 Thinking about putting together a great home cocktail bar, just interested in this fascinating highly expressive subculture? Reason's features editor Peter Sutterman talks with Jacob Greer, a craft cocktail bartender and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Greer is a Reason contributor and co-author with Brett Adams of the new book Raising the Bar, a bottle-by-bottle guide to mixing masterful cocktails at home. Sutterman speaks with Greer about the pleasures of making cocktails, the way the internet and the pandemic have changed home bartending, and what Lesson's alcohol prohibition still has for public policy today. Jacob, thank you so much for joining us. Peter, thanks for having me on and great to see you. It's great to see you too, man. So Jacob and I are old friends and we're also both cocktail enthusiasts. Before we get to the book, I actually just want to ask you. This is a book that has a lot of cocktail recipes and it's obviously the product of great passion. You are somebody who really likes cocktails. So what makes a great cocktail? Why are they so wonderful? For me, it's all about just the complexity and the balance of it and the ability to take so many different flavors and integrate them into something that's bigger than all the different parts. When you think about what goes into some of the bottles that we have on our shelves when we're mixing a cocktail, if it's a whiskey, that might have been like 10 or 12 years sitting in an oak barrel getting better. If it's an Amaro, it might be 30 different herbs. If it's chartreuse, it might be 130 different herbs. So you get the product of all this incredibly hard work and complexity that's gotten put into bottles for us. And then in a matter of a minute, we can make ourselves something incredible at home with all these different layers to taste. I think it's really cool and it's hard. You can't really do that with anything else. You know, like cooking, you know, to get that kind of complexity out of cooking is going to take you a lot of time. And, you know, other things, you just want the purity of it. Like with coffee, I don't really mix coffee. I just want to taste the bean as it's made. But with cocktails, you can have all this fun taking incredible products and making something unique with it. Yeah, I love cocktails because they have character, right? Like each one of them is a distinctive personality and you can tweak that personality in the glass. So let's let's get to the book now. Tell us why should we buy this book? What's it about? And why should people want to make cocktails at home? I mean, shouldn't we just go to a bar and pay $16 for somebody to do this for us? Well, if you can find a really good $16 cocktail now, you're you're ahead of the curve. The inflation, it's come for it's come for our drinks. It has. Yeah. And as is someone who bartends, I obviously encourage people to do that and to go out and buy drinks. But this book, even though it's written with the home bartender in mind, it really is made for anyone. No matter what your experience level, there's more than 200 recipes in here. So unless you've been hacking into my computer and in reading those midbamps, there's going to be something new for you in it. But the main idea of the book is we wanted to get past the frustration that I have and a lot of people have with contemporary cocktail books where like Peter, you and I both have huge collections of booze at home. A little too much to be honest, if you know, we want to never enough. Never enough. Yeah. I'm at the point where I'm just like, I'm targeting bottles for elimination. Like I'm going to make cocktails with this bottle until it's gone. But even with that, with this massive amount of liquor at home, I would often get a new cocktail book and be really excited. And like, I want to come home and, you know, proves this and find a recipe to make and there's nothing I can make. And my collection is ridiculous. So if I can't make it, then the ordinary reader definitely can't make it. And so what my co-author and I, Brett Adams, he and I got together and we kind of mapped out this idea of how to make a cocktail book where that would never happen. And so what we decided was we have a pretty basic pantry of ingredients, you know, a few different bitters, syrups, citrus, easy things to keep around the house. And then we would have non-alcoholic ingredients. Non-alcoholic, yeah. And then for the booze, we would take it one bottle at a time. So with the first chapter, literally, all we do is say, hey, go get a bottle of bourbon. We're going to tell you about bourbon. And then we're going to give you nine recipes that all you need is that bourbon to make, plus what's in the pantry. And then we just take you through the book, up to 25 bottles, where we just add a new bottle to your collection and say, here's what it is. And now here's what you can make now that you've added this to your bar. And so, you know, the first few chapters, the cocktails are all pretty simple, but good and varied in styles. And then as you progress through and you keep adding a new bottle to your bar, you've got a ton of different drinks you can make