The Wall Street Journal has a regular Saturday cocktail column by Eric Felten. This week’s edition discusses the Mint Julep.

Felton quotes Walker Percy, who wrote that Juleps

are drunk so seldom that when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them like cocktails.” A proper cocktail is made with a couple of ounces of liquor at most. By contrast, “a good julep holds at least five ounces of Bourbon,” Percy noted. After folks unthinkingly toss back a few Juleps, “men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesic, full of thoughts of Kahlil Gibran and the limberlost.