Whether you’re taking a break after the holidays or “dry curious,” many are forgoing alcohol for Dry January. But as you look at 2025 so far, you may be thinking you’ve made a huge mistake.
You’re not alone facing our hellscape without even the thinnest veil of numbing booze between you and reality’s horrors. Plenty of us are out here experiencing every awful revelation in high definition, unblurred by, say, a room-temperature juice glass of Old Grandad. And then another with a beer back.
Let’s toast to our resolve with fun mocktails tailored to the very things that make us salivate over children’s cold medicine and wine-a-ritas.
AI Colada
Ingredients:
3 ounces coconut cream
14 fingers pineapple juice
11 fingers coconut water
Crushed ice
Outer layer of 1 fresh pineapple
Pineapple leaves of 1 fresh pineapple
Too many fingers? Ha, that’s artificial intelligence for you! Toss it all in the blender. Did you not want the indigestible exterior or sharp leaves in there? Of course not. You didn’t ask for this and it makes no goddamn sense, but it’s not about your needs and desires, it’s about what the tech bros have developed and will deploy despite zero demand. Chew well.
Moscow Tool
Ingredients:
3 ounces ginger beer
1 slice lime
Ice
Here’s one for the Cold War kids who can’t believe the U.S. president-elect is far enough up Vladimir Putin’s ass to see the Kremlin. Fill a copper mug with ice and add lime. Pour ginger beer over ice and drink. When only ice remains, eat all of it as quickly as possible, crunching the cubes until your skull erupts into a paralyzing brain freeze that will grant you three minutes reprieve from thinking about Ukraine’s future.
Misoprostol Spritz
Ingredients:
1 bottle Misoprostol or Misoprostol with Mifepristone
4 ounces ginger ale
1 orange slice
Pour ginger ale into a wine glass and add orange slice. Keep the bottle of medication sealed and squirreled away in a cool, dry place until you or someone you know needs an abortion, because given the speed at which the right is ripping away our bodily autonomy, it might not be legally obtainable in this country for long, despite being on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. Enjoy the citrusy ginger ale!
Susan Collins
Ingredients:
3 ounces unsweetened lemonade
Juice of 4 lemons
½ whole lemon to garnish
Ice
In a tall glass filled with ice, stir all ingredients and tell yourself it won’t be sour. Drink. Act surprised it’s sour. The sourness will surely fade; you’ll get used to it. Don’t admit it’s sour or put it down to drink something else. Smile and normalize the sourness. If you need to, use your fingers to pull your lips over your teeth in a rictus as if you are enjoying it, because you just have to give it a chance.
Polio Reviver
Ingredients:
3 ounces unpasteurized apple cider
1 ounce water collected from a pothole
1 feather plucked from roadkill, unwashed
1 chilled syringe polio vaccine
Pour ingredients into a tumbler and swirl with feather. Tap the bubbles out of the syringe and jab it into the meat of your thigh. Enjoy that extra boost of polio immunity before our roadkill-eating, anti-vax incoming secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and whatever brain worms control his choices like the rat in Ratatouille take the wheel. Dump the drink; that shit’ll give you dysentery.
Oligarch Fashioned
Ingredients:
3 ounces black tea, chilled
1 twist orange peel
½ ounce maple syrup
Cinnamon stick
Black thread
Pins (optional)
Stir tea and syrup over ice and drain into a tumbler. Light a match and run it under the orange peel until fragrant, then drop peel into the tumbler. Take a length of thread and wind it around the cinnamon stick while concentrating on the hateful, self-serving, transphobic, racist P.O.S. billionaires like Elon Musk who have bought influence over U.S. policies that will place the rest of us in peril. Keep winding while repeating: “I bind you, douchebag.” We’re doing witchcraft now.
Northern Irish Coffee
Ingredients:
8 ounces flammable liquid such as gasoline, kerosene or high-proof alcohol
2 sugar cubes
6 ounces strong, hot coffee
1 ounce freshly whipped cream
Drop sugar cubes into a glass mug and pour in hot coffee. Stir, then float the whipped cream on top. Set aside.
Pour the flammable liquid into a medium glass bottle, leaving room at the top. Plug the bottle with a rag soaked in the same liquid.
Drink the coffee. Hang onto the bottle.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill and on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in ‘A Big Family’.