and the drinks get more complicated as you go. So it's a one bottle bar and then a two bottle bar and then a three bottle bar. Exactly. And we thought through that a lot. You know, we had a massive spreadsheet of cocktails to help us figure out like what the order should be in terms of how we mix things. So, for example, we don't want to tell you to go out and buy a bottle of tequila. If we haven't first told you to go get some orange liqueur, because what's the point of having tequila if you can't make a margarita? Well, you can make a Tommy's. You can make a Tommy's, yeah. But, you know, for non margarita heads, there are two basic styles of margarita. There's the sort of conventional one that includes orange liqueur. And then there's something called a Tommy's margarita, which is really more of a tequila sour that doesn't use orange liqueur. Typically just uses agave syrup as the sweetener. Yeah. And which can be fantastic. It's a great drink. But yes, obviously, the sort of traditional margarita would use the orange liqueur. So you've built out this whole system here. And in many ways, this is about simplification. At the same time, you're also telling people to buy some bottles. And I think many normal people would think, hey, that's kind of weird. You've got chinar, you've got fernet, you've got elderflower liqueur. What is what's the advantage for someone who is a normal, is sort of not cocktail, you know, sort of bottle head to owning a bottle of fernet? What are they going to do with that? Yeah, well, I mean, so part of it is that's the 24th chapter in the book. And so nobody has to finish. If you want to stop at, you know, 15 bottles and then just decide you want to build out, you know, your bourbon collection or something, that's obviously totally fine. But, you know, part of our goal in writing the book was to think about also you know, like if we went to somebody's house and they said, hey, can you make me a drink? You know, what bottles would we want to see there and what would make that really versatile? And if we go to someone's house and I'm sure you've had this experience and it's just the most random bottles that have been sitting on the shelf or in the cabinet for 20 years from when they had a house party or something. There's always a bottle of really bad blue curacao. Always. I don't I don't know why everyone in the country has a bottle of blue curacao because no one uses them. For some reason, everybody's got one. I feel like and I love Galliano, but I feel like Galliano shows up in a lot of places too, where you don't expect it. So what's a representative cocktail from this book? Give us one example that sort of encompasses this book's approach. Oh, wow, there's so many we could pick. It's hard to hard to pick just one. But gosh, where would we go with that? I would say, you know, part of the fun we had was coming up with drinks based in part on what slots we needed to fill and writing the book. So, for example, one that I'm really happy with is in the final chapter on creme de cacao, which is we wanted to end on a sweet note and encourage people to buy a nice creme de cacao and mixed cocktails. But we we wanted to have a little more use for scotch. And we also wanted to show how well chartreuse and creme de cacao can play together. And so we thought, hey, scotch, creme de cacao, chartreuse. This is the start of a really good cocktail that we probably never would have made before, except that we needed something for the book. And then we we ended up adding in sweet vermouth and then Angostura and orange bitters to make sort of a really nice, desserty, rob Roy variation. That sounds delicious. Yeah, it's called The Two Birds. It's in the last chapter. It's one of my favorites from the book, to be honest. And I think that's a good example of how this book is practical, because if you're just a person who grabbed a cocktail book up the shelf and you don't have a big bar at home and you flip to a page and you see this drink with six different ingredients, including creme de cacao and chartreuse, you're going to think I can't make that or I'm not going to go out and buy all this stuff to make it. But if you've been following along in order, you've already got all of those things, except the creme de cacao. And now you've got a whole chapter of creme de cacao drinks. So so some of these weird bottles, we're asking readers to put their trust in us a little bit and say, hey, you may not have ever thought about buying for net or Chinar or chartreuse, but we're going to tell you about it. We're going to tell you tell you why we like it. And we're also going to give you lots of different ways to use it. So like for net, for example, which we know is very polarizing. You know, we have some cocktails where, you know, it's probably pretty hefty poor, like three quarter ounce, maybe an ounce of frenet in them. And others where it's, you know, like the hanky-panky, where it's just like a gin sweet vermouth and a little rinse of frenet, where it's just there to give it that little interesting note. So so even if you don't particularly like the ingredient, hopefully you've got ways to use it that you're going