Mixology Mnemonics
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How to Enhance Your Memory to be able to Remember WAY More Drinks

I’m going to start out here with the latest, greatest craze in Mnemonics: PAO, or Person, Object, Action.

PAO is something that was created to chunk numbers together, 6 digits at a time.

I struck upon something very similar to the PAO myself over the past four decades. 

My adaptation of the PAO (Person¹, Action, Object) is not for chunking 6 digit numbers together, but for learning drink recipes.


My adaptation is based on creating a scene out of ALL of the elements in a cocktail (glass, method, glassware, ingredients and precise ingredient amounts), using at least one person, at least one action, and at least one object. 


So lets examine how the PAO for drinks breaks down in my system:

THE PERSON: We’re always going to use someone who is very memorable to us, like a big celebrity, major politician, sports hero, etc. The person may be a “small player” to everyone else, but BIG to you, after all, you’re the one doing the memorization so you get to choose the people most memorable to you!

PERSON EXAMPLES: Planters Punch When I remember the drink called Planter’s Punch I use the actor Eddy Albert in an old TV Show called “Green Acres” to play the “Planter”. In my version of the recipe he’s the planter, and I see him performing an action with an object, which gives me 1`00% of the recipe plus the glass and the proportions. So choosing your celebrity is very important for this drink because the word Planter congers up Eddy Albert’s image right away. Jolly Rancher When I first memorized the Jolly Rancher I was using Lorne Greene of Bonanza (Warning! Major corny video link!!). So even though Lorne Greene playing Ben Cartwright, the rancher WAS pretty happy most of the time, he wasn’t “JOLLY”, and as a Rancher, I kept mixing him up with the Planter. … So now my Jolly Rancher focuses on JOLLY and not RANCHER – and uses Santa Clause as the Jolliest Rancher ever born!

Jolly Rancher covered!

So let me break that graphic down for you quickly: I hear “Jolly” Rancher and see Santa with his Daisy Rifle (he’s giving it to someone for Christmas). So I know it’s a shooter glass. Now I have Santa holding a hatchet – and the hatchet is the image I’ve assigned to represent 1/2 oz. (hatchets chop things quickly in half). So now I’ve got Jolly, half ounce, and shooter glass. But looking at the image I see that Santa (PERSON) is is chopping (ACTION) a can of Spam (OBJECT). The SPAM represents the four ingredients in the Jolly Rancher Shooter – the Sour mix, the Pineapple Juice, the Apple Pucker, and the Midori. First letter of each word combined into an Acronym. From that we’ve got our entire recipe. Jolly Rancher, Shooter Glass. 1/2 oz. of each of four ingredients.

There are other ways to remember the Jolly Rancher. It’s also a simple drink of all equal proportions. But its a good clear example of how to approach mnemonics to help avoid drink recipe name and ingredient mixups.

THE ACTION: The ACTION is either being perpetrated by the PERSON upon the OBJECT, or the OBJECT is taking the action upon the PERSON. These are strong, direct actions (Bob HIT the pillow), or indirect actions (Bob gave the food to the cat), and if you’re using any mental dialogue while you’re imagining this, it’s in the active voice and not passive (as in “The food was given to the cat by Bob).


THE OBJECT: The OBJECTs can be anything. Sometimes they’re the ingredients, sometimes they’re several things, depending upon the drink being memorized. They’re always associated with one another so you don’t lose any when you’re recalling them, and they’re all linked to one another in your mind. 


THE SCENE – THEATER OF THE MIND:


IMAGERY: You’ve got to draw a picture, or a scene with more than one picture, either on paper, in your mind, or with words in case  you can’t visualize things (a rare condition, but it does exist).

I have found that placing several items near one another in a picture doesn’t work well usually, because there’s nothing binding them doesn’t work without some action and a story, and who better to be in an action scene telling a story, than a favorite, unforgettable, fascinating and loved celebrity?


PROPS AND FURNITURE: Every scene has something, whether indoor or outdoor, that we use to display things, hang things on, set things upon, or prop them up with. There’s always something.


In the Major System, for instance, we sounds represent numbers. Those sounds come from the words we speak (for instance “Speak” would turn into “0 9 ea 7”, or 097, but the SAME numbers can be derived from the spoken word “Spike” as “0 9 i 7 e”, again, 097.).


The trick in the Major System is to choose “prop and furniture” or hook and peg words that are easy to recall and see in your mind’s eye.


If you have a choice between the words “Speak”, “Spike”, “Spock”, and “Spooky”, to remember the number 097 you’d likely choose “Spike” unless you’re a Star Trek fan of Leonard Nimoy, in which case Spock might be your first choice.

For remembering drink proportions though, we use standard (specific) amounts like 1/4 oz., 1/2 oz., 3/4 oz., 1 oz., 1 1/4 oz., 1 1/2 oz., etc, in 1/4 oz. increments right up to about 2 1/2 ounces. Sometimes we use “dashes” and sometimes we use “splashes” and more rarely, drops. 


Where a drink comes along with a huge number of measurement variables I sometimes re-arrange the ingredients into logical patterns when I write them down so they’re grouped based on the amount of each ingredient.


In the early days of learning drinks by categories and there were fairly rigid rules in place for each (1 1/4 oz. of base liqueur or liquor, fill with mixer for a Highball, or 1 1/4 oz. Liquor or Liquor, 2 oz Sour Mix for a Sour – learning any new drink in the category is simple enough. All that has to be done is to plug the ingredients into the framework and Voila! New drink.

1. In the strict and very advanced PAO, the (celebrity status) Persons you’re using are each assigned a specific number, say from 0 to 99. That’s not required to use PAO to your advantage learning drinks. If you desire to go more deeply into the advanced methods to see if that helps you more, there’s nothing stopping you.[↩]