Have you been sobbing into your dirty martini lately? Subbing out your weekly therapist visit for some couch time with a gimlet? Do you enjoy your Tom Collins most when paired with a box of Kleenex and a worn copy of Marley and Me? Well, if you've been under the impression that gin will make you sad, the NY Times says YOU ARE WRONG, and a highball or two will actually fill you with the joy of a thousand cardamom bitters.
Or something like that. In a soul-stirring piece this week, NYT Magazine drink columnist Rosie Schaap says she used to think gin was the most depressing of all alcoholic beverages, designed only for those who want to wallow in Morrissey-esque self-pity. "I spent much of a particularly hot, sticky New York summer drinking nothing but gin and tonic, an order that seemed to me sophisticated enough for a young woman trying her best to feel like an adult," Schaap writes. But apparently, gin's just about as happy a drink as the person drinking it: "And I realized it wasn’t the gin that had bummed me out all those years earlier; it was life." (MAESTRO, INSPIRATIONAL ORCHESTRAL OVERTURE, PLEASE!)
But Schaap's gin-piphany is good news, both for all those bespoke distilleries and fancy gin bars that have been popping up all over the place, and for the rest of us morose, Beefeater-swigging lost souls walking around with Meat Is Murder on repeat. Gin is not the enemy, friends, so put that cocktail down and indulge your sorrows in a glass of Sour Power moonshine instead—that really is the saddest drink.
