JdBLetter Vol. 25 - Solstice Sling

Hello! Welcome back to my newsletter where until the end of the year I’ll actually be featuring content that is relevant to my professional background—drinks! 

Earlier in the year I developed four large format holiday drinks for a client and we didn’t end up using them, so I am repurposing that work here because I think the drinks are really good and you should make them for your friends and tell me what you think. 

But first! A few little tidbits: 


OK drink time!

 

Solstice Sling

I recently had the chance to visit a perfume development lab and explore with the chemists there the similarities between developing iconic fragrances and creating delicious drinks. During my time there, one of the chemists explained to me the concept of “accords,” clusters of two or more individual scents that are then combined to form the overall fragrance—similar to how musical chords work to create songs. Naturally, I find this an extremely useful framework for thinking about drinks. Many cocktails are based around tried-and-true combinations of flavors: such as rum and lime, rye and sweet vermouth, gin and cucumber, to name a few.  

One of my favorite cocktails is the Singapore Sling, which contains a host of ingredients including gin, lime, Bénédictine liqueur, and notably for the purposes of this drink here, one of my favorite flavor pairings: the combination of rich Cherry Heering and fresh pineapple juice. When coming up with an autumnal large format drinks I started with this combination, and then linked it to Scotch whisky by way of the Blood and Sand, another cocktail that features Cherry Heering. The keystone ingredient here is the sorrel, an aromatically complex infusion of hibiscus, clove, ginger, and cinnamon that is a staple of Caribbean holiday beverages. Most sorrel recipes call for some kind of sweetening agent, but in this case, I leave it out so that the pineapple and Cherry Heering can provide the sweetness. Any leftover sorrel I like to splash with a little honey and soda water for a nice harvest-inflected pick-me-up. 

A final note on the salt here: it won’t make your drink noticeably salty, but it acts as a counterbalance to some of the bitterness from the spices in the sorrel. 

Serves 6-8 people

  • 12 ounces sparkling water, chilled

  • 12 ounces sorrel, see recipe below

  • 9 ounces mildly smoky blended Scotch whisky, I used Compass Box Glasgow Blend

  • 9 ounces fresh pineapple juice

  • 4 1/2 ounces Cherry Heering liqueur

  • Large pinch of salt

 

Combine all ingredients in a festive punch bowl with 3-4 large ice cubes and stir to combine and chill. To serve, ladle into individual glasses of your choosing.


For Sorrel

Yields about two cups 

3 cups filtered water

2 cups dried hibiscus (sorrel) flowers

1/2 lb. ginger, washed and roughly chopped

1 tbsp whole cloves

1 long stick cinnamon, broken into small pieces

 

Combine all ingredients in a small pot and bring to just steaming over medium heat. Cover and reduce heat, and let steep for 30 minutes. Remove heat and leave covered until completely cool. Transfer entire mixture to an airtight container and let steep in the refrigerator for at least 12 hours. Strain and use immediately or transfer to a clean container where it will keep in the refrigerator for two weeks or in the freezer for three months.

JdBLetter Vol. 24 - Maple Reviver

Okay friends! Here it is, the first of four large-format drinks as promised. 

But first! My friends Alex and Youngmi and I started a podcast about what it’s like to be an aging millennial and it’s funny and insightful and mildly informative and I think you should listen to it. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify. 

 

Non-alcoholic cocktails are tough. Alcohol is a great base for flavor and has a tingly, vibrant texture—not to mention people tend to enjoy the way that alcohol makes them feel. There’s also a diverse and huge selection of spirits to choose from that are not only delicious, but also reliable as ingredients, ie. if you pick up a random bottle of rum, chances are it will serve well in cocktails that call for rum. 

This is all to say that when it comes time to put together an alcohol-free drink that is as interesting, complex, crave-able, as a traditional Daiquiri or Old Fashioned, there are some hurdles to overcome. When crafting these types of drinks, my first thought is to create a drink that’s densely packed with flavor, with every ingredient pulling its weight. There’s also been a very welcome trend in the past few years of an increased interest in bottled non-alcoholic potions like spirit substitutes (whiskey, gin, etc.) and other liquids that use bases like verjus, the juice of unripe wine grapes, to recreate the look and feel of things like wine and vermouth. Unexpected combinations also help to up-regulate the sophistication of non-alcoholic drinks, which can slide into “fancy soda” territory all too easily. 

These strategies all come together in this autumnal and slightly caffeinated large-format cocktail. Kally is an aforementioned verjus-based drink that features toasted fennel for deep complexity. Adding that to gin, cranberry, maple, and coffee might sound like an unholy combination, but the relative brightness of the cold brew concentrate provides an interesting accompaniment to the fruit flavors while also supplying some bitterness, depth, and richness. And at this point (late 2023) there is enough consistency across non-alcoholic gin brands that you can use your favorite here, but if you don’t have one, I used Monday. (You can also use traditional gin!)

Maple Reviver 

Serves 8-10

Combine all ingredients in a pitcher and stir to combine. Add ice to pitcher if desired. Serve by pouring into ice-filled tall water or Collins glasses. Garnish with four dried cranberries on a pick and a rosemary sprig, and serve with a reusable straw. 

JdBLetter Vol. 23 - Light and Fluffy

My last newsletter prompted more than a handful of you to reach out in genuine concern for my wellbeing and I realized that I maybe laid it on a little bit too thick. Yes I am filled with a constant feeling of existential worthlessness and a paralyzing fear of frailty and death, but isn’t that just how everyone feels all the time?? 