to find out how to like it. For a long time, I was a frenet hater and it took it took figuring it like finding drinks where where frenet was only in very small amounts for me to end up liking it. And now I love this stuff and have several different bottles of frenet on my shelf, because, of course, a frenet isn't just frenet Bronco, which is what you get when you say, hey, give me a shot of frenet at a bar. There's also all of these other different bottlings of frenet and some of them are actually quite a bit less harsh, somewhat sweeter. So people are a little bit intimidated by frenet Bronco, where they think, oh, I just don't like that stuff. I would strongly recommend that people go out and experiment with experiment with some of the other some of the other bottlings that are out there. And I like I like seeing you come around to frenet recently, because I it's such a bar to drink. I'd always assumed you'd be into it. And so like that's a perfect example of like no matter how how much you're into cocktails, like there's always going to be that ingredient that just doesn't doesn't always work for you. It takes some time to find the right use for it. So I want to talk about you for a bit here and like the libertarian the libertarian professional to cocktail nerd pipeline, which you are like the leading edge of, right? Like you were the first one because you worked at the Cato Institute in the late aughts for a little while. And then you left Washington, DC to move to Portland to make cocktails and write about cocktails. Tell me a little bit about how that happened and what caused your sort of turn towards West Coast cocktail making that towards that lifestyle? Yeah. Well, the way you describe it, you make it sound a lot more planned than any of it really was. It was also somewhat accidental. But yeah, I came to DC straight out of college. I had an internship at Cato when I was in my senior year and I moved to DC, you like basically with Cato in mind and with libertarian institutions in mind. Like I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, but it turned out that was actually just what I thought I wanted to do. And the lifestyle of working in a think tank just wasn't working for me. And it's nothing against Cato, which I love Cato and what they do and I think they've got great people there. But I was very frustrated, partly because of just things in my personal life, but also my job there. I felt like I could have done remotely most of the time in it. You know, I had to be commuting on the train in a suit and tie at a desk for a job that was 90 to 95 percent on my phone or via computer. And I just thought, man, why couldn't I be in a coffee shop right now? Why am I here sitting at this office? And, you know, so you decided to work in coffee shops and in bars, right? Yeah, so the desire to be in that place led you to led you to seek employment in them. Yeah, I think I'm the first. The only person who's maybe turned down the job at Cato to be a barista. And it was because I legitimately got really into it. And that was a frustrating thing about being in DC. You know, it's a very professional, networking kind of town and especially back in the early aughts. You know, people didn't really get this idea of being serious about making drinks. And so, you know, anytime I'd go to an event of some kind and people would ask the DC question, you know, what do you do? And I'd say, I'm a barista. And instead of following up on that, they would always just say, oh, well, what do you really want to do? And so that's changed. Like there's been a lot more movement in that in terms of respecting the craft of making drinks. But yeah, I was into that. Talk about that actually a little bit because you moved out to Portland in the sort of the midst of what has been called the cocktail renaissance, which is the sea change in the way that people think about make and treat craft cocktails. What was your experience with the cocktail renaissance and being part of that that big ship, that big culinary shift both in bars and at home? Yeah, it was really exciting time. And it was happening in coffee, too. And in both of these cases, there was especially in cocktails, it was more of a rediscovery of doing things the way they should have been done. Whereas with coffee, it was a lot of like figuring things out that maybe had never been done before with like new technology with espresso machines. But in both cases, it was this realization that you could drastically improve the product with just a little bit of care. Like you don't have you didn't have to go go nuts on things. But just by actually thinking about what you're doing and pay attention to it, like you could really elevate what you were serving, whether it was coffee or cocktails. And with cocktails, a lot of that just meant measure everything. Yeah, measure everything, use a real line rather than using you know, rather than using sour mix, make your own syrups, right? That sort of thing, which does intimidate people somewhat like when they're when they're doing these things at home. At the same time, you know, these these are actually relatively simple techniques that most people