Drink 145: Pwner's Manual

What's vp with
the "v"s?
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Today we bring you the Stalactite, a mix of sambuca, black raspberry liqueur, and Irish cream liqueur.  Since the Bottle Wonderland bar isn’t normally stocked with sambuca, Mrs. Bottle had to make a run to the liquor store to get some.  Some people might think of this as a chore, but for Mrs. Bottle it is one of the small pleasures in life.  When she is in the liquor store she sees a world filled with possibilities.

Since sambuca is a new liquor in our repertoire, we had our traditional pre-cocktail tasting.  Mrs. Bottle was not looking forward to it since the primary flavor component of sambuca is anise (see: Galliano). This is similar to the flavor of black licorice.  Mrs. Bottle does not like black licorice.  She claims it should not even be considered candy. It led us to a long discussion of the merits of black licorice as compared to those of strawberry Twizzlers.  I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that I pwnd Mrs. Bottle.

Since I like black licorice I found the sambuca tasty as expected.  Surprisingly, Mrs. Bottle also thought it was good. In the battle of anise-flavored alcohol, sambuca pwns Galliano. Taste test completed, we proceeded to make the drink. This drink had some of the more complicated instructions so far.  We were supposed to float the Irish cream on top of the sambuca, and then “carefully pour the raspberry liqueur, drop by drop, as top layer.”  The idea is that each drop of raspberry liqueur will pull the Irish cream down making little stalactites in the drink.  (Remember, stalactites cling “tite” to the roof while stalagmites “mite” make it up there one day. Knowledge is power.)

Not a stalactite
 in site

We don’t have an eye-dropper, so pouring something drop by drop was pretty much an impossibility. Mrs. Bottle gave it her best shot but it just wasn’t meant to be.  She was pwnd by the instructions.  Apparently a lot of people get pwnd by those instructions since I couldn’t find a single picture of a successful implementation of this drink online.  Of course, the taste of the drink is much more important than the looks.  In this case, the taste was surprisingly good.  I thought for sure that the raspberry and Irish cream would be gross mixed with sambuca but they were fine.  It is probably due to the fact that those flavors where muted compared to the sambuca and you couldn’t really taste them until your post-drink burp.  You do have a post-drink burp, right?

Overall Rating for the Stalactite

Taste: 4

Presentation: 1 – Probably a 5 if we did it right

Ease of Preparation: 4 – Probably a 1 if we did it right

Drinks Until Blackout: 3 – 35% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.25 oz Sambuca

0.25 oz Black Raspberry Liqueur

0.25 oz Irish Cream Liqueur