So this time I thought I’d lighten things up a bit this time lol

BUT FIRST. Promo: If somehow any of you have escaped my onslaught of posts about this, I am doing one final “stop” on my Saved by the Bellini book tour. It’s next Wednesday October 11th in Brooklyn and it is a FREE drag show by the legendary and iconic and gorgeous drag collective, Switch n’ Play. The event is generously sponsored by Chambord and if you haven’t seen a Switch n’ Play show, they are literally life-altering experiences and you owe it to yourself to make it to this show, since it’s free, and we’ll be serving drinks from Saved by the Bellini and I will have signed copies and it will just be generally awesome and life-affirming.

And now I want to talk about music.

Anyone upon whom I have inflicted my tastes in music knows that one of my favorite forms of music is vaguely (extremely) fagotty disco synth pop made by women. Tove Lo, Madonna, Robyn, Björk, Slayyyter, Kylie, Carly RaeJepsen, Goldfrapp, Ava Max, Jessie Ware, Mel 4Ever…inject it into my veins. 

But there is one such artist who does not get nearly as much play as she so obviously (to me) deserves: bisexual megababe Bonnie McKee. 

I first heard her track “American Girl” during a Monét X Change show at the Laurie Beechman theater a few years ago and was like WHAT IS THIS SHIMMERING SORCERY?? If you’ve ever seen a show at this place, there is literally zero cell phone service so I actually had to write down what lyrics I could understand in my notes app and then google the lyrics later in order to find out who this was. 

Bonnie McKee’s most visible work was what she did for Katy Perry. She wrote some of Katy’s biggest hits: California Girls, Teenage Dream, Roar, and a few others. She’s also done work for other artists like Kesha and Britney. The coolest thing about this is that she actually ended up working for Katy Perry after meeting her while waiting to sell her clothes at a vintage place in LA. They were both starving artists, and mutual fans, and yada yada yada, joint slayage. I just love how that story illustrates how much of what we define as “success” is reliant on happenstance and being in the right place at the right time (and having the capacity to take advantage of those chance encounters).

Her latest single is Hot City and the video is pretty great. It’s actually a song she wrote about ten years ago but it was stuck in legal limbo so she re-recorded them so she could own the masters.  

Turns out she’s also been sober for the past ELEVEN YEARS and she once vandalized a music exec’s car in an attempt to get out of her record contract. These are all fun facts contained in this great interview with her that popped up randomly on my Youtube and I actually watched the whole thing beginning to end. She mostly self-funds her work, which is really impressive, plus she’s amazing at Tiktok. 

So there it is. See you Wednesday.

JdBLetter Vol. 22 - Warning: this newsletter contains words

The frailties of old age creep in like cold air from an open window. At first it’s barely perceptible, then you feel it around your exposed ankles until it flushes through your lower arms and into your chest with alarming suddenness. Before you know it, you’re left shivering, only in the case of the window you can close it, with age, there is only one direction this can go. 

This is all to say that I’ve been feeling particularly fragile these days. I got sick—like for real, have-to-sleep-all-day-for-three-days-fever-chills-and-eventually-a-bacterial-lung-infection sick. I had to cancel work, I had to cancel mine and Youngmi’s trivia night (NEW DATE! September 22nd). It was the first time I’d been really sick in years, maybe even a decade. (Ok last year I had covid and monkeypox in fairly quick succession but the Covid I barely experienced symptoms (thanks Paxlovid!) and with the Monkeypox I could still go about my life, it’s just that it felt like someone was trying to shove a morning star up my ass 24/7, a sensation that was only made bearable by a few dozen Percocet.) 

I know it’s trite to be like, “I’m 40 and now my life is over and my body is a desiccated husk of what it once was,” but here we are, at least for now. This feeling is dovetailing with something I’ve been thinking a lot about since I read adrienne marie brown’s excellent Pleasure Activism: the ways in which I engage with healing in my life. 

I had originally purchased a copy of Emergent Strategy, an earlier work of hers, but it languished on my nightstand next to the biography of the Stolichnaya family that I 100% swear to god will definitely read eventually. I’m not sure exactly what moved me to request Pleasure Activism from the NYPL, but when I picked it up, I could not put it down until I was finished—I actually stopped to re-read huge portions of it, which is not something I regularly do. 

The book is a series of essays, mostly written by brown, along with a few transcripts of conversations that feature the performative exuberance of a great podcast. The general thrust of the work is—and I am simplifying greatly here—that our bodies are hardwired to experience pleasure,and that the experience and promotion of pleasure should be a central motivating goal in social justice movements. 

 Throughout the book, brown connects pleasure to healing in a very natural and obvious way. Healing enables our ability to experience pleasure and pleasure can be deeply healing. Pleasure Activism urges the reader to think about how they can find, support, create and participate in communities of care, which I think is neat!

The book affected me in a lot of ways, and I urge anyone reading this to pick up a copy. (It’s one of those rare books like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun or The Collected Novels of Charles Wright, that made me want to buy 20 copies just to have and give out.) First, it made me totally rethink the novel that I have been threatening to write for years now that I’ve written about 10,000 words of worldbuilding but no actual narrative (LOL). 

Second, and more relevantly to this newsletter, it made me think about what ways the activities in my life intersect with healing. (I cringe to think how much not-healing I was responsible for during my time as a very effective bartender…) My grandfather, who was for the most part very grumpy and disinterested in my presence always made a toast every holiday to “people in need of healing” which I always thought was nice and I’m now thinking about how the work I do promotes healing in others especially since most of the work I do these days is helping people find more delicious ways to ingest a harmful substance. (Drinking alcohol, like every activity in life, involves some risk, and for the most part, people are able to engage with it safely. And that’s that on that.)

All this is to say that my acute feelings of physical frailty (age) are combining with a bit of an existential crisis in terms of what I “do.” Am I just going to be over here writing my silly little articles about drinks and occasionally trolling the trolls on social media for the rest of my life? By the age of 40 most people who’ve “done it” have done what they’ve done, and I’m over here feeling like I’m just getting started, but also that it’s already over?  