can master without having a full on, you know, giant home bar. Yeah. And at the same time, it was a really exciting period. In terms of like rediscovering lost spirits. So this was, you know, right before I left, D.C. was when David Wonderick's book in vibe came out, which was, you know, this deep scholarly dive into the cocktails of the early mid to late 1800s and ingredients that we never had before. So, you know, liquor stores were finally getting things that hadn't been sold in the United States for a really long time, like creme de violette and duchy and Aver. And so it was very exciting to in those days to get these things that we were totally unobtainable. Like to put things in perspective back in 2007 when I lived in D.C. and was starting to learn how to make cocktails at home. I had to go to New York City to buy orange bitters, you know. In 2007, 2007, yeah, I heard stories about that from the late 1990s and the early aughts. But even in Washington, D.C., which is a great booze town, yeah, now has a great thriving craft cocktail scene and is also a place where actually the liquor laws allow us to get a really wide variety of products here. You couldn't get orange bitters. I'd never seen them. Most common bitters in cocktails at this point, right? Yeah, I'd never seen them. And then I was on a vacation in New York City. I went to the Pagu Club and I don't even remember what I ordered, but they had a drink with orange bitters on it in it. And I was like, oh, you guys got orange bitters? And the bartender said, yes, we'll actually sell you a bottle. It was, of course, overjoyed. I was like, yeah, I got my first bottle of Regans orange bitters packed it in my suitcase and it took it home. But now you can go to Whole Foods and find probably three or four different orange bitters, plus a whole bunch of other stuff we never imagined. So for you, it was a kind of discovery of of of pleasure and of right, of like lost knowledge, right? You know, because a lot of these drinks that we make are at least based in ideas that started before prohibition. How do you think like how do you think all of this sort of has changed cocktail culture over the last 20 years? You have you have watched this from the front lines, you know, and it's it's changed not just in bars, but at home as well. How do you think people approach cocktails now that is different than, say, in 2002? You know, it's funny, like we'll take an example. One that I come back to a lot is the Pendanus Club cocktail. And in it, I think I know that one. It's it's it's basically like a gin sour with apricot liqueur. So OK. So yeah, it's kind of like a Peggy Club, but with apricot instead of orange, really fun cocktail. And so like when I got into cocktail bartending, I'm going to say, we'll say like around 2008, 2009, like this is one of those vintage drinks that people who read old cocktail books would get into. And you go to a geeky bar and they might have it on the menu or you might prove your crad by offering a Pendanus Club. And I remember this distinct moment where we have a bartender bar in town. I think you've been there to your drop lounge, which was like sort of the flagship cocktail bar in Portland. And we had a bartender bartender there. Yeah. Yeah. What's that? It has been a long time, but yes. Yeah. And so there was a bartender there who had never known anything else. It was the first place she'd ever tended bar. And so she and I were out one night having drinks at another bar where there's another bartender who was like older than both of us. And she ordered a Pendanus Club and he's like, what? And he's a great bartender, but this drink had never come up. And she's like, how do you not know the Pendanus Club? And it was because, you know, this whole generation has now come up in this this environment where this is just taken for granted that this is how drinks are made. You have this extensive knowledge and this the shift of like this huge menu. But what I think is interesting now is we're I think people who are just starting bartending now are really focused on creativity and like trying to make their name with obscure ingredients, which gets hard to do. And so I think there might be a little less appreciation now for just like how to make a great cocktail with four bottles off your shelf that are pretty standard. And so you mentioned David Wondrich, who is the preeminent cocktail historian, the guy who has like helped us understand a huge amount about the history of cocktails, where they came from, old recipes, old techniques. When I interviewed him a number of years ago, one of the questions I asked was what do you think the most important thing is for bartenders and for people who like cocktails? What what should they be focusing on? And he said, stop making crazy drinks with like 17 ingredients that none of which even I have ever heard of. I'm paraphrasing a little bit. Yeah. But right. His was focus on the classics. Learn how to make a martini and a Manhattan in an old fashioned and a daiquiri. Learn how to make those core drinks really well. And and once you've done that, then you can start to expand just a little bit into other drinks. