The New Year's Day Bloody Mary Tradition
The First Drink of the New Year
The first Bloody Mary I ever had on New Year’s Day came after one of the longest nights I’ve ever had. It started in Miami, DJing some party in a mansion on the water. It was a weird scene: I was supposed to bring along my old soul and funk records for the early part of part of the night and spin before a guy I knew took over for the 11-1 shift. I was basically the warmup act and he brought the party jams. So I was spinning Little Beaver and Edwin Starr; he was going to do Pulp, Le Tigre, Ladytron and the other bangers for the early-aughts good haircut “Hey, did you hear about this thing called The Hipster Handbook” crowd. I brought along a friend of mine who decided that his drink of choice for some weird reason I’ve never understood would be some hard lemonade thing with more vodka in it. I didn’t ask questions because I was just happy to have somebody along for the ride at a party that I didn’t want to really go to, but was fine getting paid to be there and play music. So we show up, I do my thing, and my friend, drunk by the time we get to the party, comes up to where I’m DJing, and goes, “Please, let me spin a few songs.” So I let him, and he proceeded to play “Back in Black” and then “Welcome to the Jungle,” two songs that, yes, rip, but that the crowd wasn’t feeling. I know this because they all began to boo in unison and started chucking stuff at us. The guy who was DJing after me had to rush up and start playing something that calmed them.
The entire night fell apart from there. My friend continued to drink his hard lemonade, got hammered and turned into the saddest mess one could imagine, pining after some girl who didn’t want anything to do with him. I ended up in a room in the house, forced to do karaoke with a short man in his 50s and two younger women with a bunch of cocaine on the table in the middle. He kept trying to speak Spanish to me, but I kept saying “no comprendo” because despite being raised by a woman whose first language is Spanish, I’ve had too many different languages spoken to me throughout my life, and I’ve had a difficult time retaining any of them.
But that’s another story within a story that’s already gone on too long. The new year began with me just driving around after that party. I’d had one drink and then split as soon as I could sneak away from the weird, Lynchian karaoke scene. I ended up just driving around a lot that night, eventually ending up at a bar in Hollywood, Florida around 3 or 4 in the morning. The scene was like something out of a Hold Steady song, the dregs of the night still hanging around, barely functioning unless they were on some kind of drug, which I believe a few of them were. Why did I stop in Hollywood, one of those South Florida places between West Palm Beach and Miami that’s pretty much unknown to people unless they live down there? Simple: I was there because there was a sign that said the place served food 24/7 and I was starving. But when I sat down, they told me the kitchen was closed, that there was a fire back there the night before. So I decided that was wisest idea was to order a Bloody Mary and ask for extra garnishes. That would tide me over, I figured. I sat there with my Bloody Mary with maybe a dozen little green olives floating around in it and I felt a little better.
There was a lapse in my New Year’s Day Bloody between that one and the next. I’d say it was about five years until I was in Chicago on a January 1st and I ended up at the GMan Tavern, which I’m pretty sure was still the Gingerman at that point. I saw my friends were drinking Bloody Marys, so I decided I’d have one. I’d grown pretty obsessed with the drink after seeing Richie drink them in The Royal Tenenbaums a few years earlier. (I’m not ashamed to admit how influenced by Wes Anderson I was; I was a young person in my 20s during the Bush years, that’s how things were for some of us back then.) I ordered my Bloody, and the bartender gave me a little glass filled with beer to go with it. I didn’t say anything. I just took the Bloody and the beer and sat down and thought, “What a nice way to kick things off.”
I ended up having a pretty good year. In fact, I call the 364 days after that specific Jan. 1st the year I started to grow up. I don’t know if I have the drink order to thank for that, but ever since then, it’s become one of my little traditions. And if you’ve read any of these newsletters or my books or follow me on any social media, you know I’m a big fan of traditions. They keep me grounded. The most important, possibly, is the first drink of the year: I’m a sucker that believes you have to try your best to start the year on the right foot. I have my Champagne at midnight and enjoy that, then the next morning I order or make a Bloody and a beer.
But the one thing I’ve always wondered about is where, exactly, the idea of the Bloody with a little beer come from. I am pretty sure I’ve only ever had it served this way in the Midwest, and maybe at one or two places in Brooklyn — leading me to believe that it’s a regional thing or that it started in that neck of the woods. If it didn’t, I apologize. But I was curious enough that I reached out to a few friends who might know the answer.
