How to Prep a Cocktail Theme Night: House of the Dragon Edition

Here be cocktails.

At a certain point in the evolution of your home bartending hobby, you will have the idea: There will be an event coming up, and you will want to gather some friends and celebrate that event with cocktails — specifically, theme cocktails. 

This will be a good idea. But it will also be a somewhat daunting task. You will need to find or design cocktails that are both tied to your theme and relatively easy to put together for a crowd. You will need to test and prep the drinks, and you will need to design a menu of sorts, or at the very least, come up with a drink name or two.

I speak from experience: In many ways, this is how I got my start making cocktails at home. 

At times, my main job entails watching live political events on TV during the evening: speeches, debates, election night returns, etc. Sometimes, my colleagues and I would gather at my house to watch together. In order to make these events more fun and more tolerable, I decided to learn to make cocktails, and then give them silly, headline-adjacent names designed to amuse too-online news junkies. Instead of beer and wine, we’d have Mezcal Negronis rebranded with hyper-refential names like Roy Moore Love Poetry, and so on and so forth. The events started with a single signature drink or two and then expanded to three or four drinks, and later even longer menus with more elaborate standalone gags untethered from any specific news event. At one point, I printed out an entire menu designed to look roughly like the front page of The New York Times, with many of the drink names structured as kinda-sorta jokes made in the Times’ headline style.

Possibly this is a strong sign I need to seriously reexamine my life choices. 

In any case, it was all good fun, and I learned a lot about making cocktails, generally, and making cocktails at home for medium-sized groups of people, specifically. Eventually it led to this newsletter, so you, dear subscriber, can be the judge of whether it was all worthwhile. 

These days, I’m somewhat more interested in updating classic and should-be classic cocktails than in too-online in-joke drink names. But from time to time I still like to bring people together and serve drinks tied to some sort of specific event. 

For example, last weekend, I had about a dozen people over for the first episode of the Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon. Naturally, I took the opportunity to make a menu of dragon-themed drinks. 

So this week, we’re going to discuss how to go about designing theme cocktails generally, and then we are going to look at the construction of two different dragon-themed cocktails, both of which use a homemade dragon fruit syrup. 

Themes and Memes

Cocktails lend themselves well to theme nights, whether at home or at bars. Sherry-centric bartender Chantal Tseng has been holding delightful Literary Cocktails events at various bars in Washington, D.C., for years, with themed menus focused on specific books. (I recently attended a really delightful one of these built around Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.) For a long time there was a rotating theme bar in Shaw devoted to subjects like Super Mario Bros. and Gwar. Naturally, there was a Game of Thrones pop-up bar as well. 

These sorts of professional pop-ups are designed to advertise themselves on social media, and they can be fairly elaborate in ways that are difficult to replicate at home. You’re probably not going to completely redecorate your house for a month and purchase a large array of on-theme glassware, as tempting as that authentic Viking horn mug might be. As always, atmosphere is the hardest thing to replicate about a bar experience. 

But you can still put on a pretty good show at home without devoting your entire life to the project.