Drinks by Deity Drinks by Deity Paperback

Ra was going to destroy humanity. They stopped him by dyeing seven thousand jars of beer red and letting him think it was blood.

He drank the lot, passed out, and forgot the plan. That is a real story, it is the reason anyone is still here, and it is the entry for Hathor.

Fifty Egyptian figures. Fifty drinks. Not one measurement anywhere in it.

That is the format, not an oversight. No ounces, no shots, no parts, no jigger and no shaker. Every drink here is built in the bottle the mixer came in: you pour some off to make room, you put things in, you put the cap back on and turn it over. Quantity is the container. You already know how to do this.

What replaces the measurement is the flavour. In a measured drink the design lives in the ratios; here it lives in which product and which variant, so every ingredient in this book names one. That is also why the spirit is written generically. It says vodka, or mango vodka, and never a brand, because in a drink carrying candy and fruit punch the bottle you bought is a price signal and not a flavour decision.

Osiris was murdered by his brother, cut into pieces, and scattered across the country, and his wife found every piece but one. He gets Scattered King.

Thoth won five extra days off the moon in a game of dice so that a goddess forbidden to give birth on any day of the year could do it on days that were not in it. He gets Five Days Won.

Ammit sits under the scales at the weighing of the heart, and if it comes out heavy she eats it and you are simply over. She gets The Devourer.

Every character gets two facing pages and nothing is continued overleaf. Who they were on the left, the drink on the right. You never turn the page in the middle of making something.

Ten of the fifty have no alcohol in them at all and nothing put in their place. They are not shoved in an appendix at the back, because they are characters. They are marked in the contents and listed together at the end for whoever is driving.

One of eight. Norse, Greek, Eldritch, Egyptian, Aztec, Japanese, Polynesian and Mesopotamian.

They spent three thousand years preparing for the afterlife and left instructions. None of them mention what to bring.