Palmetto State Mini Bottles

South Carolina, in a post-Prohibition streak of idiocy, enacted a law designed to limit the consumption of hard alcohol. Until recently, liquor bought in bars in the Palmetto State could only be served in "mini-bottles," those tiny contraptions rarely seen outside of airline carts and as contraband at sporting events. The reason I refer to this rule as "idiocy" is because of the size of the bottles: 1.75 ounces. A normal shot of booze in most states is 1 ounce. As a result, order a drink in South Carolina and you get a shot and 3/4. Pretty good deal, but not particularly effective in deterring alcohol consumption. Moreover, because most manufacturers of cheap booze (I won't give those labels the dignity of calling them "distillers") don't tend to sell booze in mini-bottles, the “well” or “house” booze is usually a fairly palatable brand (e.g. Smirnoff vodka). Again, pretty good deal.

However, as a result, ordering a shot or a cocktail in Secessionville is slightly complicated. For example, if you were to order two shots of Jack Daniels, the barmaid will likely ask, "One shot, two ways, or two shots?" In other words, do you want a small or a giant shot? And you'll get some pretty clever ways of ordering (and challenging for those of us that struggle with fractions) - "I'd like 3 shots, 5 ways," for example. In addition, because these laws are 60+ years old, a lot of bars have had the backside of the bar designed for mini-bottles. And one can also find some really strange pricing arrangements: Kettel One might cost you $7.25 a "bottle", but then a 190 proof "bottle" might cost only $5.25 (this correspondent found such a pricing structure at Hemingway's Bar in Beaufort, SC).

Recently, though, the elected branches in Columbia finally caved to the lobbying of the South Carolina citizenry and bar industry, and liberalized the drinking laws. As the locals put it, a bar can now "choose" to use mini-bottles, or move to "free pour", or use a combination of both. As far as I can tell, that means that there aren't any rules about mini-bottles anymore.

But here's where culture and habits make things interesting. Many of the bars simply don't have the space behind the bar to put full size bottles of booze, or at least they don’t have the space for a full complement of full size bottles. Moreover, many of them still have a pretty large inventory of mini-bottles. So what you have now is a haphazard mix of cocktails priced, and spiked, to widely varying levels. For example, a bar might move to "free pour", but a bar patron might still expect a 1.75 ounce cocktail. But he might get a 1 ounce cocktail. And what's he to pay, for a Palmetto shot or for a regular shot?

In a bar in Columbia, they've moved to free pour for Yaegermeister: they even have one of those goofy chilling machines that offers, "Yaeger on tap" (that’s such an odd bit of marketing…a shot tastes better if the bottle it comes from is hanging upside down?). So Yaeger does not come in mini-bottles. Yet if you order "two shots," the barman still asks if you want "two shots" or "one shot, two ways." Why on earth do I still have to choose between a minishot and a megashot? The answer is that USC kids still order it that way. It's like South Carolina has its own little drinking metric system.

I suppose it's part of the fun of travel, but how many South Carolina bartenders have carpel tunnel syndrome, and how many landfills have been filled with tiny bottles of booze?