Barreling Forward

I am now part of a group that is doing small barrel batches of cocktails and alcohol. Our previous two (the 12 Year Itch, which is Fernet, Antica Formula and Zaya 12-year rum; and a Perfect Manhattan) were both very good, but largely followed existing recipes. For our next, we've decided to break ground and try a rum blend, and we're doing it with precious little to go on in the way of precedence. So...where to begin?

My initial thoughts were to start with something very neutral, but softer than the typical Bacardi white. Fortunately, that was easy: I'm currently grooving on the Plantation 3 Star rum, which was introduced to me by Nicholas Feris of The Rum Collective during a Plantation tasting last year. Outside of a Cuba Libra, this inexpensive white has quickly replaced most other white rums for general use. It has a clean, clear, slightly sweet rum note that begs for complementary flavors.

Next, I wanted a little bite for the oak to mellow. Previous posts have sung the praises of Smith and Cross rum. Sharp, spicy and bitey, like an alley cat that will let you rub her belly until...NOW, it should introduce some interesting notes at the high end of the flavor profile.

We need the alcohol levels to be high going in, and if you want to boost the proof, I can't think of a better add than Wray and Nephew Overproof Rum. It's a staple around the house for falernum, but despite the 126-proof burn, it's not an unpleasant flavor and should help draw some of the flavors out of the barrel (which we're going to do a madeira soak on before we cask this concoction).

Finally, I wanted something to give us some elusive notes in small quantities. Our ratios for the above are 8:2:2, so with the majority of the blend so far focused on the 3 Star, a few flourishes shouldn't hurt. We're adding a bottle of King's Ginger, for a touch of a Scotch edge and of course the bold, bright ginger flavor of the liqueur (which is nestled quietly into the profile of the final mix, so we're not worried about overwhelming things). Finally, like those few drops of Pernod in a tiki drink, we'll top off the barrel with Cruzan Blackstrap rum, for a bit of color and and hint of dark (the barrel usually holds around 13-14 bottles, so if there's a bit of Cruzan left at the end of the day, we'll just have a Corn 'n' Oil or two and call it a day).

What will we have in a couple of months? I honestly don't have a clue. I'd lik
e to think we'll have a rum that started with some great high notes, and a midrange palate that will get filled in with the char and oak, making the final blend a candidate for Rum Old Fashioneds or a particularly complex base for simple tiki drinks. Part of what makes this so interesting is that we'll be making something that will be, in the truest sense of the word, unique. No other barrel, or environment, or preparation, or anything within this process–even if done to exacting standards by ourselves–will have the same result, for better or worse. If this works, we'll each have about a gallon of rum to savor and parse out for special occasions; if it's less than successful, well, one imagines I will still be able to choke it down with enough Coke and lime.

It's the quest of bartenders, mixologists and alcohol enthusiasts alike: to create something for a moment in time, for a specific audience, for a desired result. It's exciting to use our collected knowledge (and the shared knowledge of our local bartending community) to push the edges of alcohol knowledge a bit, and to share in the results of the labor at the appointed time. Whether I'll be gushing about the results, or finding ways to burn it off without anyone calling me on it, remains to be seen. For now, I've got a small vial of control sample, and a dream.

The Carolina Dessert

I actually bartend exactly one time a year, for our company Christmas party. I got the gig because I like to mix drinks, and because the former bartender outranks me in the company. I don't mind, as it's a great way to see everyone at the party, but it's a bit against nature for me. A lot of my mixology and cooking interest probably comes from my fondness for chemistry, but chemistry is more task-oriented than your typical bartending gig. I like to mix drinks, and play with ingredients, but then some yahoo shows up and wants something to drink that I have no interest in making, and just because they have money, and my employer wants said money, I have pry myself away from a fascinating comparison of gins to take the cap off of your stupid bottle of–well, you get the idea.

