I love a good hot tub. I’ve been trying to spread the gospel for the last few years and I think it’s working. I believe people are starting to get it. They understand there is something fun and sleazy, but also comforting and chill about sitting in a hot pool of bubbling water, and now I’m here to discuss another important part of the tub life: What to drink while getting your hot tub on. On vacation, Emily asked me to make her a Martini, and I wondered if this was the right way to go. Not just the drink, but what I was serving it in. I knew there was no way I was giving her a martini in a glass. The nightmare of a Nick and Nora breaking and shattering in the hot tub was too much to imagine. I mentioned this to Mike Vanderbilt, one of my favorite people to follow on the World Wide Web and also the best bartender in Chicago, literally. Do you know how hard it is to be considered the best bartender in Chicago? Have you ever had a drink in that city? Probably not, because nobody just has A drink in Chicago. You need to have many drinks there, so I asked Mike his thoughts because he’s obviously a guru being The Best. I know bartenders love serving things in a specific way, and years of hanging out with beer snobs and amateur mixologists who will tell me “NO! You need to drink that IPA in this sort of glass ONLY” has screwed up my brain a little. I needed somebody to be my guide.
“Normally I’m an advocate for proper glassware, but in a hot tub situation I would go with plastic; there is too much chance of broken glass…especially if you’re having as much fun as you should considering you’re drinking in a hot tub,” Mike reassures me. I was right! I was starting to feel better, but then I told him my delivery method for the martini: A Yeti wine Rambler. Was I committing a sin?
“That’s brilliant,” Mike tells me. “Why not go utilitarian? It’s hard enough keeping a martini cold when you’re not sitting in ultra-hot water. Other than that, I’d just recommend cheap plasticware… if your martini is warm, drink faster.”
I’ve turned into a huge Yeti guy in the last few years, especially for water or coffee on long trips. But a cocktail felt sort of wrong.
Wrong, that is, until I bumped into a friend over the summer. One of my wine freak friends. He was hanging out with a little cooler on the lawn in Prospect Park doing some day drinking. I noticed the chilled bottle of rosé he was working on and asked him about it. Something he’d brought back from his last trip to France, a new favorite, etc. Then he asked if I wanted to try some. Before I could say yes, he pulled out a Yeti wine rambler, poured it, and handed it to me. I thought he was pulling a prank. When I tried to call him on it, he looked at me and told me “You know that you can drink wine out of basically anything, right?”
That’s how I got to Yeti martinis in the hot tub. But the truth is that I wasn’t totally happy with my cocktail. It wasn’t a hot tub drink. I thought something made from grapes might be more suitable, so I asked my wine dude, Aaron Lefkove, owner of Bluebird Wine and Spirits up in Accord, New York, and he set me straight. Not red, white or orange: “Fucking Champagne,” he says.
“Get a nice grower champagne — Selosse, Lelarge Pugeot, Stephane Regnault. Aside from that maybe something desertlike or fortified ….something that drinks more like a cognac than a wine.” He adds, “You don’t want anything that’s gonna with you down when you are already dealing with the jets and the bubbles and stewing in your own juices.”
That’s good for a hot climate, but ‘tis the season for hot tubs in the cold, and there are few pleasures quite like putting a few Miller High Lifes in the snow and pulling them out one by one as you tub. Mike Vanderbilt agrees.
“Most times I’ve been in one it’s been cheap beer or cheaper Champagne on the menu,” he says of his hot tub drinking experiences. Then he adds a story. “Once, I was staying overnight at the world-famous Rainbow Motel and when you did the overnight (not the four-hour nap) you got a free bottle of cheap Champagne. I couldn’t figure out how to open the bottle…admittedly I was a little tuned up already…so I called the front desk. I didn’t feel stupid as it was obvious to me that this poor lady had taken this call before.”