I do wholeheartedly believe that experiencing joy in the form of deliciousness IS healing, so the work I do creating recipes and teaching people how to better enjoy things does fit into this desire, but it’s not enough. What’s bigger and more impactful on people’s lives? (Am I even talented enough to do anything bigger?) Is it creating art? teaching yoga? running for office? becoming a therapist? These are all actual things I’ve considered doing at various points and to various degrees of seriousness lol. 

TL; DR: I feel death creeping in, and what am I supposed to do with my time to make the world a better place, and am I even capable of doing it? 

 

Ok if you’ve made it through whatever that was, thank you. Now onto some updates:

  •  September 22nd: Y2K Trivia Night with Youngmi Mayer at Parkside Lounge. Doors at 6:30, show at 7. Reply to this to RSVP!

  • October 11th: I’m putting on a 90s-themed DRAG SHOW with Switch N Play that’s basically just an excuse to have another book party and serve people Chambord cocktails

  • November 6th: Save the date for RWCF’s first fundraiser in NYC in over two years. More details to come!

Aside from an article I did for Full Pour that’s not out online yet don’t really have a lot of writing in the pipeline, but the Watermelon episode of Recipe Club was perhaps one of my favorite episodes of the show and easily my favorite recipe I’ve ever had to make for the show—it dethroned Lomo Saltado…

What else? Been reading a fair amount these days and really enjoyed Children of Time/Children of Ruin/Children of Memory, which is kind of a fusion of Three Body Problem and Semiosis and is probably one of the coolest explorations of what non-human consciousness and the societies built upon them would be like if any existed. Also loved Babel, which is a vaguely steampunk alternative-history 1830s Oxford England with a little bit of magic and a very hit-you-over-the-head allegory for colonialism and imperialism. Currently reading the Matthew Perry memoir because it’s always nice to hear about people who are bigger hot messes than I am. 

Until next time!

JdBLetter Vol. 21 - Season 7 episode 25, All Good Things…

If you somehow escaped seeing it, I wrote an article for Eater that came out last week about the demise of Proteau, my short-lived non-alcoholic drink brand. I had been wanting to write a kind of “tell-all” for a while now and was grateful for my friends at Eater for giving me the space to write this. It ended up being more of a musing on the how the idea of failure shows up in people’s lives than a salacious expose of how predatory the team representing my investor was and how much money I was forced to spend unnecessarily on things like getting trademark clearance from an obscure Portuguese wine producer named “Protos” just on the off chance they would send us a cease and desist. Read it HERE.

And this brings me to another thing that’s ending: my Tip These Queens series for Thrillist. Since the end of 2020, I have been interviewing gender-expansive nightlife performers (ie. drag, cabaret, musicians) and in total I have published 23(!) interviews, some with some very big names like Peppermint, Alaska, Jinkx Monsoon, and Nicky Doll.

For those of you who are not steeped in The Media, Thrillist was acquired by Vox at the end of 2021 (laying off a little more than 3% of that workforce in the process) and then Vox laid off 7% of its workforce earlier this year. (I wonder if executive compensation was reduced by 7%, but I doubt it!) Amidst all of this, Thrillist was taken from a general lifestyle/drinks/travel site to strictly travel. We tried to make it work by incorporating more local content in my interviews and making each one about the place where the subject currently lived, and I am really grateful to my editors for their effort. Ultimately that was not sustainable and a few weeks ago I got an email from my editor that they would no longer be able to publish the series. 

 So what now? 

I have been trying to identify another outlet that might be interested in an ongoing series profiling performers like the ones I have been following for the past two-plus years. Drag and other gender-expansive performers are a huge cultural asset and don’t get nearly the amount of media coverage and just plain documentation of their existence as (I think) they deserve, although Maddy Morphosis is doing an amazing job of it, so are Meatball and Big Dipper. So if you know of anyone who’d want to pick up this series, please let me know.

Barring that, I’m thinking about starting my own substack where I would continue to interview performers and also publish a weekly calendar of drag/cabaret/etc. events. I would also want to publish the “director’s cut” of many of my past Thrillist interviews because my word count was only about 1000 words and in many cases the transcripts of the interviews are over twice that, so there is a lot of good stuff out there that’s never seen the light of day. Would you want to read those? 

Also, all episodes of my Saved by the Bellini podcast are out now!

JdBLetter Vol. 20 - I Really Should Do These More Often

Hi! 

Hope you all have been well. My last newsletter was pretty epic and I cannot promise you another one on that same level. 

 So, here is a run-of-the-mill work update newsletter. Groundbreaking!!

The big news is that I started my own podcast. Well, miniseries at least. The kind people at Heritage Radio Network generously allowed me to record a seven episode series that’s a behind-the-scenes look at Saved by the Bellini. 

It’s called… Saved by the Bellini: The Podcast and I interview people who were involved in the book in some way: whether it’s my editor, various bar icons, or even people more obliquely related to the book like Brian Raftery, who wrote a book about 1999 being the best film year ever that’s one of my all-time favorite books. 

Listen to the first four episodes here!

Speaking of podcasts. Recipe Club is in full swing and you can get caught up here. 

And if you somehow missed the Bon Appetit article(s) that made everyone mad. The Yoo-Hoo and Absinthe one is here, and the Gatorade and Chartreuse one is here. I also wrote about the Naked & Famous, one of my favorite Aperol cocktails.

My interview series for Thrillist has survived the Vox layoffs in a slightly different format but it continues nonetheless. I most recently interviewed Sherry Vine and she was amazing and iconic. 

I also wrote about Queer-owned drink brands for Food Network.

