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• 5-Minute Falernum

  
  

• Cheater Ingredient: Cinnamon Syrup

  
  

Over the years, the booze that finds its way into my glass has changed. My foray into cocktails was a horrific ride on Captain Morgan’s pirate ship to Kahlua Bay, with stops to pick up shipmate Mike and his hard lemonade and this odd fellow named Yuengling who always carried a treasure chest of copper with him. He used to lick it at night – it was very strange. But, without getting into too much more detail, let’s just call this time period “The Dark Ages.”

From there, I discovered simple, but exciting new things. For example, gin was actually good in things other than a Long Island Iced Tea and whiskey was aggressively delicious. And as I’m sure any cocktail geek would say, the adventures that followed involved the unwavering desire to research and acquire every possible spirit, bitter, and syrup on the planet. Though at the end of the day, there is always Tecate or Old German in a can.

Bitters (use sparingly); Out-of-season fruit juice bottle, can, or juice pouch (2 - 3 servings); Cheap rum in a plastic bottle (3 - 5 servings); MD 20/20 and woodchuck (4 - 6 servings); Ice beer (in a new-fangled useless bottle, boxed wine, or vodka (6 - 11 servings)" />

KP Question

• What does your Drink Pyramid look like?

(Z. T. Bitzer 2011) The Problem You sit idly on your chateau’s balcony, surveying the work of your master gardner, Rondingus Brungo, former 3rd-level Druid and failed adventurer. A gin and tonic rests on the granite balustrade with a pool of water slicking the surface underneath; the glass is beaded with a carpet of droplets [...]

Apparently not updating your blog wins you nominations! I couldn’t think of another two gentlemen I’d rather be crouched in a dark corner with than Jeffrey Morgenthaler and Camper English. I’m also confident no one has ever typed that sentence in the history of the human race… Winning a popularity contest against Morgenblogger is a [...]

This series on cheater ingredients started off with grapefruit. Cinnamon is another tool in our veritable MacGyver toolkit for fixing cocktails and one that, unsurprisingly, matches very well with grapefruit. Leafing through one of my treasured reference cookbooks which might as well just be a nerdy spreadsheet of ingredient pairings, I looked for cinnamon. Cilantro [...]

Thought the Chartreuse Swizzle couldn’t be improved? The Pineapple Juice Make your own pineapple juice! Canned pineapple juice is a horrific, Reaver-like abomination not worthy of even your tipsiest patron. Bottled, “high-quality” pineapple juice is not much better. Do you use bottled lemon juice? Exactly. The creamy tang and brightness of fresh pineapple juice is [...]