It’s this plastic problem that has driven some states to propose banning nips entirely, like in Maine, where Fireball nip sales exceeded full-size purchases four to one. Though some nips are still sold in glass or even cans, the majority of cheaper ones are not. While this offered a standardized alcohol quantity of 1.7 ounces, it is extremely cost-prohibitive, limiting in choice and an awful waste of plastic. Galleys are small and everything needs to be as space-efficient as possible.” While she calls them minis, she’s noticed variations in what her passengers call them depending on the region they’re serving.įor decades in South Carolina, though, they were an annoying restriction: Up until 2006, drinks at bars could only be made from nips. Tricia Johnson, a 25-year-old flight attendant for a small charter airline, tells me that mini bottles are “easier to stock and easier to make drinks with. Today, booze is the biggest source of in-flight revenue for airlines, and liquor remains far more popular than beer or wine. Nips were the natural solution: pre-portioned, easy to store and difficult to break. Meanwhile, on planes, people love to be drunk, and pouring liquor from a glass bottle into a shot glass on a turbulence-ridden flight isn’t easy. On a flight, of course, there’s a captive market. While these prices might not be much worse than what you’d shell out on a flight, hotels are finding that customers are more willing to drink at the hotel bar or run down to a local convenience store instead. Their nips, while slightly higher-end (Herradura and Tito’s), go for $10 a piece. “We’re in the process of changing the products.” Currently, the Ritz-Carlton’s minibar contains things like $5 chips and $42 half-bottles of wine. “We haven’t been having lots of sales, so products have been expiring, which of course is company loss,” says Anna, an employee at the Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey in Los Angeles. Some hotels are phasing them out entirely or, at the very least, overhauling them. Speed up to the aughts and you find that between 20, minibar revenue fell by 28 percent. In 1974, the year minibars were introduced to that Hilton, in-room drink sales increased 500 percent. In any case, the minibar made lots of extra cash for Conrad and Co. The exact history of the minibar is unclear, but the first hotel to feature one in-room is said to be the Madison in Washington, D.C., or the Hong Kong Hilton. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, with the advent of the hotel minibar and an increase in commercial flights, that the nip really became a thing. The term nip likely comes from the Low German word nipperkin and was used as early as 1796. It’s thought that these bottles originated as tasters in the mid-1800s. Even when I’m not traveling, nips are a regular component to my drinking routine: I’ll store a few in my bag on a night when I don’t want to drop $15 on a weak cocktail, or keep them in my clutch at a fancy work event. The nip is the lowbrow version of a wine tasting or a flight of craft beer: It turns a commitment buy like Fireball into a risk-free treat. They only know the nip as what alcohol comes in when you’re on an airplane. Some might call it a miniature, a mini, a shooter or a shot, but I’d guess most people don’t have a name for it. If you’re not from New England, the word “nip” is the regional slang for a tiny bottle of booze, usually 50 ml in size.
When nips are a dollar each, the stakes are low. A blue Smirnoff Sours Berry Lemon, a pink Ruby Red Deep Eddy - it barely matters. Before I head to the airport, I pop into my local liquor store, dig my hand into a plastic tub and pick out a couple fruity, neon-accented mini-bottles of vodka. These days, I don’t get on a plane without a few nips on me.
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