It’s the hap-happiest season of all, Fingers Fam, because today, we begin building this year’s Bad Holiday Gift Guide for Heavy-Drinking Frenemies™ (BHGGfH-DF™ 2023, for short.) For those unfamiliar with this annual boozeletter tradition—now in its fourth year!—each holiday season, I put together a shortlist of the silliest, shittiest, and most stupidly expensive drinks-themed presents you can, but absolutely should not, buy for all the worst people in your life. Huzzah!
After publishing BHGGfH-DF™ 2022 just a scant few days before Christmas, I made a solemn vow to myself to get my shit together a little earlier this year. (I also set myself a calendar reminder.). So here we are, a full week-plus before Thanksgiving, already getting into the BHGGfH-DF™ spirit. I’m proud of us.
That’s “us,” dear reader, because in keeping with tradition, I’m kicking off an open call for nominations of the worst fucking drinks-related gifts you’ve seen this year.
Comments are open to both free and paid subscribers, and will run for the next couple weeks, so send me those links! (Or email me privately if you want to do your dirty work behind closed inboxes.) I’m looking for pricey, tacky, techy, and otherwise irritating alcohol-adjacent ephemera. I am not looking for actual alcohol, or whiskey stones, which are so foundational to this exercise by now that they’re basically just the “free” square in Bingo. We can do better (worse), Fingers Fam, I just know it. I encourage you to check out BHGGfH-DF™ 2022 and 2021 for inspiration.1
As a matter of editorial policy, strong preference will be given to Blue Lives Matter flotsam and products that shamelessly pander to The Troops™️. Once I’ve got a good working list of bad gifts, I’ll winnow it down to only the absolute schlockiest tchotchkes, and invent terrible people that you should give them to. Plus, if your contribution winds up in Fingers’ third-annual BHGGfH-DF™️, I’ll mail you some official Fingers stickers!2 Have at it:
Because I get a couple emails about this every year: if you like whiskey stones and/or buy them as gifts, please be advised that I don’t care and will die thinking they’re a goofy affectation of fancy pants-wearers no matter what you say. I’m sure all your giftees have loved them, though.
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📬 Good post alert
If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email or Instagram DM.
📺 Fingers pivots to video (sort of)
For the better part of two years, I’ve flying in the face of the algorithmic headwinds by refusing to create short-form video #content for TikTok, Instagram Reels, etc. I have nothing against those platforms in particular or vertical video shorts in general, mind you. It’s just that I’m one man with two jobs. The prospect of adding another production cycle into the mix was pretty daunting.
But lately,
has been producing short-form video snippets based on his coverage as part of a “hub-and-spoke” editorial strategy: his newsletter is the hub, and the spokes are his accounts on other platforms, where he publishes discrete pieces of video scripted from items in his emails. I’ve enjoyed that approach enough that I decided it was time to experiment with them here at the boozeletter. Ryan also recently noted that the videos are generating decent referral traffic from Threads, Meta’s Twitter-like bolt-on to Instagram, and I’m obviously interested in trying to tap into that. Fingers is growing slowly and steadily, but it’s still not where it needs to be financially. Why not find out if TikTok et al. can help it get there faster?So this morning, I recorded and posted my first crack at it, rehashing the top item from Sunday’s Weekender into this 60-second quick hit:
Look ma, I’m posting! I swear I’ll figure out thumbnails soon! The video is live now on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube. Right now, I have virtually no audience on the latter three platforms, and Instagram hates hyperlinks, so I don’t expect this to generate much/any traffic just yet. But this is obviously a medium that appeals to a lot of people, and in the coming months I’m going to experiment with how I can make it work for Fingers. If you have any suggestions on that front, I’m all ears! Simply reply to this email with your ideas/critiques/etc., or shoot me a note: dave@dinfontay.com. As always, I’d love to hear from you.
📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately
Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.)
2020 was sort of a slapdash affair; must have been something going on that year that had me distracted. Hmm.
Do I still owe you stickers? Please reply to this email to let me know. I’m sorry! I had a ton of travel in October and then I got sick and… oh, you don’t give a shit about my excuses, but I really am sorry! I will send you stickers, just send me your address.
Full disclosure I was working and then got shitcanned from Lagunitas brought to you by Heineken in Chicago trying to make a taproom that legit did NOT HAVE BEER LINES RUNNING on opening day, but man, they filled that fucking merch store with all kinds of dumb shit, including but not limited to a stand up paddle board (like, what? WHAT?) and so much goddamn dog toys (ALSO WHAT) but I think the best was this idiotic camp blanket, because what screams bring middling IPAs and not actually gluten free hop water to your campsite is an ugly ass overpriced polyester blanket: Reader, I guarantee you they are all still in the stupid warehouse they fired everyone out of: https://store.lagunitas.com/collections/accessories/products/camp-blanket
I think decanters are a little much to begin with but this is a whole new level. https://jonathanadler.com/products/bourbon-rocket-decanter?variant_id=39626395877410