Drink Check: Top-Shelf Intellectual Whistle-Whetting for Summer’s Doggest Days

Welcome to another edition of Drink Check, a semi-regular Patreon-exclusive Throwing Fits publication all about booze edited by two-time James Beard award-winning drinks journalist Dave Infante of Fingers.

Welcome to the “dog days of summer,” which as it turns out is not just a catchall term for soggy-waistband weather and in fact refers to the specific sweltering stretch from July 3 to August 11 each year. Go figure! Apparently, the dog days take their name from Sirius, the popular satellite radio brand and brightest star in the Canis major (aka “big dog”) constellation that appears to rise along with the sun during this late-summer period when seen from vantage points in the Northern Hemisphere. “If you go back even as far as Homer, The Iliad, it’s referring to Sirius as Orion’s dog rising,” one senior research scientist told National Geographic in a surprisingly legible piece of SEO bait last year. “All throughout Greek and Roman literature, you found these things.”