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's just a hard perspective to people have now when there is so much available and when they see shows like Drinkmasters on Netflix. And, you know, if you want to get your your name out there, you know, you need to get press coverage. And so you've got to do something weird or unique, which can be detrimental in some respects when, like Wondrick said, you don't ever master the classics because sometimes as a host, like when someone comes to your bar, sometimes the best thing you can do for them is to make them just a perfectly balanced four ingredient cocktail that they've never had before. That can be revelatory. You know, you don't need to to make spheres of gelatin or smoke something or do a three week infusion like simple can be great. Though you can do those things at home. But this is this is actually something that that is important to me since I make a lot of drinks at home. And I really think it's important for people to like it's fun to make think make these things at home. But if you are if you are making at home, even if you have a fairly complex home bar and even if it is a hobby that you spend a lot of time on. Mastering those simple drinks is actually I think that the thing that is most important. I want to want to ask you about you've talked a lot about sort of working in bars and the knowledge sharing the way things have changed in bars. But I want to ask you about how things have moved into the home, especially during the pandemic. So for about a year, most bars were either closed or might as well have been right, like even if they were open, people weren't really going. Maybe they were doing some sort of takeout program. And that brought that brought a lot of cocktail making into the home because that's where people could make drinks during that time. You were, of course, writing your book about making drinks at home. It seems like like what are the advantages? Actually, maybe this maybe this is the question I want to ask. What are the advantages to making drinks at home, even when bars are open? Well, price is a big one. It's a lot cheaper to make it at home. I think it's a pretty fun and approachable hobby. As you've experienced, like, you know, you can go very far into it. As we can tell by looking over your shoulder right now, you clearly have, which is amazing. Yeah, like at home, you can. So my friend, Brett, who I wrote the book with, said something the other day, which is great, was it it's a great way to be hospitable to and especially with like a pretty, like small, but well thought out bar, you can kind of please everyone. And so when they come over, he's an analogy to cooking. Like if you have someone over for dinner, you can't just kind of say, well, what do you want? It could be anything. I'll make it. That's pretty hard. You're either getting steak or you're getting pasta, but you're probably not getting two different meals, right? Like for everybody. Exactly. Yeah. Whereas with cocktails, if someone comes over, you can you can say that and say, hey, like what do you want? Do you want something spirit forward? Do you want something better? Do you want a margarita? You know, you've got all these bases and then you can make them something really fun. I think it's interesting the way that this in some ways started in in bars and with bartenders, but also also the the craft cocktail renaissance that we've been talking about and the changes here also started in some ways at home with enthusiasts, with guys, guys like Ted High, you know, with with sort of folks talking to each other on the Internet and bringing some of this right and sharing knowledge together. And there's really a kind of interesting story about how this was a distributed project that no one really planned, but that that the Internet allowed people to share a lot of information. How do you feel the Internet has influenced your cocktail making? Is like and like, how do you think that sort of shapes the way that people that people make drinks at home right now? Well, I mean, for me, I owe my career to the Internet because I was not an experienced bartender when I moved to Portland. And if we're being honest, I wasn't even a very good bartender. It was I was never super fast. But, you know, what I had was I was I discovered I was pretty good at making drinks like I could come up with new things and coming up with new things. It was a whole lot easier back in 2008 than it is now, just because the space hasn't been so thoroughly explored. You know, I could make a cocktail with rye, whisky, amaro and sweet vermouth and call it something new where that combination has been played out. But I was blogging about it. And so I had this whole network of people that I knew through cocktail blogging, another one being Jeffrey Morgenthaler. You know, it was obviously he was in Eugene, Oregon, Portland based bartender who has really helped shape the kind of home bartending, but also bartending at bars all across. Yeah. And he wasn't even in Portland yet. At the time he was in Eugene, Oregon. And so, you know, that's a very small market. Like he would not have been known, but he had this great