What else! My friend Kiki Aranita featured Saved by the Bellini in her piece about 90s nostalgia sweeping the food world. And I went back on the TASTE podcast.

And now here’s a picture of our cat Tetris. 

JdBLetter Vol. 17 - They Can’t All Be Bangers

I was updating my website this morning and realized that I haven’t yet put out a newsletter in all of 2023, so this is my effort to remedy that. I have a longer and perhaps more interesting newsletter in the works that details my time working at the CCRB in the context of their report on the 2020 protests, but I have not had the wherewithal to actually write it (or read the full report if I’m being totally honest). Rather than let that writer’s block block me from writing anything, here’s a perfunctory newsletter where I share some recent work:

 I have two new pieces for Food Network. One on some of my favorite rums, and another on some of my favorite non-alc rum substitutes. The opening paragraphs to the latter ended up as more of a manifesto for the validity of non-alc spirits—a counterpoint to this rather grouchypants article by the guy that invented Bailey’s.

I’ve also come out with two drink videos for Food52 so far this year. One is a non-alc Radler riff and another is for the Dark Phoenix, the first in a series of recipes pulled straight out of Saved by the Bellini, which you should pre-order now if you haven’t already.

I interviewed Jinkx! Fucking! Monsoon!—in person, no less! And she was a dream and a doll and we reminisced about the time we kissed on the mouth at the Laurie Beechman Theater in 2013 lol. 

In other news, I was quoted in Jaya Saxena’s brilliant piece about Four Loko. 


And I’m also doing more consulting! Also in Brooklyn! This time it’s for the dreamy Eric See and his new location for the acclaimed New Mexican spot, Ursula. Having a chaotic and unpredictable professional life can be taxing at times but when you have to research hyperspecific New Mexico slang for work, it’s all worth it. You gotta watch this video about “Shit Burqueños Say” and part 2. 

What else? I was on the Taste podcast in early January and loved how the conversation turned out. And another January convo I loved was with Julia Bainbridge all about the awkward nuances of Dry January.

JdBLetter Vol. 14 - Performative Vulnerability

Well look who it is

When I went to go write this I thought it had been like six months since my last missive but it was really only May 27th that I last decided to inflict your inboxes with something like this, which isn’t bad. (The reality is always somehow never as bad as the anxiety fantasy John.)

Those of you who follow me on Instagram (thank you) and look at my stories (thank you) might have noticed that on Monday I got a LOT of comments on a video from people whose entire mindsets seemed to have been shaped by misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. 

 

People just could not deal with a man wearing lipstick PINK lipstick and felt the need to say something about it instead of just going about their day of, I don’t know making their children’s lives miserable or crying while masturbating or whatever the hell these loser people do all day when they’re not needlessly commenting on things on the internet that have no bearing on their lives but rustle their jimmies nonetheless. 

 

Some of the comments were pretty bad! I won’t repeat them but I’m pretty sure if you’ve been on the internet for more than five minutes you’ve seen something similar. 

 

The thing is though, if I had to be honest, I kind of loved it. 

 

For some reason this kind of stuff does not bother me in the slightest. It’s perhaps the Scorpio in me but my overwhelming reaction is pity. Like how silently sad and chronically painful must it be to live in a mind like that? Meanwhile, someone asked me about the “horrendous” carbon footprint of a fucking pineapple in one of my videos and it sent me into an emotional spiral that I am still working my way out of. (My current sanity-maintaining hypothesis is that it was a joke…)

 

So I screenshotted the comment section and posted it to my stories and away we went. I could have ignored it, but I honestly couldn’t afford not to capitalize on the outrage. Our current internet is fueled by quick ever-escalating hits of arousal, and nothing is more arousing that disgust, anger, humour, righteous indignation, and coming to other people’s defense. Pretty soon the comment section was flooded with friends (and total strangers) saying really nice things about me! Meanwhile the views on the video skyrocketed (275k+) and since Monday I picked up about 500 new followers: my follower count increased by over 10% in half a week. 

 

This is what I’m talking about when I say I kinda loved it.

A lot of the really bad comments got taken down (I reported a few) and by Tuesday the video was plastered with people calling themselves “JdB stans” and other supportive comments about my lipstick (Chanel), and t-shirt (Gildan, Legos, and hot glue). I also got a bunch of DMs from queer people thanking me. This is the one that struck me the most: 

 

I hope you take a little bit of pride seeing the gender line loosen around expression in the younger gen knowing how much work you’ve put into clearing space by just being you. I can’t imagine the weight of being in the public eye while being tru to yourself.

 

Not to be too grandiose but this concept of clearing space is really important to me. I look the way I look partly because I really don’t know how to look any other way, but also because it’s fun for me to stick my neck out. By any reasonable account I won the DNA/Zip Code lottery so if me looking like a huge genderfuck faggot on the internet (and on the street) makes it easier for someone else, then there is almost a moral imperative to push as far as I can. And to the people who commented that I only look like this for the attention…yes, but also I pretty much look exactly the same way in real life as I do in these videos—I pretty much just roll up to the studio in my street clothes lmfao. 

 

Which brings me to possibly one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read in a really long time: this Defector piece by Kelsey McKinney about Sydney Sweeney. I have been in the bag for her since her eerily innocent performance in season 2 or whatever of Handmaid’s Tale. She is by all accounts one of the hottest (in all dimensions) actresses in Hollywood right now but even she is crushing under the weight of our economic framework wherein the top 1% are swindling the rest of us out of 99% of the surplus value of our labor. This means that unlike already-absurdly wealthy stars like Maya Hawke and Dakota Johnson (who I both adore) she can’t afford not to be online and posting ads multiple times per week.

