One of my friends turned regulars stopped into the Smoke Shop for dinner. For his second drinks, he requested a Manhattan. When I inquired if he wanted a classic, a riff, or even something tropical, he latched on to the last option for he had spent part of the weekend making Tiki drinks for a gathering. I decided to riff on the Martinique from Pioneers of Mixing at Elite Bars: 1903-1933, and I altered the rye whiskey base and pineapple juice into a split of rye and pineapple rum. Also, instead of sweet vermouth, I swapped in Punt e Mes embittered by Angostura and Peychaud's. I later dubbed it the Little Caribbean after a neighborhood in Brooklyn.

I was inspired by all of T. Cole Newton's Sazerac riffs in his Cocktail Dive Bar book. Therefore, I began to think of drinks that I could mashup into a Sazerac akin to what I did with a Green Point for the Algiers Point. Instead of that Manhattan variation as a starting point, I selected the Red Hook to merge with a Cognac Sazerac especially with how well Maraschino and absinthe work together in the Improved Cocktail. I dubbed this one the Tin City Sazerac after the shantytown that was built in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn during the Great Depression that gave shelter to the longshoremen and sailors waiting for the economy to return.

I continued on with my tinkering with the Cynar-curaçao combination, and I began to think about Maks Pazuniak's room temperature drinks such as the Charlatan. I kept that drink's Punt e Mes base, swapped in the two liqueurs, and accented the concept with absinthe. Moreover, the curaçao in a drink such as this reminded me of Kirk Estopinal's Hotel Room Temperature. Like the Prelude to a Broken Arm that I created a short time before, I kept with the Dada art theme and named this the Pillars of Society after a 1926 piece by Hugo Ball.

Many similarly named cocktails were created in the past few years, but now that it's all fading away I'm just left with a bitter taste in my mouth.