and decided to try all six drinks it mentions. The Jack Rose isn’t bad, but it’s hard to find bars that stock applejack.
Fruit belongs on Carmen Miranda’s hat, not polluting good bourbon.
And a proper one is made from rye, anyway. Unless you’re from Wisconsin, where things get odd regarding Old Fashioneds, though they prefer to think the rest of us as odd.
Well, a true Old Fashioned is just bourbon, sugar, water and bitters. That’s where the name comes from- at some point in the late 19th/early 20th century people started asking for the “old fashioned” cocktails, meaning without all the fruit, absinthe, maraschino, curacao, and whatever other modifiers were added (look up the “Improved whiskey cocktail” and the “Fancy whiskey cocktail” for examples.
It’s a throwback to the very original cocktails which are called “bittered slings”, meaning a sling (spirits, water, sugar, [maybe] nutmeg), with bitters added. Over time, bartenders added other stuff- some were dashes of liquors and fruits (improved cocktail, fancy cocktail, etc…) , some were large quantities of vermouth and other stuff (Manhattan, Martini, Martinez, etc…).
I like beer, but not every beer. I drink it far less often than in my college days. Because many people drank it during those years, it has been imbued with nostalgia and values out of proportion to its role.
For instance, I went hiking in Peru and worked up a thirst. The bar had two beers available. One was a foamy brew with a strong bitter taste. I like British bitter, but this was not very tasty to me. This was for the men. The other had lots of added fruit, so might be described as a lambic. This was for the women. It tasted delicious, almost as nice as any beer I’ve had, much nicer than “lime and lager”.
I drank more of the lambic. I had rural Peruvian men, who were far from gigantic in stature, making fun of me for hours.