 

Every so often you see some story about some celebrity “quitting” social media as if it is some moral choice when really they’re doing it because they can. Syndey Sweeney HAS to post sponcon on her insta because she does not have generational wealth to fall back on, nor does she get paid the same as the studio executives whose entire livelihoods depend on her labor. She can’t “quit” Instagram because it’s how she makes her money and who knows how long her current run will last. She’s a freelancer—just like me and I’m sure like many of you reading this. We have to say yes to everything because you never know if tomorrow will bring an awesome opportunity or crickets from your current clients. And regrettably, social media following is inextricably linked to opportunities for people whose professional profiles rely on visibility. 

 

So I’m lucky that I happen to “kind of love it” when I get a lot of negative attention from people on the internet showing themselves to be miserable small souls, because can’t afford not to.


I just updated the fuck out of my website, so if you want to check out all my recent writing, and recent media, the pages are screamingly up to date. Also go watch all my youtube videos and leave a nice comment.

Thanks for reading! Please forward this to someone you like.

Love,

-JdB

JdBLetter Vol. 12 - Remember me?

Remember this?? (Remember US???)

The last time I did one of these it was January 28th.

So much has happened since then and now it feels like an entire decade has elapsed: our 16-year-old cat Felix died, I wrote an entire cocktail book, we got TWO NEW CATS, our balcony pigeons had two squabs. And yet despite this massive passage of time, season 14 of drag still has three more episodes until the finale. (Although I’m not complaining, I think this season has one of the strongest overall casts of the franchise.) 

This is Tetris

Kinda hard to make out but this is a picture of the two baby pigeons on our balcony.

And speaking of seasons, another thing that’s happened since late January is we started recording Recipe Club SEASON TWO. Structurally, it’s a bit different from last season where we just picked recipes from the ether, unbeknownst to their authors. This time around we are asking for submissions, which we will then run through during each show. Basically: send us your recipes, and each episode we’ll choose one, make it, and talk about it.

Which recipes should I send, you ask? Well you have to listen to the draft episode HERE to find out which ingredients we’re going with this season. And you can send your submissions to thefixer@majordomomedia.com and hope for the best. Also you should join the Discord server HERE; most of the recipe club action happens in the #recipe-clubhouse channel. 

 

(As an aside, I have to say that I’m still a little iffy on the idea of being on a Spotify-funded podcast given that they platform anti-vax anti-trans podcasters like J*e R*gan, but I realize how little me refusing to participate would move the needle, and the only person who it would harm is myself.)

Writing a book super fast definitely exhausted me, but I still had a few pieces come out in the past few weeks. The one that I’m most happy about is this interview I did with musician Michete. When I first started doing interviews for Thrillist, I started by focusing on drag queens who were also bartenders, which I found a bit limiting for a monthly series, so we expanded to the focus to include Queer/LGBTQIA+ performers in general.

have been a follower of Michete for a couple years now and was actually super nervous to interview her as the first non-explictly “Drag” performer of the series. Well, she ended up being really nice and funny! And sadly due to word count limits, some of our conversation had to be left out, but you can read the results HERE.

Also, please check out my latest videos for Food52! My March installment is all about the iconic Penicillin cocktail (plus some glimpses into my recipe development for the upcoming book).

April’s is a super breezy lavender situation that also has a little bonus videowhere I show you how to make an origami lilly which is a great substitute for an edible orchid when you want to garnish a drink with a flower. 

Let’s close out with some music videos? I think I’ve alluded to Rina Sawayama before but I recently re-fell in love with her thanks to Brazillian Drag artist Pablo Vittar’s Follow Me video. 


For those of you who need a refresher on Rina Sawayama, check out her incredible anti-consumerist anthem XS, which also gave us one of the best recorded live performances of a song I’ve come across in a long time. 

Thanks for reading! Please forward this to someone you like.

Love,

-JdB

JdBLetter Vol. 11 - Mental Clutter Is My Passion

Mental Clutter Is My Passion

I don’t think I’m that unique in this, but my mind is like a clown car. Most likely it is a feature of undiagnosed/untreated ADHD but I also just accept that it’s just The Way I Am (I got up to water plants twice while I was writing this sentence.) I’m also one of those people that gets regularly asked “how” I sleep because I have so much going on at any given time. (Quite well, actually, I did CBT-I in 2019 and it changed my life.)

I enjoy solitude. I am never alone with my thoughts and I often notice them having lively conversations, which keeps me perpetually entertained. The two semi-conflicting thoughts that are having the most audible discussion right now are between Mallory O’Meara’s excellent Girly Drinks, and my latest piece for Thrillist: “What’s It Like Being a Sober Bartender?” (Which is itself a riff on another piece I wrote wayyyy back in 2018 for Liquor.com: “Sober Bartenders Say They Feel Great. But Does Not Drinking Hurt Their Business?”)

 

I’ve written a bit on the absurdity of gender and cocktails, so I was excited to pick up O’Meara’s book, and after an excruciating waitlist at the NYPL, I got it in my hands a few weeks ago and I’m about a third of the way through. (There is a joke here about a guy reading 97 pages of a 380 page book and feeling qualified to write about it in a newsletter, but I divest). 

 

One of the main points of the book—aside from how enthusiastically women have been written out of the history of alcohol—is that the policing of women’s production and enjoyment of alcohol is yet another example of patriarchal control over women’s minds and bodies. The book sees drunkenness (or public/liberated enjoyment of alcohol) as an extension of bodily autonomy. Drinking is a feminist act. This I agree with one hundred percent. As someone who believes in abolition, decarceration, and full bodily rights to all, I love how O’Meara uses the control of alcohol as a vector into understanding how society uses systems of oppression to consolidate (hoard) power. I’ve also scanned the index and she does get to queer people towards the back third of the book. This is quite possibly one of the best drinks books I’ve read in a really long time. Not only is it fascinating, it’s also kind of hilarious. Eg. “See, one of the things you have to understand about drinking during the medieval era was that everything was gross.”