Every year, I try to pack in a few things to not get bored. This year's crop of rum punch came in pretty well (I've been playing with hard ciders as my "weak" base for rum punches), and a few people discovered the joy of Old Fashioned with Rittenhouse rye and homemade brandied cherries (canned by Julie, using fresh Michigan cherries and Michigan brandy). Julie also provided the usual amazing array of Jello and pudding shots (which we're due to feature here again, at some point, methinks). There was some other combinatorial playing, but nothing too noteworthy

But the star of the evening is a story that starts in Atlanta, Georgia. My cohort in crime on this adventure was Dan, and we're doing the convention thing in downtown Atlanta. For dinner one night, we ended up at Sweet Georgia's Juke Joint, which met our four basic requirements for travel dinner:

• Walking distance there
• Staggering distance back
• Smells good from the sidewalk
• Open

I'm not proud, but I'm not apologizing.

Turns out, we went back again before we left, as the food was very good, and the drinks were equally excellent. Their menu breathlessly exclaimed "the only legal moonshine in Atlanta!" (no longer the case, but read on). The couple of drinks featuring "moonshine" were great–a dessert coffee drink, and a lemonade with soaked blueberries. After our first dinner, we asked to try the "moonshine" straight.

Okay, let's take a minute so that I can stop using the damn quotes. I KNOW that what they served was not moonshine. I know that what you buy in stores labeled moonshine is almost universally not moonshine. Moonshine is made in the backhills of Appalachia, bottled into repurposed 5-gallon tubs, using stills made from recycled automotive parts and scrap metal, and taking on the characteristics of the environment in which it is distilled (dirt, insects and Ford truck exhaust, mostly). I remain very interested in trying the real article, but I'm not going to type "diluted unaged commercial corn whiskey" when "moonshine" gets me in the general neighborhood with a lot fewer letters.

What we were served was Catdaddy–80 proof, cinnamon-infused, and my first taste of the sweetness and mellowness of corn whiskey. Purists be damned, I quite liked the taste, and have kept a bottle around the house ever since. And, for the holiday party, I was pretty sure I could find some others to enjoy it as well. Sure enough, the subject came up and the bottle was pulled out.

That said, I felt like playing a little bit, and decided to apply two additional flavors. For all the explosion in craft bitters, there's still a place on my shelf for the tried-and-true Angostura bitters, with its signature sweet citrus and herbal notes. But, my new bitters darling is Mozart Chocolate Bitters, which provides the clearest, cleanest dry cocoa note you can imagine. The Mozart has been a bit of an obsession for me, as I've been playing with it in the same way you'd use cocoa to darken and dimensionalize chili or apple butter. That said, it also seemed like a good fit for a spirit that starts as sweet and bright as Catdaddy does.

And oh boy, was the result good. Tasting it gave me that immediate rush of "this is a keeper recipe." It's simple–really only one alcohol and two bits of flavoring, and I apologize in advance for using an ingredient that is currently not commonly available in the U.S. Doesn't matter–find an importer, get a bottle of the Mozart bitters, track down Catdaddy (fairly widely available), and try this little concoction.

Carolina Dessert

1 oz. Catdaddy spiced moonshine (chilled)

2 dashes Angostura bitters

2 dashes Mozart chocolate bitters

Shake briefly with ice to chill. Serve in an apertif glass. 

The French Jewel

Everybody, meet Tamara.

She's a bartender on the Carnival Liberty, six weeks into a six-month stint onboard (many of the workers do six months on, two months off). This is her first bartending gig for the Carnival line, and she's still learning her way around her job. Her bartending requirements are no different than many others who work the job in a high-traffic situation–she's responsible for much of the bar service during the dinner seating, and interacts with waitstaff who employ a variety of ways to get her to work on their drinks first. Otherwise, she's assigned as needed to bar locations: I got my first drink of the cruise from here in one of the center interior bars (a great place to work: high traffic, people wants their first drink as quickly as possible, and everyone's in a good mood). Later in the week, she worked one of the back bars: busy during the dinner hours, and then very quiet thereafter. As there's a guaranteed tip assigned to each drink served, there is a definite advantage to having people ordering drinks from you.

I was on board for my job, if you can believe that. I was part of a team from our company running a Settlers of Catan tournament on the ship. Every night, we also participated in an open gaming session, where we could play whatever we felt like, and feel better about having a drink during working hours. (Justifying a drink is a very slippery slope on board a cruise vessel.) So, on this particular night, I'm playing a game, drink in hand, when Kim, our travel agent, bursts into the room. She grabs my hand.


"Come. With. Me."

