The History of Clocktails

History of Clocktails

Prior to the invention of mechanised clocktails devices, the quantity of time for the local drunks to consume a standard measure of a given beverage was widely accepted as an accurate timekeeping method. To mark the hour it was traditional for a shot of the local strong spirit of choice to be consumed. It is believed that clocktails as a concept was independently invented across most of the world, as the most obvious, accurate, and reliable timekeeping system that can be implemented once you’ve discovered brewing. As a result there was little standardisation in clocktails, with incredibly varied, and often complex, local systems in place.

Automation

The first recognisable incarnation of the modern automated system of clocktails dates from the early 15th century, when a group of enterprising engineers are thought to have constructed the first mechanical clocktails device. This system, due to being large, highly delicate, inflexible, and generally difficult to maintain around drunk people failed to popularise the system. Instead it became the basis for the modern wall clock.

Mechanical clocktails systems proved exceedingly difficult to bring into more general usage. The varied local rules were difficult to emulate on complex mechanical devices. Furthermore, the presence of at least 22 tequila o’clocks in a 24 hour period tended to render the inventors of mechanical systems somewhat incoherent. These mechanical often found an alternative use as stand-alone timepiece, and gradually displaced clocktails as the primary timekeeping system across the world.

Decline of clocktails

Despite the replacement of clocktails by the mechanical clock, the practice of clocktails was highly ingrained into society. Clockfails guilds remained influential, and became increasingly active in politics: a field in which the skills developed with the clockfails tradition of “setting the world to rights” were clearly relevant. The clockfails guilds rapidly became a hotbed of activism, and spawned many secret and not-so-secret societies.

Repeated schisms within the clocktails community over the number of tequila o’clocks in a day (drink twice at midday, drink twice at midnight?), and the handling of 24 hour timekeeping, served to drive many clocktails practitioners underground or eliminated entire cliques of them. The long standing disagreement between the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller over the number of shots drunk at mid-day is thought to have been the major factor in the branding of the former as heretics, and their subsequent violent dissolution. Several historians, including the respected Sir Obviously Made Up Name, has theorised that uncertainty over the handling of daylight savings time in clocktails was the primary cause of the First World War. A theory that, in between incoherent babbling and singing, he alleges is being suppressed by the Inebriati for their own, annoyingly near sober, purposes.

Modern times

In modern clocktailism, fundamentalism has mostly given way to a more pragmatic approach. Double shots at midnight and midday (or, for that matter, any other hours) are now generally seen as entirely up to the practitioner, with cries of “why the f*ck not!” occasionally being heard from even the most dedicated of single-shotters before downing a double. There are still occasional serious disputes, with the Russian occupation of Crimea seen largely as a protest against the Kiev school of leap second handling.

With clocktailism no longer a serious contender as a timekeeping system, more liberal groups of clocktailers have adopted modern technology with great abandon. Modern timekeeping devices have been used as, not a competitor to clocktails, but a method to enhance the traditional acts of clocktails. The use of a simple wall clock, appropriately marked, is a trivial method to allow actuate drinking, with minimal argument over which drink currently needs to be consumed. Automation of the drink announcement though use of a computer, further reduces the risk of a drunken misunderstanding and accidental breaking of the rules.

Clockfails

Developed from the early computerised versions of clocktails. It was rapidly realised that many of the rituals of clocktailism could be further enhanced by the addition of a random element. Thus clockfails was born. Seeding a pseudo- random cocktail generator from the current time, random combinations of drinks can be produced on demand. Later versions evolved automated name generating processes, rendering the lengthy, and widely recognised as tedious, naming ritual obsolete.