 

But as someone who has experienced varying levels of alcohol use disorder at various times in my life, I couldn’t help but wonder, what if the opposite was true? What if consumption of alcohol (particularly during the horrors of late stage capitalism) be more of an endorsement of an oppressive system than a bucking of it? When I spoke to the bartenders for my Thrillist piece, I noticed that all of them faced some level of systemic oppression, be it due to gender, race, or sexuality, and being sober felt somewhat like an added layer. People drink to fit in, and in the bar world drinking is a great way to get ahead: late nights with brand reps and owners, drinking shots bought by regulars. Not drinking while working in bars is HARD, but it almost feels like a way to opt out of a capitalist system that causes a great deal of harm to marginalized communities, both in its production and consumption. I Before you say it: I have Quit Like A Woman on my library queue right now. 

 

The cop-out is to say that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, and call it a day, which is what I’m doing because I have to get back to writing my book before my editor kills me in a drone strike. 

I will leave you with this picture of me when I was cat-sitting for my friend and I took my shirt off because she has cool mirrors.

Thanks for reading! Please forward this to someone you like.

Love,

-JdB

JdBLetter Vol. 10 - Saved by the Bellini

‘sletter weather

Two weeks ago I announced my second book, Saved By The Bellini, which, as the name implies, is a pun-based book of cocktails dedicated to 90s pop culture that is just the right amount of gimmicky and credible. (As I said in my first book, life is all about balance.) 

In response, a bunch of people sent me messages of congratulation garnished with wonder at how I was able to find the time to write another book. Well, I….haven’t had the time! I just announced the plan to write the book, now I actually have to get writing because it’s due really, really soon. This is in contrast to Drink What You Want where the kernel of the idea emerged in 2016 and the book did not hit shelves until June 2020.

This tight turnaround is mostly thanks to the fact that I am no longer a first-time writer so the process is much more streamlined. Going into DWYW I had mostly no idea what I was going to say about drinks other than that I wanted to say something and it took a LOT of revising to get to the focused message I ended up with. My first draft was 56,000 words and I had to cut over 18,000 to make it publishable. Like, literally the entire thesis of the book did not come until maybe a week before the final draft was due and I was seriously considering scrapping my entire manuscript and starting over. 

 

For SBTB I’m not trying to educate people on the grand unified field theoryof cocktails. I already did that—and quite well if I do say so myself. Now I’m trying to write a book that cravenly appeals to millennial nostalgia for the last “real” decade of human existence (before we got shunted to the simulation) by picking out cute items from the 90s and creating ~modern~ cocktails that connect to them in some way. Eg. an alcohol-free cocktail based on my fourth grade love of En Vogue called Free Your Mind. See, this book writes itself! 

 

Another bonus to this book writing cycle is that I’m working with the same editor. When I was meeting with various publishers for DWYW, there was a theme of feedback that the overall tone of the proposal was “too much” and that I kind of needed to tone down the “voice” and let my expertise speak for itself. Amanda was the only one who said the opposite. She is a significant reason for DWYW being so sassy and snappy and I expect nothing less this time around. 

 

And it’s too soon to say who’s doing them, but the illustrations are going to be out of control. And a third of the recipes will be zero-proof/non-alc. 

 

The best way to stay up to date with all my writing progress is by not unsubscribing to this newsletter. (I had my first unsub last week and I might need to start therapy again to deal with the emotional fallout.)

This is fun…

I was just made aware that a piece I wrote for the Food Network on Bourbon is (as of 11am today) the number one trending story on Apple News. I am always cautious of wading into “spirits expert” territory because spirits nerds are extremely persnickety but so far I have not been dragged by r/Bourbon so that’s some comfort.

I’ve actually be quietly cranking out stories for Food Network for a few months now and you can check them all out HERE.

And speaking of the 90s…

I am now able to reasonably justify all the time I spend on Youtube watching music videos as “book research” and woo boy let me tell you I have been making the most of it.

I was a big Z-100 kid in the 90s and I LOVED Dutch vocalist Amber’s “This Is Your Night” but I had not seen the music video until about 4 days ago and I have watched it 21831 times since then (I am watching it as I write this.)

There is a lot to love about this video: the red suit, the text projected on the dancers, the dancers themselves, but really I can’t get the shot of her in the water out of my head. There is this single-shot shift from full-color to monochrome that I know they did with lighting (there is no way they did it digitally in 1996) that I think is so cool and I would like for someone to explain it to me and also help me recreate it.

(And maybe it’s because of La Bouche and Real McCoy but I always thought Amber was Black??)

And this is from 2010 but Alphabeat’s Hole In My Heart FEELS more 90s than 90s music? What is it about northern Europeans and balls-out pop music that I crave?

And last week someone responded “not enough thirst traps” so I will leave you with this, a ‘sletter exclusive:

Thanks for reading! Please forward this to someone you like.

Love,

-JdB

JdBLetter Vol. 8 - Survival Is Not Endorsement

Survival within a system does not equate endorsement of that system—nor does it invalidate all critiques of that system.

Welcome to the first newsletter of 2022, which happens to be happening during January, or as many like to now call it “Dry January.” (Although I have seen people refer to it as “Soberuary” and whatever midlevel agency creative came up with that needs to be reassigned—no offense. (ok maybe yes offense.)) Dry January is supposed to be the month where people stop drinking for 31 days in an attempt to atone for the overindulgences of the previous, more festive months. As someone who has enjoyed dry periods of varying duration over the past decade, I can say it’s a noble effort. Drinking alcohol is a risky activity. We like to comfort ourselves by saying that small amounts of alcohol can have heart-health benefits (mostly untrue). Wine has resveratrol! Beer has electrolytes. Okay….sure. Alcohol is the third-leading preventable cause of death in the USA, not to mention “second-hand drinking” that causes harm like car crashes, interpersonal violence, and property damage. 