cocktail blog. And, you know, sometimes it was just about making cocktails. But a lot of times it was about sharing information and like what you could figure out about some spirit or the history of the cocktail. There used to be an event called a mixology Monday, which was on a Monday of every month. They were the Paul Clark, who's now an editor in by would host it. And he would pick a topic and just say, hey, this month's mixology Monday is this spirit or this holiday. And then you'd have 30 different bloggers around the country coming up with cocktails to fit that theme and talking about what they are and why they work. So, yeah, I got I got hired because I was a blogger more than anything, which which is great. That's the most DC thing about your Portland story. Yeah, it really is. And I don't think you can do that anymore. Like one, because the the knowledge is out there so much, like it would be really hard to like make your name as a cocktail blogger because not many people blog that much. And then I mean, we have newsletters now like you do, which is actually really exciting development, which I think is great. And that's the point I'm getting to is in recent years, the internet cocktail trends have been driven more by Instagram than by blogging. And there's disadvantages there. Like one, it's just it's all about the visuals. You know, fancy glassware, really cool garnishes, you know, fun, big drinks, you know, there's only so many ways you can make a Manhattan cocktail look sexy and different. And so people are always trying to do these kind of outlandish things. And then Instagram doesn't really convey a lot of knowledge. Like it'll it'll usually be maybe a recipe, but not a lot of background. You're not going to get a paragraph length description of what each ingredient is or the history of the drink. So yeah, I'm actually pretty excited to see things like newsletters come back. Like like when you do it, you really go into the the wise and house of a cocktail when you give it, which is always a series of choices, right? And like each choice matters. And you like and you might, you know, different people might make different choices and different choices might be legitimate. But this is, I think sort of I think there's something sort of fundamentally libertarian about cocktails and ripe, which is that they are they're about individual choices and they're about customization. And you mentioned this for guests, right? They're also about, you know, so it's like you can make something that is exactly perfectly tailored for each one of your guests or for yourself. And you can always make, right? You know, if you're making your martini, right? Like everybody makes a martini differently, right? There's so many different ways to do this incredibly simple drink. And and it's the whole idea of craft cocktail culture kind of boils down in a lot of ways to to the libertarian idea of individual choice in everything and of sort of individual customization and the idea that there's no one right way to do, you know, to make any drink. And this is this is a sort of, you know, I think this is true about about all of the classics. You know, we talked about we'll learn to make a great daiquiri, but what a daiquiri is a three ingredient cocktail. And there's a nearly infinite number of ways to make a great daiquiri at the same time, right? And so it's it's this very strange sort of thing where it's like on the one hand, you can make you can make very good versions of this and there and there are elevated versions. And on the other hand, there's also, you know, a nearly infinite array of different ways to make these things. I actually want to switch gears just a little bit here and talk about some of your other work, not on booze, but on another vice on smoking. And so before you co-authored Raising the Bar, you actually wrote a book titled The Rediscovery of Tobacco. Tell me a little bit about that book and about your work on on on that vice. Yeah. Well, first of all, writing that book prevented me from having this home bartending book out in 2020. So in that sense, it was a huge mistake because 2020 was the year this should have been released in hindsight. But yeah, the read. So this has always been a passion of mine going back to tobacco back to when I was in DC, then it became like the the one policy area that I think kept me in policy writing. And I don't know if I would have stayed in it if not for this. But it came out actually for my coffee days. I had a regular at the coffee shop who was kind of intimidating. He was because back then, you know, not a lot of people were drinking straight espresso and this guy would come in and he would order just straight espresso. And so I knew I had to make it good. And not because he was mean or anything, just because when somebody ordered straight espresso back then, you're like, oh, this person knows what they want. They know what's good. I've got to do it right. And then he would also go outside and smoke a cigar. And I just thought this was so bizarre because I in those days, I'm like tobacco is gross. It just destroys your palate. Why would anybody do this? And then I got to talking