Okay, another brief aside. Think about the limitations of tending bar on board a ship at sea. Space is precious, and the alcohols that you have on board are selected for maximum familiarity, variety of uses and ease of replacement. The craft cocktail craze has largely bypassed Carnival (they had one bar, The Alchemy Bar, that was exploring some less-traveled ingredients), but they sure do know their way around a fruity rum drink. As a vacation thing, it's easy enough to simply rationalize in your head that for the next seven days, your lot in life will be a parade of tropical flavors and a lot of hurricane glasses.

Okay, back to the distraught travel agent. I have no idea what she wants, but I gather there's some expediency in the matter, so I follow her out of the room and down the hallway to the bar. Tamara is behind the counter, and she has seven or eight patrons merrily keeping her company. Kim sits at the bar, and points to a pink drink in a martini glass on the counter. "Drink. That."

I'm beginning to suspect that the issue at hand is not so much a matter of urgency, but more a matter of "I've just had some drinks, and you need to do so as well." Tamara sees me smell the drink first, and smiles. "Are you a bartender?" I laugh a bit. The more I'm around working bartenders, the less I'm willing to claim the title.

The drink is comfortably in the wheelhouse of the tropical drinks on the boat, but not as sweet, and certainly a bit more subtle than most of what I've consumed on the trip so far. Another of the patrons wanders up to me. "I told her to make me a drink, and that's the best drink I've had onboard. I went to the Alchemy Bar, told them to make me a drink, and then I told them that there was a Czech bartender downstairs who was kicking their ass!"

"Would you be willing to tell me what's in the drink?" I ask Tamara.

She smiled. "Last day of the cruise."

For each of the next three nights, I came back to the bar and had a drink. One of the barstaff managers took an interest in her drink. Each night, a group of people joined me in searching her out and getting her to make us her drink. She was clumsily hit on, the target of the occasional sexist comment, constantly having to shift gears between her customers and the demands of the dining room waitstaff. And each night, her group of fans grew. As bartenders go, she did her job, and did it well, and my cruise was better for it.

Courtesy of Tamara, enjoy her drink and know that somewhere out in the Caribbean, there's a Czech bartender, new at her job but getting better at it every day, who has knowledge, a personality, a smile and a drink that's all worth spending some time with.

French Jewel (courtesy of Tamara, Carnival Liberty)

2 oz. vodka (Tamara uses Grey Goose)
1 oz. Malibu rum
.5 oz. pineapple juice
.5 oz. mango puree

Shake together with ice; serve in a martini glass with a sugar rim.

Oh Bother

The bartender gave me a half-smile, and shrugged. "Of course, you can't tell the customer no."

*****

Julie and I are in Chicago, and I'm vibrating with glee, as we're about to enter a tiki bar I've been waiting to enter for over a year–Three Dots and a Dash. It's off an alley behind another bar on North Clark (the also-tasty Bub City), and a short skull-themed stairway later, we're third in line to get in at opening time.

The Jet Pilot, it just wants you to be happy.
If by "happy," you mean "rollicking drunk."

We take a seat at the bar, and pick our drinks–she goes with their riff on the Painkiller, and I go with one of my evaluation drinks, the Jet Pilot. The Zombie is my first-choice go-to drink to compare a tiki bar to its compatriots, but at Three Dots the Zombie, although it looks pretty authentic from the menu, is also a $65 drink for 3-4 people. Another time, perhaps. We also tried several of the small plates offered (the tuna crisps, served with a quartet of sauces, was a nice, light counterpoint to the drinks ordered). The drinks arrived in their resplendent ceramic, and we were happy, happy patrons.

The bar filled up fairly quickly (it's a segmented single room, so it's not hard to do). Our first drinks went down at an efficient pace. so a second seemed a reasonable plan of action. The menu proudly touted its "Selection of Fine Rums," and perusing the shelves, it's hard to argue. Sitting on the second shelf, my current darling of the rum world proudly held court with its blue and silver label: Smith & Cross rum, which features prominently in earlier entries on this blog. I call the bartender over.

"So what are you using the Smith and Cross for?"

She looked at the bottle a bit quizzically. "I'm not sure. We use Appleton as our Jamaican rum for most of our drinks. I can ask someone, if you want."

"No no, that's fine. Would you be interested in making me something with it?"

