Four Years of Substack Cocktails

Also: Send me your cocktail queries! And subscribe now to lock in your price.

When I pressed send on the first edition of this newsletter in November 2020, I didn’t expect it to last a year.

I’d been writing about cocktails for years already, but mostly for myself, in scattered notes and haphazard recipe revisions that I kept in a private drink diary. With a newsletter, I’d be writing for an audience, trying to translate my notions into actionable, interesting ideas that others could actually use.

Somehow, it worked. Today, this newsletter turns four years old. I can’t believe it either. 

Some of you have been here from the very beginning. Many of you are more recent subscribers. I’m grateful to all of you for making this newsletter possible. In so many ways, this newsletter has changed my life for the better. I hope it has improved your lives just a little bit too.

This is still a modest project in many ways.

I write and edit every edition myself. (I know—you can tell.)

I make all the drinks myself, including the failures that you don’t see.

I take all the photos on my phone. (Again, I know—you can tell.)

My wife and friends are my test audience.

My dog is my sole assistant. Maybe I need another one. All in good time.

But even in its DIY, homebrew modesty, this project has been far more successful, and far more fun, than I ever imagined. That’s entirely thanks to you, my loyal subscribers. 

I hope you’ll stick with me for another year.

 

In the coming year, you can expect more weekly cocktail columns, more Old Fashioneds, more large dog(s), more Negronis, more puns, more elaborate movie metaphors, more digressive footnotes, and more Cynar.

As always, this newsletter will focus first and foremost on breaking down and understanding cocktail recipes—how they work, why they work, and how you can use that knowledge to make and modify your own drinks at home. 

We’ll look at use cases. We’ll explore ingredients. We’ll discuss swaps and substitutions and ratios. 

More than anything else, what I want to convey with this newsletter is that making cocktails is a conceptual exercise. Cocktail-making is a sturdy craft with recurring forms and structures and techniques and rules of thumb that can be put to use by home bartenders.

Yes, I want to show you how to make and improve specific drinks. But I also want to teach you how to take those drinks and alter them, play with them, make them your own. That’s what home bartending is all about. 

We can learn something from every drink we make. We can also learn from each other. 

One of the best things about this Substack is that it’s created a community, a group of like-minded folks who are curious about cocktails. That means sharing recipes and knowledge, but also asking questions and trying to figure things out.

Indeed, one of the joys of writing this newsletter is that many of you have written in to ask about recipes, ingredients, techniques, odd bottles, what bars to go to and so forth. My inbox is full of interesting queries.

Your questions are always illuminating. They help me understand what readers might want to know about. They help me consider different use-cases for different drinks or styles of drink.

I think seeing those questions might be helpful for other readers as well. 

So as we head into the next year, I want to introduce a new feature: Send me your cocktail questions, and I’ll try to answer them in the newsletter.

You can ask me anything you want about home bartending, cocktail recipes and ingredients, drink-making tricks and techniques, or bars and bargoing.

Do you have a special event you want to plan drinks for? A skeptical friend you’re trying to win over to the cult of Cynar? A recipe you’re working on that you’d like to polish? Do you have a bone to pick with my Daiquiri spec? Do you want to know what to do with a weird old bottle you found tucked away in a family member’s bar cabinet? Ask away! 

I almost certainly won’t be able to answer every single query. I won’t be able to make or comment on every single drink recipe sent my way.  I’ll focus on answering and elevating questions I think might have value to other readers. 

But I’d like to give all of you more of a voice in the newsletter by making this a semi-regular feature.

To submit a question, please send an email to: cocktailswithsuderman@gmail.com with the words Reader Question in the subject line. 

Finally, a programming note: After Christmas, I’ll be raising prices. 

If you are already a paid subscriber, this will not affect you so long as you maintain a continuous subscription. Current paid subscribers will renew at the same rate.

Four years in, new subscribers will get a lot more than initial subscribers did four years ago. A paid subscription unlocks full access to the archives. That’s hundreds and hundreds of newsletters—and even more recipes—available with a paid subscription. 

I strongly recommend an annual subscription: I conceive of this newsletter as a series of year-long classes, with extended units and recurring themes and elements.

My plans are never fully set in stone—although I sketch out big-picture arcs in advance, I typically only write one or two weeks ahead of publication, and sometimes just a day or two.¹ But over the next year, I anticipate that we’ll look at some historical Manhattan variations, several savory Martinis, a couple of notable tiki drinks, some highballs, and, I hope, a new-to-this-newsletter technique or two. 

We’ll also have a new Thanksgiving drink coming in the next several days. (Hint: It rhymes with lean, mean Houdini.) 

Finally, I hope to write more about bars and bargoing, and how home bartenders should approach drinking out. 

If you’ve been considering a paid subscription, the time to lock in is now. 

Thanks to all my readers for four incredible, surprising, delightful, delicious, structurally rigorous,² Cynar-soaked years.

Every bar needs regulars. The same goes for a cocktail newsletter. I’m glad to have the very best. 

The Big Gal Is Ready For Another Year

1. I think this is more or less how early seasons of 24, which always seemed to have a rough idea where it was going but also seemed to be making it up on the fly, were written.

2. …mostly.