Kathy Lette: fireball sambuca
Aussies have a sense of humour drier than an AA clinic. But it’s the only dry thing about us. We do love a tipple. And why not? In this hot weather, doctors maintain it’s vital to keep up your fluids.
Spumante was my first alcoholic discovery – although spewmanti would be a more appropriate description. I got so horrifically drunk on this sickly sweet, sticky beverage aged 13 that I didn’t drink again till I was 18.
By then, the drink du jour was the fireball sambuca. The sambuca arrived in a shot glass, decorated with three coffee beans, representing health, wealth and happiness. But what the flaming sambuca inevitably represented – as the booze was set ablaze – was flambéed eyebrows and singed nostril hair.
To drink the fireball sambuca, you must always extinguish the flame first. The trouble was, after one or two of these potent potions, you’d suddenly discover you were thunker than you drunk you were, and likelier to forget about smothering the flame before quaffing, giving a very literal meaning to “hot lips”.
Drinking fireball sambucas also led to other accidents like the glitter ball graze I got on my nose during a mistimed pogo move on the disco floor. And the cold sore I caught from the bloke I drunkenly snogged on New Year’s Eve who, in a better light, turned out to be married to my boss. Not to forget the time I woke up in an unfamiliar nation with nipple jewellery.
In short, it was the flaming sambuca which converted me to religion; I’d never believed in hell until I awoke one morning with singed lips, the sack, an areola infection and a mouth like the bottom of a budgie cage.
Trent Dalton: Stones ginger wine
Like many regretful Aussies, my gateway tipple was Passion Pop – it sounds like a song by the Monkees but always ended in tears. Karloff vodka with fruit cup cordial wasn’t much better; neither was Bundy, that uniquely Queensland poison, decanted into a 1.25-litre Coke.
As I matured into my more romantic phase, my brothers and I would hang around the Bracken Ridge Tab until some old gus who needed the five bucks for a punt would buy us a bottle of Stones ginger wine. Channelling our Irish heritage and newfound love of the Pogues, we’d wind up swaying arm in arm in the living room, belting out tunes from Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. This behaviour was not sustainable and, by the summer of ’98 we were spending our days leisurely sipping White Russians under the aircon, playing Tomb Raider and pretending we were in The Big Lebowski.
By the time I left home, these carefree escapades were behind me and I developed a taste for Coopers Pale Ale, which, in the best possible way, is like drinking Australian dirt. So enamoured I became (and still am) with its earthy, honest notes that I once gave some neighbours a Daihatsu Charade and took a six-pack of pale in exchange. To this day an icy Coopers Pale can take me straight back to the turn of the century; it’s like modern Australia in a bottle.
Rhys Nicholson: vodka Redbull
Growing up in Newcastle, I was always the “good kid”, staying sober and making sure everyone got home safe. That all changed one fateful New Year’s Eve when my friends and I invented the frighteningly ill-conceived “vodka spider”.
Mixing cheap vodka, off-brand creaming soda and Streets vanilla ice-cream was, at best, tempting fate and it wasn’t long before that cursed concoction curdled in our naive little guts and ended up sprayed across the back lawn.
That horror, of course, did not deter me. I soon graduated to the viscous delights of RTDs in every lurid hue. By the mid-noughties I was getting around Oxford Street in stove-pipe suits, wearing bow-ties and sipping sandcastle buckets full of vodka and Redbull at the gay club of my dreams, Babylon. My highest aim being to find myself in the social pages of the street press looking nonchalant in the most focused way possible. Mostly I just threw up out the front.
These days any kind of sweet drink just makes me feel gross. My rule with drinking now is the moment that I can’t taste the booze is the moment I should probably stop.
Harry Jun: Somaek
In 2012 I joined the Korean society at uni and went on my first “MT”. Officially it stands for Membership Training but in Korean those letters unofficially stand for “Drink” and “Vomit”.
Basically it’s a form of ritualised bonding that’s centred around getting absolutely plastered on a drink called Somaek, a delicious but fierce cocktail of soju and beer.
The first time I encountered it, it looked like some bizarre sacramental ceremony. A crowd was gathered in a circle with someone holding that iconic green soju bottle. As they poured it drop by drop into a shot glass floating in a schooner of crisp Korean Cass, everyone went mental. I had no idea what was going on until, after a couple of rounds, the shot glass finally sank beneath the sea of beer and the sinker had to scull the lot. The game is called Titanic, it goes on for hours and I can testify to the fact it will mess you up. Despite the hangover, I still love it.
Elouise Eftos: Midori and lemonade
I graduated from high school in 2009 but I was in Perth so it was more like 1999. In keeping with our delusions that we were living in some millennial rehash of Miami Vice, we spent a lot of time hanging around our parents’ pools in bikinis drinking exotic highballs like Malibu and diet Coke.
I was obsessed with the movie Moulin Rouge and Midori and lemonades seemed like the perfect stand in for absinthe as I imagined myself as some kind of West Coast of Xtina – who apparently only drank cocktails that smelled like they could double as body butter.
My Juicy Couture aspirations might have mellowed but my love for tropical flavoured beverages continues unabated. There’s still nothing better, or more nostalgic, than sipping a frozen pina colada by the pool.