She paused for a moment. We've talked a couple of times up to this point, the usual light chatter and customer check-ins that barstaff should do. "To be honest, I really don't know the rum. We're trained on the menu drinks, and the managers don't really like us to improvise a lot." She half-smiled, and shrugged. "Of course, you can't tell the customer no..."

I can't complain about the bar, the drinks, or the service at Three Dots–quite the opposite. I'm eager to go back and explore more of the drink menu as soon as possible. And, our visit was within the first six months of opening, which means that, although they've had a proper shakedown by the public (the first crop of staff who won't work out have left, and the ones that will work out have some experience with the menu), they're still new enough to be adjusting to what is a non-standard bar menu (the tiki drink set is going to be a departure from the bartenders who may be accustomed to expertly mixing a never-ending parade of rum and Cokes or Old Fashioneds).

But, truth be told, I've been a bit spoiled. I have bartenders locally (hi Ravens Club, hi Alley Bar, hi Last Word) who are endlessly inventive, mixing drinks based on experience, mood and the occasional challenge from me. At places like Frankie's Tiki Room or the Zig Zag Café, I've shown up on their doorstep on a mission, and they've waxed poetic about both drink and spirits recommendations. I am so very curious about this amazing hobby of mine, and I've been fortunate to run across a bunch of bartenders, mixologists and drinking companions that support me in the quest part of the experience (and the drinking part, too).

I am VERY mindful of when it is appropriate to be all "make me something bartender's choice blah blah demerara rum" up in here. If the place is rockin', with drinks flying across the bar, I know not to interrupt or even get too chatty; I always figure that if I try a "make me something" move when a place is busy, Ray Foley is going to magically appear and Gibbs-slap me. "Get there early, hang out a bit, then back off as the place fills up" works pretty well as an MO for me.

Still, if there's a rum sitting on a shelf at a bar, and that bar is a tiki bar proclaiming its specialization in rums, it's a bit of a disappointment that I can't play a little bit. For all of the Bud Lights and rum and Cokes that crossed the bar in front of me (and going to an amazing bar like Three Dots to order Bud Light ought to earn SOMEBODY a Gibbs-slap or two), you've got a rum on your shelf that I like, and I want to see what you can do with it. So, I loved the experience, I'm ready to go back–but if that bottle of Smith & Cross is still sitting there, someone's going to make me a drink using it. You Have Been Warned.

Shut Up and Drink

One of my primary goals with this blog is to NOT represent myself as an expert in mixology or alcohol. I'd love to be comfortable with the title "gifted amateur," but even that remains a goal, not a reality. I take advantage of a great friends' network, frequent travel and the inability to flinch at ten-spot cocktail prices to build on what bits of information I've collected over the years. I have a better-than-average home bar, and a much better-than-average wife who simply rolls her eyes when the 24th different bottle of rum sheepishly wanders into the house.

All this sets the stage for today's story, set in the lovely city of Boston, Massachusetts. Our company team is there for a convention, and we're staying downtown at the Omni Parker House, one of my favorite recurring hotels on our annual travel circuit. Home of two culinary treats (Parker House rolls and Boston Cream Pie, both of which they still make very well indeed), they also have The Last Hurrah, a storied bar which is about as old-school as a bar can get–walking in gives a sense of the political movers and shakers that have both drunk and said too much within its walls (indeed, the name of the bar is a nod to a political bestseller by Edwin O'Connor).

Our evening started with a bit of pub grub, and then my friend Nik and I decide to have a nightcap at the 21st Amendment. My wife and I had a great evening last year drinking at the bar with the bartender, but this year the bar was far too crowded (and the craft cocktails touted on the chalkboard last year had been replaced with the month's Sam Adams specials–we'll try again next year). Not to be thwarted in our efforts, we decide to retreat back to the hotel and The Last Hurrah.

Now, this was not necessarily a problem. I had a terrific drink at the Hurrah last year, and I recalled the drink menu as excellent. My larger, general problem is that retreating back to your hotel at the end of a night always seems to me an admission of defeat. "Well [insert city name here], I've had a great time today, but now, there's nothing you have to offer me that is more interesting than watching Adult Swim in my hotel room bed." I know that if I can just stay out for another hour, something terribly interesting is going to happen, and THEN I can collapse back at the hotel, having fought the good fight. The [insert hotel bar name here] is a coward's choice; I want a drink, but can't be tossed to find the best one available to me within walking/cab/train/rickshaw distance. Hotels are a tool, not a destination.

