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Orizaba Beer
I was reading the last chunk of Against the Day a few weeks ago, freshly home from Mexico, and I found a passage containing a couple of drinks that I’d entirely missed recording on The List. Page 990 brings us to a cantina called “El Quetzal Dormido,” where Frank is drinking “either maguey brandy from…
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Chilean Riesling
You would think I could have taken care of this one years ago. But nary a drop of Chilean riesling has graced Australian shores in the years I’ve been looking. So it took a trip to Santiago. We had only a day in the Chilean capital, sandwiched between two weeks in Patagonia and a week…
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Pulque
I remember clearly the moment I reached page 376 of my first reading of Against the Day. I’d already been moonlighting as Drunk Pynchon here for a few years, just with a big “Coming Soon” sign plastered in place of the AtD list (or actually, it originally said “coming less soon”; I was pretty intimidated…
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Merry Christmas! (Perrier Jouët)
Merry Christmas everybody! May your parties be as glamorous as R. Wiltshire Vibe’s (and not as evil): Palm trees grew everywhere, arecas, palmettos, Chinese fan-palms, ranging from squat greenhouse specimens in wicker-covered pots to twelve-foot foyer varieties to stately coconut and date trees rooted somewhere far below and soaring to these ballroom altitudes through openings…
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Absinthe and Champagne
I’m planning on rereading Against the Day next month, as I’m taking it with me on an international expedition (which may or may not be Drunk Pynchon related…). What better preparation could there be for journeying back into Pynchon’s titanic opus than drinking that most Against the Day of liver-provocations, a cocktail of absinthe and…
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Piña Colada
It’s January 1956; it’s Chapter One of V.; Benny Profane’s back in New York, up early yo-yoing sub-pavement between Grand Central and Times Square. He meets a group of Puerto Rican kids called Tolito, José, and Cucarachito (Klook to his friends). Their sister Josefina shows up too and shortly decides that Profane should move in…
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Grapefruit Margarita
A cocktail from Inherent Vice brought us what is by far the most read post on this site: the tequila zombie. I’m not sure exactly why that one pulls in the hits so much more effectively than anything else around here. It certainly isn’t the wildest or most iconic drink we’ve tackled (see banana breakfast,…
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Canary Wine
Are we getting late in the game here? The list of empty bottles grows lengthy. But plenty remain uncracked too (even some low-hanging fruit—rum and coke!). And of course there is always the possibility of a new novel descending, pages humid with ethanol. Plus no one could accuse me of setting a cracking pace. This…
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Peach Brandy Milk Punch
Milk wouldn’t seem to be the most common booze component (let alone the most promising), but we do have a minor history with it here at drunk pynchon dot com. We first got lactic live on air with the Pynchon in Public podcast back in 2015—Chris took the vodka with milk, while Bo and I…
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Fortified Wine Spritzer
Partly on the wise urging of a reader here, I reread Vineland a month or so ago. My original go at it however many years ago was a bit juvenile. Gravity’s Rainbow was my first Pynchon, and this followed hot on its contrails. Predictably, I was craving paranoid pyrotechnics and wild world-historic tangents and wound…
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Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 