Say Cheers To Clock-Off Cocktails

Competition / Diary of an Office Girl / Diary of an Office Guy / Don't Be Stationery / Human Resources / Office Fashion / Office Life / Office Politics / Stationery / Stuck in the Office / Team Bonding / Tips/Tricks / Treat Yo Self / Work Life Balance 3 Jul 2015 Alina Fisher

Are you melting? I’m melting. You know what we both need? A cold drink. With an umbrella in it.

We’re big fans of Friday Beer O’Clock (Beers O’Clocks?) here at Euroffice; a chance for the office to wind down and get together for drinks and nibbles with colleagues at the end of the working day.

But in this unprecedented heat, I think we need an unprecedented change. We need to take our inspiration from warmer climes and classier times. Palm-fringed tropics, men in linen suits and women fanning themselves on the verandah, while jazz plays quietly in the background.

What drink do you associate with that scene? A super-strength lager? An alcopop? No sir, nay madam – we think of cocktails.

Perhaps the classic hot-weather hooch is a Singapore Sling. (A sling is, apparently, ‘a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters‘).

Also, is it my imagination or is that man wearing clear nail varnish?

Another wonderful thing about cocktails is that each one is a recipe which you can alter as you wish. With Beer O’Clock, if you don’t like any of the booze in the ice bucket, you’re stuck. If you want a tipple, you’ll have to put up with something that’s not quite right.

Yet with a cocktail you can make everything right, simply by mixing your own drink from a range of essential spirits, liqueurs and syrups. What if you don’t fancy an alcoholic drink? Pas de problème. There are many and varied virgin cocktail (or mocktail) recipes out there, so you can have all the flowery sweetness without any of the buzz.

Swapping from beer to cocktails might also be good for our waistlines. While an ingredient-heavy cocktail can have higher calories than beer, when’s the last time you heard about people knocking back a mojito after mojito before last orders in the pub?

Cocktail culture is about sipping and savouring; appreciating the blend of flavours. That means a drink will last longer, so you’ll consume fewer calories than if you were absentmindedly going through lagers.

Indeed, with the football season approaching (I wonder what the England women’s team will be drinking), I think a solution to aggro before a game is to sell cocktails at every match. I can’t imagine anyone kicking off because someone spilled their Shirley Temple, can you?