So yeah, taking four+ weeks off from alcohol? Great idea. I love it. When I stop drinking for long periods of time, pretty much everything in my life gets better: my anxiety baseline plummets, my sleep is of course way better, my sense of smell goes through the roof, and I am at my most creative and unhinged on social media when I am stone, okay-to-operate-heavy-machinery sober. (Like, if I ever go quiet on twitter or Instagram for more than a day or two, something’s up.)

 

What gets me is this increasingly prevalent marketing idea that we need to consume ourselves out of a problem that we’ve caused by our own overconsumption. It feels like buying something you don’t need at all and justifying why you bought it by saying “it was on sale!” As if 20% off is somehow better than the 100% off you get by not buying something. Or when some consumer product claims to be zero-waste, or carbon neutral/negative or donate a percentage of nebulously-defined “proceeds” to a given charity. Incrementalism is a valid way of accomplishing big goals and there are real benefits to doing things slightly better, but it’s really just marketing. People spend money on things because they believe that the thing will benefit them in some way, and “feeling good” about the purchase is a very powerful—and real—benefit. But is this really just mollifying us against making more challenging changes with more significant impacts? 

 

(This also reminds me of a visit a few years ago to Los Angeles during a drought where many restaurants proudly proclaimed that they were only providing water upon request as a way to conserve water without any seeming awareness that one kilogram of beef costs 15,000 liters of water to produce, or one glass of wine needs 120 liters to produce. But saying you only give tap water to those that ask for it is considerably more obvious and allows you to *feel* like you’re doing something without actually having to make a meaningful change. (And lol everyone asks for water anyway.))

 

For zero-proof drink makers like myself, Dry January is our Black Friday. In January of 2021 my shopify sales were twice the normal average. This month already sales have been great and I’ve got press inquiries keeping me busy. In order to survive, I need the craven marketing concept known as Dry January. 

 

This all reminds me of the “Mister Gotcha” comic by Matt Bors where some unhelpful douchebag pops out at people who dare to advocate for a slightly better way of doing things. Yes, I need Dry January in order to build a successful business and keep Proteau existing in the world, but at the same time I don’t think the answer is to suffocate our out-of-control desires with added layers of material consumption. Maybe instead we consider what true sobriety might mean and duck dive into the waves of life’s despairs and meaninglessnesses instead of retreating to the comforting shores of hyperconsumption. 

 

That said, I did an awesome Dry January cocktail for Food52 and you should check it out. The video is HERE.

And speaking of zero-proof drinks, Proteau’s equity crowdfunding campaign is accepting reservations so you can be a part of growing the brand. Check out the full deal page HERE.

Additional Dry January Content:

I was on Josh Gandee’s No Proof podcast the other day and it was a great conversation, check it out here:

And if you’re craving additional Dry January tidbits, you should take a look at Wirecutter’s guide from 2021 about the best non-alcoholic drinks on the market, I am quoted as an expert and Ludlow Red and Rivington Spritz are both highlighted. Read it HERE.

Also, if you haven’t checked it out, my dear friend Julia Bainbridge’s Good Drinks is an excellent primer on the current state of non-alcoholic mixology. (Also my book has a cute lil chapter dedicated to non-alc cocktails too.)

In other news, I am completely overtaken by the Weeknd’s new album that came out last Friday. I’ve loved The Weeknd since the beginning but he just keeps getting better and better. To me, it’s perfect pop. 

Take My Breath gives me chills still even though I’ve listened to it 500 times and the darkly hilarious irony of a song like this coming out during a respiratory pandemic is….not lost on me. Gasoline is another standout on the album and the video just came out today.

Aside from the music, I love how he does so much modifying of his face for each album’s era. The most obvious referent is Aphex Twin, but part of it also feels very Drag—really stupid in an extremely intelligent and well-executed way.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to forward this to someone you like.

Love,

-JdB

JdBLetter Vol. 7 - The Undiscovered Country

What is there left to say?

I blew my Christmas load last week, and this will probably be the last newsletter of the year, so why don’t we do an extremely run-of-the-mill 2021 recap?? (I’d like to think of myself as one of those people who will spend the winter break crafting a newsletter, but I’m not.)

My work life is divided, somewhat neatly, into three buckets: Proteau, Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation, and “JdB LLC” (not a real LLC lol).

Proteau

Proteau has had a pretty interesting year, to say the least. It was our first “full” year being in the market and we started off with an amazing January, thanks in part to the fact that it is “Dry January” AND we got a writeup in The New York Times’s Wirecutter, listing Ludlow Red and Rivington Spritz as some of the best zero-proof drinks on the market. Seriously, there were a few desperate weeks where I was frantically scrambling to make sure our shipping warehouse was adequately stocked and I got really, really good at replying to customers asking why it’s taken over a week to received their order. (“We’re a small team.” Is a euphemism for: “We’re not amazon, please chill” and you know what, it works.)  

My first Covid-era travel was to our bottler in Missouri to oversee another bottling run. I find sometimes people are surprised to hear that we’re not continuously making Proteau in a little factory in NYC. Producing in large batches allows us to make a far more consistent product. I think another misconception about the beverage industry is the people expect all of these fun, pretty, and delicious drinks to come out of some Willy Wonka-esque facility when the reality is much more drab and mundane. Although cerain equipment like tunnel pasteurizers can be thrilling in their own right. 

