California Drinking: A Boozy Birthday for the Golden State

California turned 175 on September 9, which means it’s time to celebrate the only way the Golden State knows how: with alcohol that costs more than rent and tastes like optimism mixed with wildfire smoke. A concoction that shakes you up!

Forget cake. Forget balloons. This is a state with a history that reads like a fantasy sci-fi novella, with chapters on the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake, Charles Manson, Hollywood’s Golden Age, Silicon Valley, and the rise of agentic artificial intelligence.

Honoring California isn’t just about understanding its milestones; it’s about drinking through it. While we constantly find ourselves burglarized by cocktail prices (complete with salad-like garnishes), the four cocktails here didn’t just emerge from California soil; they clawed their way up through the fault lines, carrying 175 years of delicious boozy yumminess with every sip. To start my celebration, I am going to make an Irish Coffee, which is really the only acceptable morning buzz. This drink was first concocted at San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe in 1952.

This should keep us all going until lunch at noon, where we graduate to Pisco Punch, the drink that built San Francisco’s cocktail culture. Back in the 1850s, when the bay was mostly muddy streets and dreams of gold, Duncan Nicol’s Bank Exchange Saloon served this deceptively smooth cocktail to miners who needed to forget they’d traveled 3,000 miles to splash around in rivers looking for shiny stones. The original recipe died with Nicol in 1926 because some secrets are too dangerous to survive, but Rudyard Kipling postulated that it was made of “the shavings of cherubs’ wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of lost epics by dead masters.” Any recipe I come up with here would be more of a knockoff than the real deal. 

Afternoon at 2 pm calls for Oakland’s Mai Tai, invented at Trader Vic’s in 1944. Two o’clock is the perfect hour for tropical delusion—precisely when Karl the Fog finishes his wet blanket performance across the bay and slinks back to sea defeated. As the last wisps of San Francisco’s maritime depression clear out, you can finally pretend you live somewhere warm. Nothing says “California dreaming” quite like sitting in a fake Polynesian bar, drinking rum that tastes like vacation, while the actual weather finally remembers it’s supposed to be Mediterranean, not Scottish.

The Mai Tai became America’s way of achieving tropical paradise through adequate alcohol consumption and cultural appropriation. Peak California innovation: take someone else’s island imagery, slap it onto suburban escapism, and charge premium prices for the fantasy that you’re
anywhere but here. By 2 pm, even the fog has given up on ruining your day. Time to embrace the lie that tiki culture sells, that paradise is achievable through rum, paper umbrellas, and willful suspension of geographical reality.

To end this celebration, let’s enjoy our last call with a Martinez. It was supposedly invented in the town of Martinez during the 1860s and later bastardized into the Martini. A gold miner wanted something special to celebrate striking it rich. The bartender created a drink strong enough to make anyone believe they were successful. The Martinez is the perfect California cocktail: it looks sophisticated, tastes like concentrated poor judgment, and convinces you that tomorrow’s problems are manageable because you have only had 4 drinks so far following this guide.

I recommend drinking these at your pace to experience 175 years of California in eight hours. Start optimistic with morning Irish Coffee, embrace delusion with Pisco Punch, accept fantasy with the Mai Tai, and end believing you’re classier than you are with a Martinez.

By midnight, you’ll understand why people keep moving here despite the earthquakes, droughts, fires, and rent prices that require sacrificing your firstborn to Zillow. California doesn’t always make sense, but it is a state that’s spent 175 years proving that land of fantasy and amazing cocktails can make people ignore absolutely anything, including basic mathematics and geological warnings.

Happy birthday, California!

Buena Vista Café’s Irish Coffee

One or two C&H sugar cubes (personally I like one sugar cube … it helps keep my humor dry)
6 oz fresh brewed coffee (I like my rituals to stay consistent with Ritual Coffee)
1 1/3 oz Green Spot Whiskey (with all the brown, a spot of green goes a long way)
Heavy cream, lightly whipped

Directions

Add sugar cubes to the glass, then add coffee until the glass is 3/4 full. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add whiskey and stir gently and briefly to combine. Float a layer of whipped cream over the top of the coffee by pouring it gently over the back of a spoon.

Mai Tai (Courtesy of Difford’s Guide, because I can’t be trusted)

2 oz Caribbean blended rum aged 6–10 years (long enough to develop trust issues)
1⁄2 oz Orange Curaçao liqueur (bittersweet like the fleeting warmth of the afternoon)
3⁄4 oz fresh lime juice (squeezed by hand, like your soul)
1⁄3 oz orgeat syrup (almond syrup for people who can’t pronounce “orgeat”)
1⁄4 oz simple syrup (because regular sweetness isn’t complicated enough)
1⁄6 oz dark rum float (optional, like happiness)

Directions

Shake everything except the dark rum with ice until your existential dread temporarily subsides. Strain into a double old-fashioned glass filled with crushed ice. Float the dark rum on top, because even paradise needs a shadow. Garnish with a spent lime shell, mint sprigs, and skewered pineapple with a maraschino cherry.

Classic Martinez Cocktail

1 1/2 ounces gin (I prefer Barr Hill, because anything finished with honey keeps the buzz going)
1 1/2 ounces sweet vermouth (I suggest Lo-Fi, a vermouth that doesn’t promise crystal clarity; it promises charming distortion … aka California Dreaming)
1 teaspoon maraschino liqueur (bitter to balance the sweet gin and the scratches from Lo-Fi)
2 dashes orange bitters
Lemon twist, for garnish

Directions

Fill a mixing glass with ice. Add gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino liqueur, and orange bitters. Stir until very cold then strain into a chilled cocktail glass while listening to Steve Aoki. Twist lemon peel over cocktail to express its oils. Rub rim of glass with peel and discard.

San Francisco-based Dina Novarr enjoys sharing her passion for fine wines, spirits, non-alcoholic craft beverages, and more with others.

Cocktails with Dina
Published on September 11, 2025