Naming your creation is probably the hardest thing about creating a new cocktail. Not only is this attested to in the Death & Co book (“It’s not as easy as, say, naming a baby or a car. You can’t call a new cocktail Austin and move on.)”, but the problem extends to other fields as well! There’s a famous quip among programmers:
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
- Cache invalidation
- Naming things
- Off-by-one errors
Looking for the source, I think the original is off-by-one, and that bit got added later. I have to admit, back when I was still writing code I too was definitely banging my head on the desk occasionally regarding cache invalidation, but off-by-one errors not so much!
Anyway, since this is the beginning of my blog, let me introduce how I usually go about this intimidating challenge. Naming cocktails I mean (don’t expect any coding wisdom here). Sometimes something clever presents itself, a name that is both somewhat descriptive (or at least allusive) and witty or with an appropriately obscure reference – if so I always go for that.
But this is by far the minority of cases. My solution is to fall back on my theme, which is “astrophysics”. You see, I used to be an astrophysicist and my field was cosmology – something about the fundamental nature of our universe. And lucky for me that field is full of awesome names. So I keep a little list of (astro)physical phenomena, principles, objects, laws and things that sound cool, and whenever I am lost for a name I will pick something from this list! In some cases I can even find something about the actual cocktail that makes it make a little sense – although that is hardly a requirement.
If you want some examples, just read my blog! At the end of each recipe I will say something about the naming of the drink and the meaning of the name!