October showed up this morning. The light went with it. Six in the evening now looks the way eight did in July.

Ginger starts sounding good around this point in the year.

National Vodka Day lands Sunday, October 4, and it has been on the food calendar since at least 2007. So this week we are making a Moscow Mule. Vodka, fresh lime, and enough ginger beer to make you sit up, in a copper mug if you own one and a highball glass if you do not.

Three ingredients. Two American cities both claim it. Nobody agrees on the mug.

In this week's newsletter:

Answer at the bottom of the newsletter

The Moscow Mule

Vodka, fresh lime, and cold ginger beer over a full glass of ice. Three ingredients, and the ginger beer decides whether it is any good.

Ingredients

Directions

Why It Works
The build is short and the failure points are few. Fresh lime, because bottled juice tastes flat under all that ginger. Ice to the rim, because a half filled glass melts faster and you end up with weak ginger water halfway down. Pour the ginger beer last and pour it slowly, since the bubbles are what carry the heat of the ginger to the top of the glass. The copper mug is not required and it’s not only for show. Copper takes on the cold of the drink in seconds, so the metal is cold against your hand before the first sip.

Ginger ale and ginger beer sit next to each other on the shelf and they are not the same drink. Ginger ale is a soft drink flavored with ginger. Ginger beer started out fermented, and the bottled kind still carries far more real ginger. Put ginger ale in a Mule and you get a vodka soda with a faint sweetness to it. Put ginger beer in and you get the drink.

How to pick one:

The template underneath:

A Mule is a highball, and the highball is the easiest template in the book. Two ounces of spirit, half an ounce of citrus, four ounces of something fizzy, over a full glass of ice. Pour bourbon instead of vodka and you have a Kentucky Mule. Aged rum gets you close to a Dark 'n Stormy. Tequila makes it a Mexican Mule. Same ratio, different bottle.

Two habits fix most flat highballs. Fill the glass all the way with ice instead of halfway, because a full glass melts slower than a half empty one. And stir once rather than five times, since every turn of the spoon lets carbonation go.

Two more this week. One scotch, one gin, neither one anywhere near the ginger.

Equal parts scotch, sweet vermouth, cherry liqueur, and orange juice. It should not work and it does.

Ingredients

Directions

Add everything to a shaker with ice. Shake for about 12 seconds. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Twist an orange peel over the surface and drop it in.

Why it works
The recipe first shows up in print in the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, named after the 1922 Rudolph Valentino bullfighting picture (the record is here). Four equal parts sounds lazy and it is the reason the drink holds together. Scotch on its own would run over the orange juice. Cherry Heering on its own would turn the glass into candy. At equal measure each one clips the one beside it. Use a blended scotch rather than a peaty single malt, because smoke and cherry pull against each other. Squeeze the orange yourself. Carton juice is the fastest way to make this taste like medicine.

Gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino, and lime in equal measure. Bracing, herbal, and a little strange.

Ingredients

Directions

Add everything to a shaker with ice. Shake hard for about 12 seconds. Double strain into a chilled coupe. No garnish needed.

Why it works
It was on the menu at the Detroit Athletic Club by 1916, where it was the most expensive drink in the room at 35 cents. Who first made it is unknown. Frank Fogarty, a vaudeville performer working in Detroit, carried it east to New York, and Ted Saucier wrote it down in Bottoms Up in 1951 (the history is here). Then it went quiet for decades, until Murray Stenson found it in that book and put it on the list at the Zig Zag Café in Seattle in 2003. Equal parts again, and again that is the point. Chartreuse is loud enough to bury a drink by itself. Lime cuts it, maraschino rounds it off, and gin gives the whole thing a floor to stand on. Measure this one. A heavy hand on the Chartreuse and nothing else in the glass survives.

Same ginger, same lime, same full glass of ice. Tea and bitters doing the job the vodka was doing.

Ingredients

Directions

Fill a copper mug or a highball glass to the rim with ice. Add the tea, the lime juice, the bitters, and the salt. Top with cold ginger beer poured slowly down the side. Stir once. Squeeze a lime wedge over the top and drop it in.

Vodka is not bringing flavor to a Mule. It brings weight and a small sting, and those are two different problems to solve. Strong black tea has tannin in it, and tannin is what gives a drink grip on your tongue instead of sliding off. The bitters cover the sting. The pinch of salt is the part people leave out, and it sharpens the ginger the same way salt sharpens a grapefruit.