The Ultimate All-Booze Drinks-Giving Menu

This morning, apropos of basically nothing apart from the fact that it’s two days before Thanksgiving, my buddy Will Grindle emailed me this totally batshit insane Thanksgiving menu comprised entirely of booze. Apparently, he intends to serve all of these cocktails—hopefully alongside some actual food—to human beings on Thursday. He is a lovely guy and I hope he and his guests survive this endeavor, but just in case, I figured it should see the light of day beyond my inbox.

Ladies and gentlemen, Drinks-giving.

And Will, I wish you and your liver the best of luck.

Hello Paula!

I think you’re one of the few people I know who might fully appreciate this. After hearing an NPR piece that referenced a cocktail called a Bullshot (like a Bloody Mary but with beef broth instead of tomato juice), I got it into my head that I could create an entire Thanksgiving dinner in booze form.

Some of us are gonna be in Austin on Thanksgiving Day and I am gonna make them my guinea pigs for this, but I wanted to share the set up with you.

Main Course: Brined Turkey

This is probably the simplest of the cocktails, as it is just a pickleback using Wild Turkey. Best way to start the meal, I think.

Side Dish: Hotshot

I was trying to make a cocktail of savory sides and I decided to use the Bullshot as my base.

Making it with 1 part potato vodka and 2 parts beef consommé (with a few dashes of Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce), I figured this would cover the potatoes and gravy.

Garnishing with pickled green beans and cocktail onions would give the sense of a classic green bean casserole, or garnishing with a stick of celery and onion would give it that dressing/stuffing vibe.

Coming up with a Thanksgiving-y name was a pain. After googling around for alternate names for the base dishes, a Wikipedia hole lead me to “hotdish.” Swapping the dish for a shot, and I finally settled on something that sounded right and covered pretty well the basics of the sides it was representing.

Side Dish: Calixocopia

Representing the sweeter sides and the various harvest fruits and vegetables, this is basically a Cape Cod with even more types of juices. The V8 Fusion has juice from sweet potatoes, purple carrots, carrots, white grapes, apples, concord grapes and red raspberries, while the Ocean Spray covers the cranberry element. (V8 actually has a Fusion variety with cranberry, but I could not find it anywhere unless I wanted to pay $30 to have a case shipped to me.)

I’m doing one part each of the V8 and cranberry juice to one part of corn vodka (Tito’s in this case).

There were a lot of options for this name: Plymouth is off Cape Cod Bay, but not on the cape itself, but there is a Plymouth Bay. Too confusing. I toyed around with a Plymouth on the Rocks but finally settled on a Calixocopia—roughly meaning “cup of plenty”—as a play on the cornucopia and to represent the sheer variety of fruit and vegetable types in it (plus it’s just super fun to say).

Desserts: Liquid Pies and Wine

Desserts were the easiest. I went with a pumpkin ale and a pecan porter for the traditional pies (I might still try to get a growler of 512 Pecan Porter by the day, but this was my backup). I added a harvest wine to the mix with the Beaujolais Nouveau (though when I went to get it, they were already out, so I figured by this point in the “meal” no one was gonna care that I got a bottle of Two Buck Chuck nouveau instead).

Like I said, I’ll let you know how it actually goes once we start drinking it, but wanted to share the idea with you.

Happy Thanksgiving and I hope you and yours are happy, healthy and warm!

-Will