to this guy and he made me realize that the way he talked about tobacco was the way I was thinking about coffee where the place it's grown matters, how it's handled matters. You know, whether you have a super dark rapper or super light rapper is going to affect the taste. And he finally convinced me to try one and, you know, change the course of my life in that way because I realized it was amazing. I like I love cigars. And unfortunately, the the same time that I got in the cigars was the same time that smoking bands were spreading across the United States. And I was in DC when the fight over the DC ban came on. And without taking like too strong a position either way on it, like I was just really frustrated by how terrible the science that was being written about was in terms of the effects of secondhand smoke. And there were some really outlandish claims being made and sort of mindlessly repeated in the press about how dangerous it is. And that's not to say that there's no risk, but you were seeing claims like if we implement a smoking ban, we'll see the population level rate of heart attacks drop by 60 percent in six months. But now it would be a miracle cure if it were true, but it obviously wasn't. But this would get repeated. That did not happen. It did not. It happened in one small town, you know, Helena, Montana. But no, it turned out to never be replicable, which shouldn't be surprising. But yeah, the New York Times wrote about it, even the Wall Street Journal wrote about it. You know, these these just kind of ridiculous studies would get picked up. And so as someone who was just getting into this and then seeing the businesses that I like to go to being forced to shut down or fundamentally change what they do, it became something I write about quite a bit. And then, you know, moved to Oregon. Actually, I had the bad luck to move to Oregon three months before our smoking ban took effect as well. So I was basically being chased by smoking bans across the country. But are you sure you're not the cause of? Oh, man, what if I what if it is my fault? This is terrible. But I started I started seeing the same thing happen with e-cigarettes when these came on the scene where there is this this moral panic about them on one level. But also just again, really terrible science being put out in the service of banning or restricting these products, which in this case, like, could actually help people like, I love cigars, but I'm not going to tell anybody the cigars are saving people's lives. E-cigarettes could legitimately save a lot of people's lives if we could convince cigarette smokers to switch. And they were just getting a terrible bad rap in the press and, you know, being banned in city and state levels. And I saw a continuity here that I think a lot of people even in tobacco control don't really see. Because because now there's a huge divide in the field, like really, really bitter divide among academics who see the potential for harm reduction and the people in the more Bloomberg prohibitionist wing, who just want to see everything banned and nicotine and tobacco is wiped out forever. But I don't think it's hard even to convince the people who are on the pro harm reduction side of that divide now that this is not a new problem, that it that the field has been rotting for a long time with its tolerance for really bad science and lack of respect for people's choices that dates back to much earlier issues like secondhand smoke. So the rediscovery of tobacco was was my attempt to sort of take a long view on smoking, like going back to, you know, Colombian times when Westerners first encountered tobacco all the way to the present day to give just to get a bigger perspective on it outside of the usual prohibitionist framework. Since you mentioned prohibitionists, yeah, you meant you wrote a great piece for Reason magazine earlier this year about the dawn of the nicotine prohibition era. Do you think there are clear parallels between alcohol prohibition, you know, as we saw it 100 years ago in the United States and what's happening with nicotine today? Yeah, I think it's a great parallel, much more so than like I would compare what we're doing to nicotine now, much more to alcohol than, say, to the drug war. Because at least for now, nobody's going after users, like nobody is saying we're going to pick up menthol smokers off the street and throw them in jail. Well, unless they happen to be selling illegal looses and, you know, yeah, and it's maybe not meant maybe they're not attacking menthol smokers specifically. But we do see that, you know, selling cigarettes kind of illegally, right, just one at a time on streets has led to violent police encounters. Absolutely. And and I think we're just going to keep seeing more of that because like it does go back to alcohol prohibition, where during prohibition, it wasn't illegal to drink. It was illegal to sell booze. And that's what we're at with tobacco. And in most cases, to make it and to make it. Yeah. And I think that's what we're going to see. I think we're stumbling towards the same outcome with nicotine and tobacco, where nobody, at least most people aren't really