People Once Ordered Whiskey In Saloons Using This Strange Method

Sidle up to a bar, simply pick out a standalone spirit, and the toughest question you'll likely face is whether you want to order your drink neat or on the rocks. Once you've made that crucial temperature selection, you'll receive about 2 ounces of whatever booze you choose. Other than possibly asking for a double, it might have never even occurred to you to interrogate other potential alcohol measurements. A "cup" of the stuff could be perilous. A "splash" might amount to less than a taste. Were you magically transported to the Old West and awakened with a hankering for some whiskey, an even more surprising specification might have been in vogue: You may have needed to order your whiskey in "fingers" so as to disguise your modern-day provenance.

Much like other culinary conundrums, like whether a hot dog is a sandwich or if cereal is actually soup, one must truly open one's mind to figure out how fingers would even factor into a drink. Measuring anything with, say a pointer's length from bast to tip, would seem to make sense, but that would, again, just be an awful lot of liquor. Instead, a finger of whiskey turns those digits horizontal, like they might line up when someone is holding a glass, to better approximate what we think of as a typical pour today.

Do so many classics of the western movie genre contain the obligatory barroom brawl because that is the nature of compelling cinema, or is it because the pours that might have varied wildly from saloon to saloon at the time could quickly stir up conflict? Probably both. Imagine the Yelp posts were we to follow the same inconsistent practices today: "The swinging doors are cute but the afternoon bartender's finger is half the size of the guy with the handlebar mustache who comes in at night. I would give zero stars if I could." Eyeball your own finger pour when you're holding a whiskey glass, however, and you might be surprised by how close it actually comes to the roughly two ounces you could reasonably expect to be served.

Following this, "two fingers" of whiskey would have basically been a double (maybe a double-plus, if you're among the many folks those middle fingers are larger than the rest). Three and four fingers would, of course, scale up accordingly. It's also worth noting that, since fingers run out at that point, this measurement can tell us not only how much to drink but maybe when to stop as well.