The Steampunk Drink (Part 1)

I met Kimberly Maita on a cruise ship. I'm sure that I talked to Kimberly, who runs an enterprise named Gamer Adventures, at a game convention or two before cruising with her, but I MET her onboard, over many drinks and shipboard relaxation. She is a delightful cruise coordinator, and a fun person to hang around with. (We keep trying to meet up in Las Vegas at Frankie's Tiki Room, but so far, no luck. The fact that we're still trying is to her credit.)

Early this year, I received a message from her, asking me to create a drink for her Steampunk Symposium onboard the Queen Mary in January. I said yes, because Kim is a friend and I figured it would be worth a few free drinks when next we met. Her requirements were modest–the current drink was "too sweet," and it should be something appropriate to the theme of the cruise.

I, of course, needed to make it harder. I had to rule out alcohols released after 1910 or so (which is pushing it for true steampunk, but I wanted some validation chronologically), and my starting point was something evocative of the theme. Steampunk is about creating an creative, just-off-center experience, with internal rules governing the flights of fancy on display. So, I wanted the drink to adhere to the same sorts of rules that I would apply to creating a costume for a steampunk event.

Additionally, there was one more rule Kim added: no absinthe. This struck me as an odd rule, and I'm not sure if this is a shipboard rule, or a personal preference, or just such a Victorian stereotype as to be instantly dismissed. This wasn't a huge deal, of course, but it did prevent one line of exploration (which would have been nice, as I have four bottles of the stuff at home, and I'd like an excuse to use a bit more of it than I do).

I also wanted to remember that this was going to be part of a cruise bar offering, of which its patrons are not known for their overall self-control. One drink becomes two, two becomes four, and by the end of the night it's hard to tell the rolling of the ship from the variations in gravity caused by your inebriated state. So, it needed to be a high-volume drink–no five-minute production processes, no eight-hour garnishes, but something that a working bartender could produce quickly and efficiently.

Two major avenues of exploration occurred to me. The first was to play off the "showy" side of steampunk–find something reactive in color or presentation that would provide a bit of a show during the production of the drink. In retrospect, it's not surprising that I found little on the subject; chemical reaction in consumables presents the challenge of taking two edible substances that combine into another edible substance, without the production of bad by-products or overly endo- or exothermic reactions. I'd love to explore this topic in the future, but I'm resigned to the the idea that it might need to be a much more controlled atmosphere for success than a working bar would provide. A few side explorations proved fruitless as well (who would have thought that Pop Rocks would be so very boring when added to vodka?...).

The second avenue also involved showmanship, but of an external variety. I imagined that a simple lightbox might be added to the bar as a mixing platform, allowing me to create blacklight-sensitive drinks. It's a very well-known fact that quinine is blacklight-reactive, casting off a bluish glow under ultraviolet. As quinine is an ingredient in tonic water, it means that any drink that uses tonic water to any great extent will provide that glow. Thing is, it works best with clear drinks–a gin and tonic is very pretty as the clear drink glows blue, but introduce any other color to the drink and the effect gets washed out enough as to not justify the extra bother of a lightbox.

This was my research status as of May, when I made a trip out to Charlottesville, Virginia for a Mayfair Games production meeting. When people ask if I play games for a living, these are the days where I can say "yes" - fourteen hour days where we're hammering at designs, or churning through a design an hour, or eating while discussing games and game designs. But, this is being done in a beautiful, relaxed setting, in the shadow of Monticello, with friends who are as engaged and focused on the games at hand as I (and usually more so).

The drink is pictured in the
Wave Polka Dot Shooter
and is available for purchase
on the Contemporary Complements
website

On our last day, we were making our traditional morning run to Spudnuts (a now-defunct national chain, with individual franchisees still operating, that makes lighter-than-air potato flour doughnuts). Needing my morning mocha, I wandered across the street to The Farm C'ville, a small grocery/deli with a bit of a wine selection on the side. While waiting for my coffee, I glanced over at a display shelf next to the register, and was immediately fixated on the word "quinquina." This is important because it means that it's in a family of apertifs that includes cinchona bark, which means quinine.

What I was looking at was Byrrh (pronounced "beer," to the dismay of anyone wanting to buy a bottle somewhere, and having to start every conversation with a clerk with "Do you carry [beer]?"). It's an French herbal aperitif, created by two French brothers in 1866 and marketed as a health drink. In a typical French manner, they use red wine as the base, and the drink is sweet, but with a palate-clearing edge thanks to the quinine fluttering about at the end of the taste. It fell out of fashion pre-Prohibition in the US and has only been available again since 2012, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

I immediately snagged up a bottle, somehow knowing in my heart of hearts that this was the ingredient I needed to inspire my drink. But what to do with it?

That, dear friends, is a story for next week...