Cocktail Hour Meets...A Pandemic

By Jeremy Cooper and Andy Klausner

Covid-19 turned the world upside down in a matter of weeks. Shelter-in-place, quaranting, staying-at-home left many of us not even knowing what day of the week it was. We needed something to add structure to the shapeless hours, a daily reminder that there is always a reason to celebrate. Why not welcome the evenings with Cocktail Hour?  <

• Language: English
• Publisher: AK Advisory Partners LLC
• Release date: Jul 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578718088

Jeremy Cooper

 Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of five previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum’s catalogue of artists’ postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC’s Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for  Ash before Oak . 

Book preview

Foreword—Andy

Jeremy and I really don’t drink cocktails, other than the occasional margarita. In fact, we are the guys with a 400-plus-bottle wine room in their dining room (see sketch in Jeremy’s foreword). Our first choice is wine, with straight tequila or whisk(e)y or rum coming in second. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2020, I posted the following on Facebook:

New game—we switch off making a cocktail of the day to begin our evenings. I started tonight—Americanos. Equal parts Campari and sweet vermouth with a splash of club soda. Can’t wait to taste what Jeremy Cooper comes up with for tomorrow.

Little did I know that this would be the first of 50 consecutive nightly posts as our stay-at-home adventure continued. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and the comments and positive reactions started trickling in the first day. I am still not 100-percent sure why I started this challenge, but it became an important addition to our daily routine during the pandemic (although, full disclosure, we didn’t always switch off each day and we often collaborated on the drinks). I’m actually not that imaginative; the more inventive cocktails came mostly from Jeremy.

The start of the pandemic was so surreal, and we probably did the same thing a lot of people did—purchased random items that we would never eat during late-night runs to the grocery store and bought in-home exercise gadgets on Amazon, most of which we did use. But as the new reality set in, and being a nearly compulsive planner anyway, I set about developing a new daily routine for myself.

I am self-employed, so I was already used to working at home, and I always get up early. During lockdown, I worked in the morning, with a break for some exercise, went on a nice long walk with Jeremy around lunchtime to explore our surrounding neighborhoods, worked some more, and then used my new Pilates stick (the greatest invention ever). Seems like a full day, but that only took me to around 4:00 p.m. (work had inevitably slowed). What to do before dinner? While I would have loved to have had a glass of wine to unwind, I resisted that temptation. I like to read, but at first I found myself not having the ability to concentrate. Watching the never-ending Breaking News on TV was depressing and anxiety inducing.

All this to say, I think the cocktail idea evolved out of a need to fill some time before dinner. There really is no other explanation; some might call it self-medicating, but to us it was a creative way to transition to evening. Regardless, I surprised Jeremy with the idea, and after a little coaxing, we never looked back. It became an important part of our lockdown life for fifty days. We scouted for cocktail ingredients on our limited grocery runs, we discussed our creations more than we probably should have, and we smiled when we toasted each other with each night’s concoction. The cocktail of the day became one of the ways that we marked good days and survived the inevitable bad ones.

Fast forward to about Day 40. More and more friends and family were encouraging us to turn this adventure into a cocktail book. One Saturday in mid-May I woke up at around 5:00 a.m., unable to sleep, and decided that it would be a fun project. Later that morning, I started making calls to find out more about publishing (since I knew next to nothing about that world), and by