All that said, Nik and I pull up a seat at the bar and order a couple of cocktails. Nik lives a state away from me, but getting together with him is always fun, and as he's someone I've known for over 25 years, and I'm not letting the evening go down without a fight. The first round was excellent, and we decide that we should have a bit of Scotch to end the evening, and we peruse the extensive list that the Last Hurrah has.

I like Scotch, and I'll further specify that I like peaty Scotch. When I visited Edinburgh for the first time, I took the Scottish Whisky Heritage Tour (which apparently has become a carnival ride in my absence), and walked out of the tasting room ready to buy my first bottle of Scotch (a 17-year Ardbeg from the original version of the distillery, of which I still have a bit left). I've had (and have purchased) other varieties, but for me, it's that smoky, campfire nose that I love about Scotch; it's that property that makes it different from other alcohols and what I seek out when I go for a Scotch.

But an expert, or even an informed amateur, I am not. So, I asked the bartender for a recommendation. "I'm not the best person to ask. You should talk to our manager Frank," he said, pointing behind me.
"He's the one that put together the list." I turned to look.

When you see Frank Weber standing in The Last Hurrah, you immediately think, "Well, of COURSE he's the manager." He looks at home, comfortable, aware of his surroundings, and attentive to what is going on around him. Not a surprise, really–he bartended at New York's Maxwell's Plum in the 1960's, opened bars in Cincinnati in the 1970's, turned around a few establishments, competed in some mixology competitions, and is now settled in as the food and drink manager at the Omni Parker House. This is a man who has built an establishment to his standards, and is consequently the core of its being when he strides around the place. This is HIS bar.

"So–what do you know about Scotch?"

Since my Scotland trip, I've learned an bit about the regionality and classifications for Scotch; I've purchased a bottle every year when I've been in Frankfurt, I've tried a variety and have a pretty good sense of what I like and don't like. Still, in the moment, there was a decision to make: do I sputter out something like "Islay peaty argledy blah," or do I let the nice man with several decades of experience tell me a story?

I smiled. "Let's assume I know nothing."

Frank gave us the basic tour, introduced us to Ardbeg Galileo (which if anyone reading this runs across a bottle sitting on a shelf somewhere, I need to know immediately) and the Balvenie Caribbean Cask, but it was terrific to have someone give me the guided tour, letting him share his knowledge and his bar without any pressure. It was a marvelous end to the evening, and Frank spent enough time with us to be memorable. I use "enough time" very deliberately–not so much as to interfere with his other duties, not so much as to not leave us wanting more, and enough to make two lads out for a drink on a Thursday night in Boston very happy.

Could I have represented myself as having more knowledge? Sure, but what would have been the point? There are wide categories of spirits that I have little experience with (tequila, I'm looking at you), spirits with long histories like Scotch that I know only the broadest level of information about, and even for things I am comfortable with talking about in detail, I try to be around people that know more about these things than I, because I'm NOT the expert - I'm just the guy who drinks their work and sings their praises. I am happy to be the student in most of my interactions, as it means I get the benefits of the knowledge with none of the expectations. There are parts of my life where I am the expert, and I do the teaching, but as far as my ongoing exploration of spirits goes, I am content to learn and share.

The Steampunk Drink (Part 2)

So – we have Byrrh. Now what?

On the back of the Byrrh bottle, I found what turned out to be 95% of the drink I wanted to make. The Le Negociant is a 4-ingredient French lovefest:
- 1 ounce Byrrh
- 1 ounce rhum agricole (which means "rum made straight from sugarcane, skipping the molasses step)
- .5 ounce elderflower liqueur
- .5 ounce lemon juice

Rhum agricole is by default French, since Clément or Rhum JM are the usual go-tos, and both hail from Martinique in the French West Indies. "Elderflower liqueur" is St. Germain, and do not waste time with anything else. And with Byrrh's pedigree, we're not only solid French, but we're golden on the age of all of the above – 1866 for Byrrh, 1887 for rhum, and 1884 for the process used to make St. Germain. ("Le Negociant", by the way, refers to a French wine producer who buys grapes from a mix of smaller vineyards and combines them to create their own label's release.)

