Day 18: Liquor, Wigwams, and the Brain

Here's a tip:
If you want to practice opening a bottle of champagne, don't buy a $5.99 bottle.

Reason:
You will discover that underneath the lovely gold foil, there is a screwtop cap, not a cork.

After the champagne bottle practice was thwarted, I dove into a crash course on liquor and have spent the past couple of days immersed in a whole new world of alcoholic vocabulary. Just a few days ago I could not have told you the name of a single brand of gin. Today I can rattle off at least four, none of which are as hard to pronounce as Gewurztraminer:

Tanqueray, Beefeater, Bombay, Bombay Sapphire.

I also know at least:

3 types of Bourbon
- Jack Daniels, George Dickel, Wild Turkey

3 types of Canadian Whisky (no 'e' in Canadian whisky)
- Canadian Club, Crown Royal, Seagram's

3 types of Scotch Whisky (no 'e' in Scotch whisky either)
- Johnny Walker Red, Johnny Walker Black, Glenfiddich

2 types of Irish Whiskey
- Jameson's, Black Bush

6 types of Vodka:
Absolut, Smirnoff, Finlandia, Grey Goose, Stoli, Ketel One

4 types of Rum:
Captain Morgan, Malibu (which has a flavor of coconut), Bacardi, Meyer's Dark

and

3 types of Tequila:
Cuervo, Sauza, Patron Anejo Gold

When I get a job, of course, I'll have to learn the types stocked by that particular restaurant, but at least now I won't be completely ignorant going in. The flashcard app helped, as did the book Bartending for Dummies, as did knowing from my previous career a very important tenet of learning:

The brain rejects arbitrary information.

It would have been much harder for me to learn what I have so far if I had not known this and had only relied on flashcards. Instead I knew that the more and richer connections I could make around the names and brands of alcohol, the easier they would be to learn.

One way to make these connections would be through actually experiencing these brands. However, that would take more time than I have, and there's also the minor problem that I can barely tolerate any alcohol without feeling the next day like my insides have been blowtorched. Though the brain rejects arbitrary information, my head and stomach reject alcohol even more, so the direct experience method is out for me.

Instead, I've tried to learn as much about the story and context of the brands as I can, and that seems to have worked well. Brain scientists know that narrative information is one of the brain's favorite and easiest types to encode and remember. For example, here are some of the connections and stories I read about in Bartending for Dummies that made learning the brands of gin easier:

- Gin was invented by a professor at a university in Holland, and British soldiers brought the recipe back to England after the wars in the Netherlands. The professor made the concoction from the juniper berry, and French for juniper is genievere, which is also what the professor called his elixir. The Brits shortened the name to gen and then gin, and it became the national drink of England.

-Tanqueray is one type of gin and puts the drink in a green bottle that is said to be modeled on an English fire hydrant.

-Beefeater is the name of one of those heavily costumed soldiers in the British royal guard, so that makes it easy to remember as the name of gin, once you know that gin is such a British drink.

-And everyone knows that England was big into India for a long time, so that makes it easy to remember the brands of Bombay and Bombay Sapphire.

It may seem paradoxical that it's easier to learn and know more about something, like gin, than it is to just try and remember four arbitrary brand names, but that's how it works. You have to build as many rich connections as you can if you want to remember something for real, and not just for tomorrow's exam. I remember one study that was often cited as an example of this: it involved elementary students who needed to learn which tribe of Native Americans built and used which types of dwellings: longhouses, wigwams, teepees, chickees, etc. Kids had a terrible time remembering which was which when the information was presented in a list. However, when they were taught much more about the subject -- for example, where each tribe lived and the weather there, plus interesting stories about the tribe's lifestyle, it suddenly made much more sense why a particular tribe would build a particular type of structure. The information was no longer arbitrary.

That's also the reason why the education world recoils when state governments start demanding that teachers cover a curriculum that's far too broad, often called "a mile wide and an inch deep." If you don't have time to teach enough rich connections around information that you want kids to remember, then the info will seem arbitrary and it won't take hold in the brain.

But that was my last career. I need to get back to more relevant topics now like liquor. I need to not only know the brands, I need to know the names of drinks and the types of liquor in them, so that I can make instant connections like:
Customer orders a Rob Roy = Scotch Whisky = Would you prefer Johnny Walker Red, Johnny Walker Black, or Gledfiddich = look for a drink on the bar that looks like this:

Fortunately the Mental Case flashcard app allows you to include pictures. It's all a lot more complicated than "would you like fries with that" but the pay should be better too. Otherwise I may be looking for a good deal on a chickee....








Of course, I know I can't study forever. I'm nowhere near finished studying mixed drinks or listening to Bill Wilson's wine podcasts, but in three more days it will be three weeks since I started this quest, and that's long enough on the talk. Time for some action. I'll apply for my first job no later than Tuesday. Stay tuned.