Hannah Chamberlain Wants to Help You Become a Better Drinker

With a Mid-Atlantic lilt and a floral gown straight out of a Mississippi Sunday service, Hannah Chamberlain opens a TikTok video with, “Let’s ruin our mornings with blueberry Pop-Tart brunch shots.” Better known by her handle SpiritedLA, Chamberlain has become a social media sensation thanks to her cocktail recipes—bold, whimsical, or just plain strange (yes, that is a Caesar salad martini infused with anchovies), yet executed with practiced aplomb. When not mixing drinks at home, she’ll trawl cities across the country, knocking back bartender-suggested shots and asking them where to drink next while husband William Chamberlain plays cameraman. Her whip-smart debutante style and persona, juxtaposed with her enthusiasm for dive bars and lowbrow pubs, has charmed hundreds of thousands on TikTok and Instagram.

But Chamberlain, who lives in Portland, is moving beyond the social media scene with her first foray into the publishing world. On February 25, she released How to Be a Better Drinker, a beautifully photographed drinker’s manual combining cocktail recipes with practical advice, etiquette on being a host and a guest, and no shortage of witty asides or coy references. Throughout it, her personal voice shines through, whether it’s in the description of a Funyuns-infused martini or musings on how best to remove a houseguest who has overstayed their welcome.

Alex Frane: Your handle on social media is SpiritedLA, and yet you live here in Portland. What’s the story there?

Hannah Chamberlain: I started SpiritedLA over a decade ago when I was living in LA. The city really made me fall in love with cocktails and cocktail culture. I’ve been [in Portland] for a while, and I absolutely love living here. It’s been a dream come true to live in one of my favorite drinking cities.

AF: From what I understand, you don’t have a background as a professional bartender. How did you transition from enjoying cocktails out at bars to making them at home?

HC: I’d been going out and enjoying cocktails around the city, and it was early in the cocktail renaissance [the early aughts], where people were extremely enthusiastic about sharing what they knew. I was at a girlfriend’s house who was a bartender. She went into her kitchen, and she made a drink that probably would not be my favorite anymore. It was like a vanilla-pomegranate-vodka-sour or something.

For some reason, I had it in my head that cocktails had to be made in a bar, or they had to be made by some old fellow in a smoking jacket with a bar cart. I didn’t realize that anyone could do it in their own kitchen with the right tools, the right ingredients, and the right knowledge. From then on, I started experimenting with making drinks at home. Some of them were horrendous, but it’s part of the journey.

AF: How did the SpiritedLA Instagram and TikTok phenomenon arise?

HC: When I was first getting into making cocktails, I was going to law school. Believe it or not, there seems to be a link between being in law school and an increased interest in cocktails. I left law school because I realized it wasn’t for me, and I was going for a PhD in Cold War Eastern European dissident history. So that was one idea, and the other was working for BuzzFeed.

AF: I mean, that’s the pipeline right there, isn’t it?

HC: I had some friends there, it was brand-new in LA, and it just sounded like nothing else that I’d been doing. I decided to work at BuzzFeed, and that got me into the idea of sharing what I was doing, my home bartending. I started making cocktails for the office and posting them more. After a few years of just posting cocktail photos, I got pretty bored with it; I felt like it just wasn’t scratching my itch creatively. And then TikTok came along. I started realizing there were these less precious ways of storytelling, where you could show off a funnier, more irreverent way of looking at drinking culture. So, I started making videos, and then the pandemic came along, and suddenly everyone was looking to become a home bartender. A lot of the videos started doing better, and it allowed me to quit my day job. I’ve been doing content creation with cocktails ever since.

AF: You have this fascinating mix of approaches to your cocktails. One day you might be presenting a fruit-filled summertime punch, and then the next day you’re posting a video where you’re holding shrimp the size of your forearm in a martini glass. What do you think is the strangest cocktail that you’ve come up with at home?

