The Cabinet: Coffee Liqueur

Careful man. There's a beverage here.

~ COFFEE LIQUEUR ~
Alcohol-infused with coffee and sweetened. Can be rum, tequila, brandy or neutral based, from Mexico, France, Jamaica, Italy, etc. 16-25% ABV / c£15-30+ for 700ml
Friends with: Rum, principally. Bourbon, brandy, tequila, too. Vodka but that’s cheating. Milk and cream. All of your coffee friends: amaretto, hazelnut, vanilla, cacao, etc. But, also orange, lime, lemon, pineapple (yes). Campari, orgeat, Bénédictine, tea.

HAS any TV show produced as many memorable cocktailing moments as Mad Men (2007-2015)? I feel the show has slipped far enough into the collective memory bank by now that it is no longer a slightly passé reference point - like the estate agent who fashions a pocket square from a napkin and imagines he’s Don Draper - but a widely recognised high-water mark of excellent TV. A high watermark from which we are slowly sinking. I’m thinking Sally Draper making pancakes for Don and accidentally pouring rum on them? I’m thinking Roger’s Gibsons. Also, Roger pouring vodka into his milk. Betty’s melancholy Gimlet. Remember that one? Oh and the Three-Martini-Lunch. Which I seem to recall involved an iceberg wedge with blue cheese and bacon. Or was it oysters? Whatever: we need to book a table at The Park and recreate that some time. Also Peggy: “You need three ingredients for a cocktail. Vodka and Mountain Dew is an emergency.

I mean I could go on. But the alcoholic moment that has always stayed in my mind is rather more fleeting. It’s in season seven, which is set in 1967 or 1968, I believe. The episode is called The Field Trip. Things have become a little psychedelic. Don is well and truly divorced from Betty and his new partner (and former secretary) Megan has just moved out to California with dreams of becoming an actor. Don has travelled west and intends to surprise her in her Laurel Canyon bungalow. Only as he’s rooting around her things, he finds, amid evidence of partying, a bottle of Kahlúa coffee liqueur. Incriminating! Just what is she up to out here?! He raises an eyebrow, half appalled, half amused - perhaps noting the rather low 20% ABV, a sure sign that this thing is more sugar than booze? And we realise then that we are not on Madison Avenue anymore.

When Mad Men opens, we are still in a rigid, post-war, masculine world in which a man like Draper is in full command. Now, the show’s centre of gravity has moved from the East to West Coast. Social mores are melting and reforming like wax in a lava lamp. The monochrome Martini era is over. The technicolor Tiki era is upon is. We are in emotional Kahlualand and there is no map. We have drifted rather far from little Sally Draper mixing her daddy’s Old Fashioneds.

Don isn’t sure he approves or understands. But we sense that something irrevocable has shifted and that his relationship with Megan is just as doomed as his relationship with Betty. And yet, by the end of the episode he is having a threesome with Megan and a friend of hers so it’s not all bad. Pretty soon, he has created the finest advertisement of all time. The world does not end with coffee liqueur after all.