If you’re a reg, and you are a fun person, you’ve been receiving one or two of these lately (even The King himself had one last night). Some bread and butter pickles with a half ounce of bourbon between courses. Sure, it’s got some of my favorite things, namely vinegar, sugar, cucumbers, and bourbon but although it tastes so good I feel like it shouldn’t work, right? If you lived through the “Great Shrub Craze” of the late aught-teens and the early 2020s, you know that vinegar in cocktails is just so-so. A small dash will do ya. No one really wants to drink vinegar. Sorry Pok Pok, it’s a little gross. Tastes like pureed throw up. It’s good in salad because it’s offset by the oil you put in there as well as the salt.

When I speak about bread and butter pickles, I think to myself, salt and vinegar go hand in hand, they sort of neutralize one another, adding a bit of sugar never hurt anyone and the mustard, Thai chili, and turmeric give it some zip, color, and earthiness. The crunch and density of the pickle itself is something comfortable. In other words, there’s pizzaz. If you made a cocktail with this stuff, however, it would taste like cold, acidic diarrhea. So then why does a shot of bourbon compliment it so well? Here’s my take: The bourbon is so damn strong that it’s able to cut through everything while the pickles (or maybe you’re slamming down the juice) happen to tone down the sting of the whiskey. Everyone goes hand in hand. Many strong flavors combining to form Voltron.

It’s one of those things. We’ve all had incredible cocktail ideas simmering on the backburner of our subconscious only to put all the ingredients together and have the physical result taste like the schmeg on the underside of a yak udder. Sometimes this shit makes no sense, even when the Flavor Bible is around to guide us. That’s why I mistrust bartenders who refrain from tasting their own concoctions. There’s times when the feces touch is strong, my friends. It’s all part of the process. Stick to what you know, remember the basic rules and that those rules can sometimes be broken in the right circumstances, experiment, ask people you trust for their opinions, and then assess on your own as well. Maybe that’s a metaphor for life and not just creating a decent drink.

Somewhere along the way, some schmuck decided to throw back a shot of pickle juice after downing two ounces of bourbon. Yeah, that’s where the original idea came from. It’s more popular these days to hammer down Jameson, but the original version was Kentucky’s finest. And the man himself? His name was Reggie Cunningham. The year was 2006. He worked at the Bushwick Country Club, in Brooklyn, NY, and did it because he and a regular were hungover. It makes sense. Both pickle juice and the hair of the dog are supposed hangover helpers. In case you’re wondering, the Bourbon of choice was Old Crow (Beam-Suntory, same mash bill as Jim Beam but with less aging). So hey, maybe one day you’ll drink something stupid and your name will go down in cocktail history too. There’s a lot of great inventions that were discovered by accident. Velcro, the microwave, x-rays, quinine.