What we drink in a crisis | How To Spend It

Tea, tequila, claret, gin… Alice Lascelles finds out what the world’s been glugging — Read on howtospendit.ft.com/food-drink/208311-what-we-drink-in-crisis What we drink in a crisis Tea, tequila, claret, gin… Alice Lascelles finds out what the world’s been glugging APRIL 20 2020 / ALICE LASCELLES Email Twitter Pinterest Facebook When the going gets tough, the tough drink… more. That seems to be the case if the past few weeks are anything to go by, at least. Alcohol may be an “unhelpful coping strategy” during times of stress, according to the WHO. But that apparently hasn’t deterred people from hitting the bottle a little harder during their time in quarantine. When Donald Trump declared a national emergency in the second week of March, spirits sales in the US jumped 26.4 per cent. The biggest spikes were in sales of gin and tequila, but there was double-digit growth in every main spirits category except brandy, curiously. The Bureau National Interprofessionnel du Cognac might want to look into that. With the bar scene in lockdown, New Yorkers have also been embracing cocktails “to go”. The Greenwich Village hot-spot Dante – voted World’s Best Bar last year – says it’s been doing brisk business in bottled classics-with-a-twist: Negronis, Old Fashioneds and Martinis. “Stirred, spirit-forward drinks have been increasingly popular,” says owner Linden Pride. In Gaungzhou, China, Hope & Sesame – another bar on the World’s Best list – has been tiding itself over during shutdown by selling takeaway cocktails in the kind of branded, peel-back cans in which you’d normally expect to find tuna. Bestsellers include a coconut Old Fashioned made

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