It's the Size of the Glass

As a fan of a good cocktail and AMC’s Mad Men, I am both impressed and mortified with the amount alcohol the characters in fictional universe of Sterling-Cooper consume. Draper and company drink at the office, at home, while entertaining, on Sunday mornings. They drink and drive, drink and work, drink and talk, (which is occasionally the prelude to drinking and fornicating) – the show features about everything except for the drink and shower ala N. Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.

Jon Hamm may be the star of the show, but alcohol is the lead, inhabiting nearly every scene. Given the constant drinking, I am amazed the characters can stand let alone function at work, while parenting and everything in between. The most obvious answer is, the alcohol consumption is exaggerated, that people didn’t drink like their fictive counterparts. Except in interviews with the actual Ad Men of the era, there is some disagreement about the amount of womanizing that happened in the day but everyone pretty much concurs about the smoking and drinking that was done.

After all, it was the era of the 3 Martini Lunch. Except that the 3 Martini Lunch may not have been as actual of a thing per se, rather a symbol of managerial excess. I can’t help but think that the phrase 3 Martini Lunch is not too different from the other forms of ridicule disguised as corporate speak - derisive mentions of comp days, golf meetings, upgrades to first class on the corporate card – common business practices that are nevertheless dismissed by what Hugh MacLeod has called the ‘gammas attacking the betas’. Long before Jimmy Carter derided (and Gerald Ford defended) the tax-deductible, $50, 3 Martini Lunch, in the 1976 election, the phrase 3 Martini Lunch was used to debase what the workers saw as executive privilege.

But a 2-3 hour business lunch did happen in the Mad Men era. How could people even conceive of putting away only 2 drinks before heading back to the office to rack up billable hours? Because drinks weren’t as big back in the day as they are now.

The James Bond Martini from Mad Men Era – 1.5 oz vodka, .5 oz vermouth. From the Saucytorium’s most recently published cocktail book: A classic martini – 3 oz vodka, .5 oz. vermouth. An Old Fashioned from the Art of the Cocktail, the book the NY Times reports is the bible for Mad Men drinks - 1-2 oz bourbon. A not so Old Fashion from a bartending guide published earlier this millennium, 3 oz of bourbon? For Don Draper, beer was often 3.2% alcohol, modern ales are twice as strong. Wine was claret, mild compared to some of recent vintage strong reds that have an alcohol content in the mid-teens. Doubling the liquor in a drink takes its toll.

Mad Men is spurring an interest in classic cocktails but maybe the retro craze we could all endorse is the gruff bartender who claims ‘we serve small drinks to men who want to stay sober longer’.