Cocktail Recipes for Thirsty Anglers
A Bucket for Monsieur
For over a century the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was a convenient and tempting dump for industrial pollutants. In 1969 solvents and oils covering its surface ignited and the Cuyahoga burned. Decades before click-bait and manufactured outrage, the story went viral. Public anger galvanized political will and the EPA was formed.
Say what you will about today’s regulatory environment, our waterways don’t catch fire nearly as often as they used to.
Five minutes from my house there’s a little brook that holds wild trout. It’s a sanctuary, a half-hour of peace on days when I’m too busy to drive to a real river. I know most of those fish by name.
The water there is clean; I have never needed asbestos waders.
It’s a different sort of pollutant that has me worried about Flint Brook. It’s not PCBs, invasive mussels, or even storm water runoff. It’s empties.
People drink in their cars. Inhibitions lowered, they toss bottles and cans out their car windows. The bridge spanning Flint Brook is a convenient and tempting dump.
One stolen afternoon I fished the pool below the bridge and managed to catch a few specks. But I also made the mistake of counting the empties strewn along the bank.
The unfavorable trout-to-trash ratio shattered the spell. The story went viral, personal anger galvanized apolitical will, and on my next trip to the brook I carried a 5-gallon bucket instead a fly rod.
It took three trips to clean up the mess.
Years ago I read James Surowiecki’s great little book The Wisdom of Crowds. I still believe its premise that the many are smarter than the few. As I sorted my haul into recycling bins, I saw opportunity, rolled up my sleeves, and did some science.
The hypothesis:
Cohort preference in adult beverages may be measured by brand prevalence in a sample set of refuse. A proportional admixture informed by this analysis will comprise the most popular and palatable of spirits, producing a tasty and refreshing tipple.
After a quick inventory and a little volumetric analysis, I had a crowd-sourced cocktail recipe in hand and was ready to go shopping.
The experiment: A Bucket for Monsieur
Two 750 ml bottles of Old Crow bourbon
24 nips of Fireball cinnamon whiskey
Twelve cans of White Claw hard seltzer, various flavors
One five pound bag of ice
Mix the bourbon and the fireball together in a five gallon bucket. Add ice and stir with a wading staff. Top with a dozen White Claws and serve. Pay it forward. Remember to save those empties and throw them out your car window later!
The results:
As an emetic, this gets the job done.
As a cocktail, it is wretched. I liked it better when the rivers were catching on fire.
Nice! Sometimes when people at the brewery are indecisive, I kindly suggest that I could mix all of the beers together in one big glass for them. No one has taken me up on it yet.
It sounds like the "wisdom of crowds" did not lead you to an ideal cocktail recipe this time, but collective intelligence is still fascinating. Robin Hanson suggests that prediction markets are underutilized in democracies (https://philpapers.org/rec/HANSWV) and the book Superforecasting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_Science_of_Prediction) deals with how the best predictions are formed.