 

And I buried the lede here, and you’ll probably be hearing more about this in the upcoming months, but we’re in the process of launching an equity crowdfunding campaign with Republic.co. We’re still in the pre-launch phase, so all I can do is encourage you to take a look at our campaign page (and see terms and conditions at republic.co), and let me know what you think! 

Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation

Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation also had a pretty amazing year as well. 2021 was nothing like the grueling pace of 2020, where we raised over $6M and launched one of the biggest and longest-running Covid relief funds, but it was transformational nonetheless. Most significantly, we hired our first full-time staff, Executive Director Kiki Louya. Her tenure began in April 2021 and she really hit the ground running, executing a spectacular fundraiser at the end of September. We also recently brought on Cheryl Williams to be our Director of Finance and Operations last month. In 2021 we were able to grant out over $1M to organizations that are working to support and transform the restaurant industry, and we are about to announce another $0.5M in year-end systems-change grants. 

As we head in to 2022, it looks like Covid is going to be ravaging the industry for a long time to come. If you’re able, please consider donating to Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation’s general fund, our Covid Relief Fund, or our Racial Justice Fund, which we also launched this year with the goal of uprooting anti-blackness and dismantling white supremacy in the restaurant industry. 

JdB LLC

JdB LLC had a great year as well, thanks in large part to my partnership withFood52 as their resident drinks expert. In August, we launched the Drink What You Want video series on Youtube and it has been so much fun sharing my expertise with everyone as well as offending people who can’t wrap their minds around a dude wearing lipstick (#Annette). You can watch all of those videos HERE, and read all my recipes HERE. 

I also kept my freelance writing gigs going and rather than list them all here, as this newsletter is already getting kind of long, I’ve freshly-updated my website so all of my writing I’ve ever done can be found HERE, and you can check out all the media I’ve appeared in HERE.

 

And my book, Drink What You Want: The Subjective Guide to Making Objectively Delicious Cocktails continues to do well(-ish) and feel relevant. June 2020 was not exactly the ideal time for a frivolous cocktail book to come out, but fortunately, the subject matter is evergreen. It’s the gift that keeps on giving! If you already have a copy a.) thank you! And b.) even though Amazon is the devil, it really helps book sales to have reviews on the site as often times smaller retailers use amazon ratings when making buying decisions. If you have a spare moment, please leave a (glowing) review. And if you hated the book but somehow made it here, 600 words into my seventh newsletter…I don’t even know what to say…congrats?

Odds and Ends To Finish Out The Year

I absolutely love that in 2021 I got to monetize my love of Drag, and Alaska is the most famous Drag performer I’ve interviewed to date. Read it HERE.

And here’s a little bonus recipe I did for a Mulled Martinez that you can make a big batch of in advance and just pour as you need. It’s also, I think, the first drink I did that can be served either hot or cold. Check it out HERE

Thanks for reading! Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and all that. 

Love,

-JdB

JdBLetter Vol. 6 - Navigating Grief and Joy

Bear with me here…

Do you remember when Carrie Fisher died? I do. Vividly. The fact that a huge celebrity’s death is well-remembered should be unremarkable except for the fact that I was pretty much drunk and spiraling throughout the entire multiday period between her heart attack and eventual death.  

For those that need a reminder, it was in that maudlin and surreal week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 2016. The Election had just happened. My mother had died in February 2014 after an excruciating strike of glioblastoma. I had just come off opening my tenth restaurant in two years. The accumulation of unresolved grief and trauma and stress caught up with me and broke me. (As a preview, I had completely lost my sense of smell from November 2014 to February 2015 for no obvious physical reason.)

After the election I was literally catatonic for days before my husband dragged me to a psychiatrist and I started treatment. But by the end of the year I somehow got it together to host an elaborate sit-down Christmas dinner for 14 people in our not-tiny-but-not-huge-either Lower East Side apartment. And as is one’s wont during the run-up and execution of holiday festivities, I had been mild-to-heavily drinking for days. 

 

Another fun fact about the holidays is that my dead mother’s birthday is December 26th and used to be such a  wonderful coda to the Christmas holiday that my family had once celebrated so thoroughly. As I laid in bed on 12/26/16, hungover and still drunk, exhausted from effort and agonizing over the possible discontinued existence of a famous woman whom I had never met but who uncannily reminded me of my mother in a small but not insignificant way, I fell out of bed.

I’m still not clear what happened but my left foot got tangled up in the sheets and the fall twisted my ankle. I was limping for days. I still feel a rosy discomfort and think of that day and those two women when I find my foot at certain angle. Will that feeling ever go away? I have to say: grief is my body’s most mysterious inhabitant.

It’s not all sad

After my mother died, the generously-proportioned house in Greenwich, CT that I grew up in became too generous and too full of her absence, and my dad downsized, bestowing a lot of…stuff on me and Michael. And a lot of that stuff was Christmas decorations! Every year Michael goes all the way the fuck out when decorating our home, and this year we had the good fortune of Food52 sending a camera crew to document it while I explained my latest recipe for them, the L.E.S. Glogg, which you can read about HERE, and watch HERE.

(And be sure to keep an eye out for my BFF Annette in the comments.)

Some Links: 

If you still think cancel culture is a real thing, read this: Dr Luke Has Never Really Been Cancelled For The Kesha Case

Why Dune's Litany Against Fear Is Good Psychological Advice

Arca played a show this week in NYC and now I wish I had gotten tickets The Uplifting Chaos of Arca's 'Kick' Albums

Let’s end on something fun and not holiday-ey, shall we? 

This short film, set to Rina Sawayama’s iconic “XS” was sent to me by my dear friend Karen Fu and it is overflowing with fabulousness. Watch HERE.

Thanks for reading. Forward this to someone you think will like me. 

Love,

-JdB