Drinks by Deity: Norse

Odin hung himself on a tree for nine nights, stabbed with his own spear, and came down with the alphabet. In this book he gets a drink. So do forty-nine others. Fifty Norse figures. Fifty drinks. Not one measurement anywhere in it. That is the format, not an oversight. No ounces, no shots, no parts, no jigger and no shaker. Every drink here is built in the bottle the mixer came in: you pour some off to make room, you put things in, you put the cap back on and turn it over. Quantity is the container. You already know how to do this. What replaces the measurement is the flavour. In a measured drink the design lives in the ratios; here it lives in which product and which variant, so every ingredient in this book names one. That is also why the spirit is written generically. It says vodka, or watermelon vodka, and never a brand, because in a drink carrying candy and fruit punch the bottle you bought is a price signal and not a flavour decision. Heidrun is the goat that stands on the roof of Valhalla producing mead instead of milk, forever, for a hall full of dead men. She gets The Mead Goat. Saehrimnir is the pig they kill and eat every single day and who is whole again by morning. He gets Killed Each Day. Tyr put his hand in a wolf's mouth as collateral on a promise everyone in the room knew was a lie, and let it close. He gets One Hand Left. Every character gets two facing pages and nothing is continued overleaf. Who they were on the left, the drink on the right. You never turn the page in the middle of making something. Ten of the fifty have no alcohol in them at all and nothing put in their place. They are not shoved in an appendix at the back, because they are characters. They are marked in the contents and listed together at the end for whoever is driving. One of eight. Norse, Greek, Eldritch, Egyptian, Aztec, Japanese, Polynesian and Mesopotamian. Ragnarok is coming, the gods know the date, and they are going anyway. Have something in your hand.