Drinks: The New Mormon Frontier

When I was a senior in high school, our church had a youth dance with a 50s theme. My brother and I thought it would be cool to go as "rebels without a cause."

We tried finding some candy cigarettes that we could roll up in our sleeves, but the store didn't carry them anymore. So we made our own fake cigarettes and rolled them in our sleeves.

As soon as we walked into the church house, our mother, who was the stake young women's president, saw our fake cigarettes and yanked us by our ears outside.

She made us throw away our fake cigarettes and gave us a lecture about the appearance of evil. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Didn't really listen. I was being all rebellious and what not. Rockin' and rollin'.

Fast forward 18 years or more and I have a confession to make from this Mormon woman: drinking fancy alcohol drinks looks appealing. Well, not really, but the idea of having a plethora of a whole bunch of different drinks to go with different food, that sounds cool.

I've blogged before about Kulani's dinner parties. They're a highlight of his life. The only thing we ask others to bring are drinks.

This time he asked people to bring "inconvenience drinks" to go with our theme dinner: inconvenience food.

Our dinner guests brought it big time. These drinks were special. Super special. Not special in the alcoholic sense, but special in the "Oh look at us. We're laughing and enjoying these swanky drinks. Perhaps Don Draper would like to join our party."

I think Mormons are thought of in the public-at-large as boring, mostly because we don't drink alcohol. Saturday Night Live recently lampooned Mitt Romney's presidential loss by showing him drinking quart after quart of milk to drown his sorrows. Milk: just not that sexy.

So perhaps there is a market for making sexy Mormon-friendly drinks. After last night, I'd say yes.

Our guests brought drinks I'd never heard of. Ginger beer and fermented orange drink. Amazing.

And one guest, Andy and Simy Gartz of Slab fame, even made some homemade "moonshine." They made two flavors that were out-of-this-world amazing. One was a tangerine/orange vanilla syrup that you added to soda water. And the other flavor included habanaro peppers and it would burn your throat and lips. It almost felt like perhaps I was drinking alcohol.

Rest at ease. I don't really see the likes of Don Draper dropping by a Mormon party anytime soon. But perhaps a few more of us will appear a little less like Donny Osmond and more like...Brandon Flowers? Give that guy an Italian imported San Pellegrino Arianciata or a micro brewed organic fruit seltzer!