American author Ernest Hemingway. Photo / Tore Johnson/Getty Images
By Kiran Dass
"Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks," writer Ernest Hemingway once famously wrote. Known as much for his love of alcoholic beverages as his sharp pen, Hemingway invented the dreamy cocktail Death in the Afternoon - an opalescent combination of absinthe and champagne. Washington D.C-based cocktail historian Philip Greene is Trademark and Internet Counsel for the United States Marine Corps, with an office in the Pentagon by day. But his other specialist area is the heady world of all things cocktail-related, with a particular passion and knowledge of the inexorable history between literature, writers and cocktail swilling.
Greene turned his meticulous research skills to Hemingway's life and drinks of choice with his book To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion. He is also the author of books The Manhattan: The Story of the First Modern Cocktail with Recipes, and A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris, where he examines an array of notable American ex-pats from Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Gertrude Stein. It's only 9.30am when Greene and I speak ahead of his appearance at Wellington's HighBall 2019 event this weekend but it's not long before he makes me feel thirsty for a mid-morning stiffener.
So how did Greene, a history major, become a cocktail historian? He says the spark was lit while at law school in New Orleans - a city drenched with food and drink history, folklore and culture. "I became a New Orleans history buff, particularly the food and drink scene. Then it occurred to me to do my family tree, since my paternal grandmother was Marie Louise Peychaud and her cousin was Antoine Amedee Peychaud, inventor of Peychaud's Bitters."
In 2004, Greene heard about the festival Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans and emailed the director, asking if they'd like him to talk about Peychaud and the history and evolution of classic New Orleans cocktail, the Sazerac. From there, Greene went on to help launch the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans. He also fancied himself as a bit of a mixologist during his university days.
"I invented a drink based on the Tom Collins, a classic gin drink but, in homage to the lead singer from Genesis, I added vodka instead and named it the Phil Collins. See what I did there," he laughs.
When I ask Greene to match great works of literature with cocktails, he says he could give me 40 examples but settles on a handful, starting with The Gimlet - a cocktail of gin and lime - matched with Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled noir classic, The Long Goodbye.
"The plot involves the disappearance of Philip Marlowe's friend, Terry. Terry was a gimlet drinker, so Marlowe visits Terry's old haunt and orders one. A 'woman in black' also orders a gimlet, which Marlowe perceives to mean she knew Terry, and they end up having gimlets together," he says.
"Also in that novel, Chandler offers great commentary on bars, how he likes bars just after they open for the evening when the air is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. He wrote, 'I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and anticipation. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar - that's wonderful.'"
It was a Hemingway cocktail creation which first prompted Greene - a literature and Hemingway lover - to drink the cocktails he was reading about. In the novel Islands in the Stream, the protagonist drinks a Green Isaac's Special, which is essentially a Tom Collins made with lime juice instead of lemon. Reading the novel while on holiday with his then girlfriend (now wife of 27 years), while visiting her parents on Sanibel Island, Florida, Greene had an idea.
"I'm reading about the drink, and I'm thinking, 'Wait, there's a lime tree over there, a coconut tree over there, there's gin and bitters in the house, damn it, I'm going to make this drink.' And I did, and I'm sure her parents were thinking I was daft, but that's what started me thinking about cataloguing all the drinks of Hemingway."
Greene's next match was the martini as featured in Hemingway's autobiographical novel, A Farewell to Arms, about Frederic, a young man trapped in the horrors of World War I who falls in love with his nurse after being wounded (much like Hemingway himself). When she becomes pregnant, they escape from Italy into Switzerland and he defects from the Italian Army. Feeling at a loss without his uniform, the protagonist orders a martini as a way of returning to normalcy, to tune out the war. From the book: "The martini felt cool and clean … I had never tasted anything so cool and clean. They made me feel civilised." Greene says after Hemingway grew tired of indulging in too much red wine, bread, cheese, bad coffee and grappa; the crisp clarity of the classic martini was a tonic.
"He's in civilian clothes, having a martini. The war was over from him, he's checked out."
When I quiz Greene about what he thinks makes the perfect cocktail, he says much of it depends on using freshly squeezed juice, not the bottled stuff, to always use plenty of good ice cubes (dilution is important in a drink but it must also be very cold), to balance the sweet, the sour, the strong and the bitter; and not to fuss over that expensive bottle of bourbon.
"It's not so much about the quality of the spirits, though that is important. Would you use a scotch fillet for a stew? Probably not. Just cut a lime in half. It's not rocket science and you're halfway to making a daiquiri."
Highball Festival, Wellington, this weekend
highball.co.nz/themainevent
New York Times: The internet is reframing the humble fizzy drink as an indulgent escape.