HC: One of the strange ones I like the best is in my book. It’s called the Junk Food Martini, and it’s a sea-salt-and-vinegar-infused martini with olives stuffed with blue cheese and bacon bits and garlic, and it’s extremely savory. But probably the weirdest one I’ve made is a Buffalo wing martini. Many of the elements were fine, but I went a little too far with the chicken schmaltz fat wash. That was definitely not a necessary part of the drink.

AF: You’re well known for your ability to navigate a city’s bar scene by going to a bar, asking a bartender where you should go next, and then going there and asking that bartender where to go next. Have there been any notable surprises, a place that really wowed you? And has there been any time that you’ve been disappointed or let down by a suggestion?

HC: I think it’s something that cocktail lovers have always done. It’s pretty fun, and it’s very unpredictable. The tricky element is that we want to keep things as real as possible; we’re not telling the bartender ahead of time or giving them any hints about where we’d like to go. And we’re very faithful: If they tell us to go here, we have to go here, and we’re always very careful about getting permission. There are cities where we’ve been to amazing bars, and we’d love to showcase them, but they’re just not comfortable being on camera, which I totally get.

One of the nicest surprises has been the number of places where, if you described it to me, I never would have thought it would be one of my favorites. And then I’ll find myself wanting to return over and over again throughout the trip.

AF: What was the kickoff for you writing a book about cocktails and bar culture?

HC: When I was working at BuzzFeed I loved the idea of writing something that was close to what this is. It’s not just recipes, it’s also how to appreciate the whole drinking process more, both from an environmental perspective and an etiquette perspective. I know you, as a veteran drinker, have probably had a few snafus in your past and some things that you could give young drinkers advice about avoiding or doing differently.

AF: Certainly.

HC: I really liked the idea of sharing that in a fun way, but I was way too nervous to consider it. I would write, and I would put it away, because I was, like, “Little old me! What am I going to do with this thing?” But during the pandemic, when the videos started doing better, I had a publisher reach out. I was so excited, because it’s been my lifelong dream to write this book.

AF: One of the things I’ve noticed is you have a very clear voice online, and that voice comes through in your writing. How were you able to so clearly articulate your own perspective and your own voice, and translate it from the screen to the page?

HC: Part of it is I started viewing what I was online as an exaggeration of who I am, and a bit of a character. I’d read these books from people like Charles H. Baker and Lucius Beebe, and I would think, “I don’t care if these recipes are any good at all. I’m just enjoying the experience of reading them and they’re not taking it too preciously.” I’m never going to be Hemingway; I’m never going to be Fitzgerald. I’m going to be silly.

I also have to credit my father-in-law. He’s a very funny guy, and he’s always been a good editor for me. Making fun of each other over the years has helped sharpen my writing.

AF: You do have quite a bit of wit in both your online persona and your book, and it is different than how you speak in day-to-day life, right? You have almost a mid-Atlantic tinge in some of your videos.

HC: I blame my voice teachers from back in the day… When I was in LA I did a little acting. And I’ve grown up with awful allergies. This is such a silly reason that I speak this way, but people were constantly telling me they couldn’t understand me very well. I was trying very hard to articulate, and it somehow ended up like Katharine Hepburn, I went too far the other way.

AF: Your book offers a lot of practical advice, but I feel like the through line is about etiquette. A lot of people might feel that etiquette is sort of a dated concept. How do you feel like it’s still relevant in today’s fast-moving, contentious world?

HC: I picked up Emily Post’s Etiquette a number of years back, and reading just the introduction, I realized that we think of etiquette as a stuffy thing where you have to put your pinky in a certain way or go through these rituals, but that’s really not what etiquette is about at all. It’s about improving everyone’s time, making people more comfortable, and taking away the things that make socializing less pleasant and less fun. It’s taking away opportunities for miscommunication. I feel like that is something that we could all use these days, especially when sometimes it’s hard to feel like we’re seeing eye to eye, and it’s hard to connect in meaningful ways. We might as well give ourselves the best shot we can by doing things to make each other comfortable and feel valued. That’s the real point of etiquette, and that will never be out of style.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]