The drink is terrific - the Byrrh's red wine (and, to be clear, this is mistelle – fortified red wine that's sweeter than a traditional red) gives it a front sweetness, the St. Germain gives it floral and citrus notes and a gentle sweetness, the rhum adds a light rum flavor that contributes another sweet note, the herbals and undernotes of the Byrrh and the St. Germain dancing just out of reach. It's a great drink...

Von's 1000Spirits. I took their word for it.

...but I did say the word "sweet" four times in the above paragraph. One of my mandates, as you'll recall, was that the current drink being served was "too sweet." Now, this is not pina colada sweet, but it's definitely going to register as sweet on the palate. This is not necessarily going to be a problem, but the closer I can walk to the border of sweet and tart, the wider the audience I can reach with this drink.

So, we flash forward to September, on a beautiful night in Seattle where my friend Ron and I are walking the streets of Seattle looking for Byrrh. (In reality, we're just looking for drinks, but if you've got a goal, it's purposeful drinking, right?) Surprisingly, there was no Byrrh at Von's 1000Spirits (though I did pick up another nifty trick for the steampunk bartender), and I had a great throwback drink with a nifty local story. At The Diller Room, I got a pity-carding at the door (at my age, always appreciated), and a great side-by-side comparison of a variety of quinquinas. No Byrrh, but I did get to try Cocchi Americano straight for the first time (think Byrrh, but with a moscato base) and the local entry into the category, Chinato D'Erbetti. Both were interesting, but not what I was after...

Finally, we ended up at the Zig Zag Café, tucked away as you head down towards the shoreline from Pike Place Market. Ron had been there the night before, and had sung the praises of the place effusively. Ricardo was our bartender for the evening, and upon asking about Byrrh, immediately produced a bottle of the stuff for our amusement. So, we had him mix up a Le Negociant, parse it out into a couple of glasses for control sample purposes, and resolved to come up with the perfect variant of the drink for our purposes.

After a couple of abortive attempts to add additional ingredients, Ricardo made an observation. The sweet is coming from three sources in the drink; what if we can modify one of the existing spirits in the drink to take the sweet edge off? The Byrrh was off-limits, and the St. Germain is a beloved favorite, so the rhum became the sacrificial victim. I really wanted to keep rum, but didn't want to add a rum that would overwhelm the drink (Bacardi would add a sharp undertone, anything dark would drown out the herbals, and so on).

Suddenly, Ricardo reached over to the rack and pulled down a semi-familiar bottle – Smith & Cross Jamaican rum. This was one of the stars of our rum dinner from a few months ago, providing a knife-like palate-cleansing alongside foie gras. The rum is navy-strength (meaning that it would not prevent gunpowder from igniting), and is a blend of two traditional Jamaican run processes (part aged less than a year, part aged 18-36 months). Adding it to the drink not only took a bit of sweet out (both in its own flavor and in the extra proof knocking a bit out of the front of the drink), it added some additional spice notes that worked beautifully with the drink. And, as required for steampunk purposes, the Smith & Cross mark dates to 1788. We had our cocktail recipe.

The drink is pictured in the
Etched Bullseye Martini Glass
and is available for purchase
on the Contemporary Complements website.

Finally, we needed a name. Adding the Smith & Cross gets us a British/French blend that doesn't have a lot of commonality–Jamaica was a British colony, and I couldn't find anything evocative of a connection between the spirits or the countries of origin. So, I fell back on the original creators of my primary ingredient. We're only swapping one ingredient from the Le Negociant, but both to separate it from that drink, and to not force inebriated passengers to butcher French in front of our poor bartender, a simple nod to The Violet Brothers seems in order.

The Violet Brothers
1 ounce Byrrh
1 ounce Smith & Cross Jamaican rum
.5 ounce St. Germain
.5 ounce fresh lemon juice

Shake with ice in a cocktail strainer. Serve in a martini glass.

It's been a fun ride, and to all of my companions along the way, (especially Ricardo at the Zig Zag), I'm delighted to have a drink that I'm confident to pass along to our steampunk partygoers. Thanks to Kim Maita for the challenge, and if you try it, let me know what you think!

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...