Brendan Kelly, who has spent enough time on both sides of the bar to maybe know the reason you get a beer with your Bloody, as well as making some of my favorite music of the last 20 years in bands like the Lawrence Arms, the Falcon and his solo stuff, had some really interesting stuff to say about it:
“So what I think is that in the midwest, we are beer people by virtue of the fact that when all the Germans came and settled in Milwaukee and St. Louis, they brought with them the light drinkable beer traditions of their homelands, right? 90 between Chicago and LaCrosse was known as "the Heileman highway" because of all the old style trucks bringing beer to the city. Now, it's also true that Chicago and Wisconsin love their hard liquor, but it's much less of a cocktail culture than most other places, mostly because the focus is on actually drinking, not being frilly (and I'd put Minnesota in this category too), but the Bloody Mary is one drink that is enduring here, and why is that? Because you can drink it first thing in the morning, and we are the drunk states. It's my take (and I really don't know if I'm correct historically here) that when you're doing a spicy, savory early morning cocktail for a bunch of shot and beer people, you'll need to give them something that familiarizes the experience and also mitigates the heat (Germans do not appreciate spice, and though we've all come a long way, the Teutonic blood in Chicago, Wisconsin and Minnesota is still the main blood), and everyone's just also from the Midwest. Have a Bloody, but also have a beer, so if you don't like the concoction, you still get a pony of High Life out of the deal. That's what I think, I do not know, but I DO know that I'm not drinking a Bloody without a beer for this very reason.”
That seems pretty reasonable, at least as a philosophy of sorts. It makes the Bloody the cocktail for beer and shot people.
As for its origins? A few people pointed me to Wisconsin Cocktails by Jeanette Hurt. Hurt writes, “I think this is not just a midwestern thing; instead, it’s mostly a Wisconsin thing,” and claims that the practice “really tends to stay inside Wisconsin.”
Despite the fact that I’m a Chicago Bears fan, I love Wisconsin. And the more I thought about it, the more it dawned on me that the practice of serving a Bloody with a beer, as far as I could tell, has grown out of a few places in Chicago over the last 20 or so years. I’ve also had a Bloody served to me this way once somewhere in the Twin Cities, and possibly once in Michigan, but I could be making that up. The point is that it probably very well is a Wisconsin thing, and who or where it started is probably lost to some hungover morning. One person Hurt talks to chalks it up to “Just some brilliant bartender, maybe,” and that honestly seems about right.
The other thing that I noticed is that Hurt mentions the chaser is “sometimes called a schnitt, a snit, a sidecar, or just a chaser.” In Chicago, I’ve only ever heard of it called a “back.” This sort of adds to my theory that this is maybe a relatively recent thing in places outside of Wisconsin. That maybe some enterprising bartender originally from Kenosha or Milwaukee moved down south to Chicago and started serving them up. Or possibly somebody from Chicago or the Twin Cities went to Wisconsin, liked the way they served a Bloody Mary and started doing the same in their bar. Something like that. Something small that caught on beyond the Badger State.
That’s my theory, and I’d be pleased as punch or a rum Old-Fashioned to find out otherwise. Like if there’s some guy named Jim Uszniewicz who served these out of a tavern in the 1950s and he’s known as the “Schnitt King of Sheboygan,” please, by all means, reach out and let me know. I’d like to toast that person for inventing such a beautiful combo.
A Bloody Mary recipe
Brendan mentioned to me he makes the best Bloody Mary and was kind enough to share the recipe. This is going to be my first drink of 2021.
“Start with ice to the top of the glass, fifty percent vodka. From there, Worcester sauce (a lot more than you think) until the vodka is deep brown, then add a heaping spoonful of prepared horseradish (again, more than you think), a decent sprinkling of garlic salt, some black pepper, a hefty sprinkle of celery salt, two dashes of cayenne, one quick pull of Guinness, a dollop of bbq sauce, a dollop of A1, a healthy ribbon of Sriracha, and a tiny dash of tabasco. At this point your glass should be almost full, top with a splash of Bloody Mary mix or tomato juice (it doesn't matter. it's a super minor component) shake and serve with a beer back and with no garnish. It doesn't need it and frankly, it's an insult to the craftsmanship of this particular version in my opinion. That said, if I was forced at gunpoint to garnish it I would garnish it with gorgonzola olives.”
Things I read that I loved
If you’re looking for stuff to read this week, I had a whole Twitter thread about some of the stories I read and loved this year, from Alex Ross on exiled German writers in 1940s L.A. to Noah Cho on Korean comfort food. A few new ones popped up on my radar after I tweeted those, specifically Kat Kinsman on growing citrus as a form of therapy and Alexandra Tanner on Mormon mommy bloggers.
Anyways. That’s it. That’s the last letter for this terrible year. For 2021, I plan on getting a little more serious about this little endeavor. Still going to aim for two a week, but we’ll see. I might add an option to pay me if you’d like, but I want to keep this thing free. My hope is that as I get a little busier with projects I have coming up, I can keep up the pace with this The Melt and turn it into a thing. But before all that, I just want to say have a happy new year, and here’s hoping we can all be OK.