thinking about it in a prohibition as sense, but they're putting in place policies that will have the same effect. So, for example, pretty much all e-cigarettes will not be authorized by the FDA and will be illegal to sell in the United States. And then we're also seeing states like Massachusetts, New York, now California, you know, outlawing all forms of flavored tobacco. And, you know, they always fall back on it and say, this is just a regulation. We're just saying stores can't sell this. We're not arresting anybody. But there's always other laws in place. So, for example, if this creates an illicit market and then people respond by bringing in flavored tobacco anyway. Well, they might not be arrested for violating the flavor ban, but they'll be arrested for violating state tax law, because there's no way to pay taxes legally on these products. And so I'm following cases now where we likely will see the first person go to prison in the United States very soon for bringing flavored tobacco into Massachusetts, even seeing it in Portland, which is very frustrating because I live in probably maybe next to San Francisco, the most liberal drug-friendly city in the United States. You know, we're one of the first states to legalize cannabis. We've decriminalized almost all drugs. We've got silo-subin legalization on the way. We've got stores openly selling mushrooms here in Portland now, you know, outside the law, but nobody's doing anything. And at the same time, our local county board is voting to ban the sale of flavored nicotine patches that are, you do no harm, basically, it can really help people quit smoking. So it's really frustrating, you know, seeing this dichotomy of how every other drug is treated as a person's choice and as something that should be least legal in some way. And nicotine, which is pretty low risk once you divorce it from inhaling a cigarette, is being not criminalized, but being made illegal to sell. To bring this back to alcohol for a moment. It does seem to me like there is a kind of neo-prohibitionist movement that is growing, not to ban alcohol outright. But that attempts to use policy or wants to use policy to substantially decrease the amount of alcohol that is purchased and consumed in the United States. And primarily this is about tax policy, where you just now constantly see arguments for substantially increasing taxes on alcohol in order to, they will always say that it's about problem users. It's about people who abuse alcohol. But it would cost everyone who purchases alcohol and it would really change the market. Do you see that movement gaining hold? Do you see any relationship to some of the nicotine prohibition there or sort of nicotine prohibition movement that you have written about? Do you think there's a relationship? I mean, there's definitely an attitude of trying to restrict drinking. And, you know, I think they choose funny targets sometimes, like to go back to what we talked about making drinks at home or getting drinks to go. Like the prohibitionist groups, if we want to call them that, they're like very, very opposed to the idea of being able to get a cocktail to go, which to me seems very counterintuitive because one, this is the most expensive way for you to drink a cocktail at home, right? Like to get it to... If you're trying to raise the price of drinking at home. Exactly. Here's how to do it. Cocktails being purchased to go would be a method for doing that. Yeah, it would dramatically raise the price. And then second, you are at home. So you you are avoiding one of the really big risk of drinking, which is drunk driving. So for us, I mean, to me, that just makes sense to allow people to do this and to be able to say, even to say to a guest as a bartender, it's like, hey, how about you get this next drink to take home instead of have it here? All right. So just before we close out here, one thing that I want to ask you is, what is your favorite cocktail that is in the book? That's such a hard choice, but I'm actually going to call out a DC bartender on this one. Chantal saying who does literary cocktails in DC gave us a fantastic... Sherry specialist. Her drinks are wonderful. Yes. Amazing to Sherry. And so I asked her about Sherry, but I also actually reached out to her about Furnet. And I said, Chantal, I'm looking for Furnet cocktails. I know you do a ton of drinks. Like, do you have anything for me? And she emailed me with, I think, 23 different Furnet cocktails, which is so over the top. Most of them didn't fit the format of the book because they might have called for something too specific. But she had one that worked great and it has become one of my go-to cocktails now, which we ended up, she didn't have a short name for it. So we called it Telling Phoebe, but it's Scotch, Sweet for Mouth, Furnet and Benedictine. So spirit forward, bittersweet and really a great drink. I am excited to try it. Jacob, thank you so much for talking with me today. His book is Raising the Bar, a bottle by bottle guide to mixing masterful cocktails at home. It is available everywhere. Books are sold. Thank you so much. This has been delightful. Thanks, Peter. Always great to see you.