The 4th of July means two things: celebrating America and getting so drunk that you start fistfights with random bums you think are King George III. But if you’re going to do your patriotic duty and get completely smashed, you better make sure you’re doing so the right way.
Now there are lots of so-called “patriotic” drinks, cocktails that just have a dumb red, white and blue name, but we’re better than that. We understand that a true American drink has to represent true American ideals. These are not fancy drinks with fancy names, but American drinks celebrating everything that makes us so awesome.
So screw you, England, Bin Laden, Ivan Drago and everyone else who has ever tried to keep us down, because we’re going to toast America this 4th of July with one of these eight truly patriotic alcoholic drinks.
8. Bacontini
It’s a martini mixed with bacon! Come on! Okay sure, vodka isn’t exactly as American as apple pie, but you know what is American? Stealing some other country’s traditions and making them even better, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with the Bacontini. You start off by soaking strips of cooked bacon in a bottle of vodka, and then wait for the fat to become strained off. Once the vodka becomes cloudy with that bacon goodness, you’re ready to go. Top off with a garnish of – what else? – bacon, and you’ll be drunkenly slurring “USA! USA! USA!” before having to be rushed to the hospital for a combination heart/liver failure, or as it’s known in medical circles, “the American Dream.”
7. Four Loko
America is the only country on Earth that could have come up with something as ridiculous as Four Loko. It is a perfect symbol of our desire to get trashed in new and dumbass ways, and of our go, go, go attitude. You won’t find Four Loko in some place like Spain or Italy, where the banks are all closed at 1 in the afternoon because everyone has to take a nap. No, you’ll find it in the good ol’ US of A, where everyone from ditch diggers to Wall Street tycoons are working on a 96 hour work day and still find time to get hammered with their bros. Four Loko’s caffeine will let you keep powering on even after your brain tries to shut down like Congress in a budget debate. Sure, it essentially turns you into a drunk zombie, but you’re a drunk American zombie. Never forget that.
6. Jell-O Shots
As the ad once said… there’s always room for Jell-O. And that’s especially true if that Jell-O is made up of alcohol and drunk girls screaming “Whooooooooo!” all night long. Everyone loves Jell-O, unless of course you’re a communist, and even then, I bet you’d sneak a few shots in when no one is looking, comrade. The Jell-O shot represents the perpetual youth and energy of America… or something. Look, it’s just a fun, really easy way to get hammered, and that’s good enough for me.
5. New Orleans Hand Grenade
Look, I know I said I wouldn’t get hung up on names, but what’s more American than New Orleans and hand grenades? Put them together and you get an exceptionally powerful – and American – drink that is made up of vodka, gin, rum and melon liqueur, which is all well and good, but what really makes it special is that that already potent mixture is topped off with pure grain alcohol. It doesn’t get any more American than that, baby. Any time you can use your drink to fuel a funny-car, you’re doing your forefathers proud.
4. Liquid Steak
Uh, it’s called Liquid Steak for god’s sake. Sure, some might think combining Bacardi 151 with Worcestershire sauce is disgusting, but that’s coward talk, and we can’t have that. Not here, not in America, the land of the free, the home of people so brave that they would willingly ingest rum that is 75.5% alcohol combined with steak sauce. We fought wars so that we could do this sort of thing. Men and women died for it. The least you could do is throw up a salute before you down this and then throw up everything else.
3. Moonshine
It’s a drink so American that it’s actually in the history books. Now that’s when you know you’ve made it as a drink. Sure, some common liquors and beers might show up in magazine ads or in TV commercials, but not many show up side by side with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. But moonshine made it, and it made it because no alcoholic drink is as representative of the stubborn American spirit as moonshine. They tried to take away all alcohol and so how did Americans respond? By making their own in bathtubs. Sure, some of them went blind, and this is basically the spiritual cousin of a meth lab, but where there is a will, there is a way, and nothing proves the American will to get completely hammered as the way known as moonshine.
2. Jack Daniels
Jack Daniels is the most American of all hard liquors. It just is. There’s no use in arguing it. It’s iconic, a symbol of everything people associate with us around the world. That’s kind of messed up, but what the hell, we’re a country of messed up people, descended from weirdoes too wild and crazy to be acceptable to any other country. Jack Daniels is all of us. It is our rebellious nature summed up in one badass bottle with a black label to represent our black pirate hearts.
1. Beer
Let’s not argue about labels, about imports or domestic, microbrews or big business macrobrews. Just tip a bottle of your choice, of something fine, something bitter, something light, something dark, something that tastes like the honey of the gods or something that tastes like glorious, cheap piss water. Tip that bottle and never forget that if there’s one thing that can bring us together as a people, one thing that we can all appreciate regardless of who we are, or where we come from, or how we think, who we love, it’s our love of beer. We may not have invented it, but we all understand what it’s like to just kick back at the end of a long, hard day and crack open a beer, and enjoy it because we can. And nothing is more patriotic than that.
RELATED:
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4th of July beer image by Shutterstock
New Orleans Hand Grenade image: Joel Kramer, Flickr
Beer image by Shutterstock
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