The Candid and Startling Observations of Giles Humbert III, Denver's Last True Gentleman.


You can stop publically chugging 40oz. bottles of King Cobra in hopes of being 'discovered,' Wynkoop Brewery has already selected its Beer Drinker Of The Year. Jack McDougall, a 48-year-old pipefitter from New Jersey, seized hold of the honor with his claim of tasting 654 different brands of beer last year, and is on track to taste one thousand different beers this year. Which rather overshadows the highlight of my submission--existing on nothing but Guinness and water for three weeks, a minor faucet of my rather daring Great Liquor Experiments of 1977, conducted during my freshman year at Oxford.

Speaking of Oxford and unsung heroes, May 9th is the twentieth anniversary of the day the best and brightest minds of the Oxford Men's Tippling Club mounted their fateful expedition up Brazil's treacherous Deentae River to investigate rumors the cannibal natives held in their gnarled paws the secret of the ultimate cocktail. Reputably a distant cousin of the Mai-Tai, this as yet unnamed libation was devised by the 18th Century alchemist/adventurer Marquis Ferdinand D'Etatis, the very same 'Mad Marquis' who led the famous grog mutiny on the British prison ship HMS Lavenham while it was anchored off Brazil's coastline. After setting the ship aflame and swimming to shore, the Marquis swiftly enlisted with a Dutch trading company and struck out upriver to trade the company's trinkets for the furs of the cannibal natives. The tribesman viewed his ever-expanding insanity as a sign he was in touch with very powerful spirits, and it wasn't long before he married the daughter of a cannibal king. He subsequently went completely native, dedicating all his time to the dark art of alchemy (while a young man in France he had studied under master alchemist Charles Mon). The Marquis taught the natives how to distill liquor and the natives introduced the Frenchman to various native roots and berries with psychoactive properties. And so, from this melding of western liquor and native fauna, the marquis is said to have assembled the perfect cocktail, a tipple so toothsome it is supposed to have swayed from God a century's worth of Catholic missionaries sent upriver to convert the heathen cannibals. To this day, none have returned. And neither did the brave drunkards of the Oxford Men's Tippling Club.

They were called mad when, after breathlessly absorbing the legend from an English naval officer who had visited the region, they decided to abandon their dull studies and seek out this ultimate libation, this Holy Grail of Cocktails. (I, sadly, was merely a freshman member of the OMTC, and thus, despite my impeccable credentials, was not considered suitable for the expedition.)

The flag of the brave OMTC Expedition. So, on the morning of the 9th of May, after a breakfast of native mangoes and several good-luck cocktails, the Courageous Eight started upriver in a WWII-era PT boat they had christened the HMS Legless Lilly, (after a celebrated Oxford Village barmaid). Not certain what dangers they would face, they had fitted the craft with a deck-mounted Browning .30 caliber machine gun, a sturdy, well-stocked wet bar and an especially-designed OMTC expedition flag--a white martini and crossed cocktail swords on a field of black. They were never seen again.
Upon their disappearance, I am ashamed to say, the halls of Oxford sang with a cruel whipsong against the collective reputation OMTC Eight, calling them foolhardy drunkards, naive idealists and much, much worse. Some chose to believe the daring adventurers were devoured by natives, others found the light of truth in the notion the chaps spent more time manning the wet bar than the bridge and subsequently scuttled their craft on one the river's legion of jagged rocks.

The British Embassy and the men's families felt obliged to mount a pair of abortive fact-finding missions, but neither progressed more than twenty miles upriver before meekly retiring in the face savage spear attacks by hostile natives.

There rests on the grounds of the Oxford Village Cemetery a small granite monument to the OMTC Eight. On its face is engraved a reproduction of the expedition flag above the OMTC's motto, "Alcohol Above All." Beneath the heavy stone are buried eight bottles of Pimm's No. 7.

Mock me as a sherry-eyed idealist, but I prefer to believe the eight found their way to the Lost Tribe of the Mad Marquis and his Holy Grail of Cocktails. In my mind's eye I can see them triumphantly grounding their boat against the sandy shore and rechristianing it Legless Lilly's Pub, where they, even now, are tipping back with the mestizo descendants of missionaries and the Mad Marquis, tipples whose taste and quality we 'civilized men' can only fitfully dream of. A toast to you, lads: "Alcohol Above All!"


I'm staggering home.