Those Who Can't Do, Blog

This certainly looks like the
next big thing to me

Over the past few months we have reviewed scores of drinks, critiqued liquors, rated beers, and even made the occasional restaurant review (what happened to that feature?).  Even though we have been reliably informative, hilarious, and touching, TBIAW still hasn’t caught fire with the masses.  We need something to set us apart from other blogs about drinking, and that something is a signature cocktail of our own.

That’s right, you read correctly, we are going to come up with our own original drink.  Once we perfect it we fully expect it to become the next big thing.  The current big thing is planking.  If something as dumb as that can become popular then I think we have a real chance.  Of course we are hurting ourselves by unveiling our first attempt on a holiday weekend when most people will be outside doing something fun instead of avoiding work by reading our blog.

This is a fad, really?
Img: whataplanker.com

Creating a signature cocktail isn’t as easy as it sounds.  The most difficult part is coming up with something original in light of the thousands upon thousands of recipes available online.  The easiest way to develop something unique is to invent your own liqueur.  Then any drink you make with it will be new.  You can put the brand of the liqueur in the name of every recipe to further strengthen your message.  To publicize it sufficiently it is also a must to create a web site with an annoying splash page with music and slowly developing graphics.  A cool logo and weird bottle don't hurt either.

Alas, I searched the entire grounds of the Bottle Wonderland Estate and I could not find a distillery or a cadre of web developers so we will have to use ingredients that have already been invented. For our first attempt we decided to use science to determine the right ingredients.  And by science, I mean an Excel spreadsheet.  We chose to use Excel 2003, widely agreed upon by the top spreadsheetologists in the country to be the version installed on our laptop.

Notice the sophistication, precision, and cell formatting

We took our spreadsheet and created a model to determine which ingredients were most likely to lead to a tasty beverage.  The model was quite sophisticated and used formulas such as SUM and COUNTIF.  The laptop smoked and sputtered and caused an area brownout but eventually it spit out a list of vodka, orange juice, lime juice, and lemon juice as the top four.  After determining that this was a unique set of ingredients we used a variation on the Hodge conjecture to optimize the proportions. 

Naming the drink was quite easy.  With the selected ingredients the only logical choice was to call it the Dragon Street Cobra Tamer.  With that settled, Mrs. Bottle carefully measured and mixed the inaugural Dragon Street Cobra Tamer (3 shakes over purified ice in a metallic shaker)  and poured it into our fanciest chilled cocktail glass.  It was good but a little too tart.  Recognizing that mixology is both art and science, we decided to add a little simple syrup to balance it out.  This was really a genius touch because by adding “simple syrup to taste” to the recipe it is on you if you think it is too sour or too sweet and we remain blameless.

Nailed the logo!

We ultimately felt that the drink was not a perfect five, but it was a solid four.  There is nothing wrong with a four and that gives us the opportunity to create additional drinks. Mrs. Bottle began planning out the ingredients of our next drink before we had even finished this one (sneak preview: there will be coffee liqueur).  The only downside is that we had to change the name of our drink to the Dragon Street Cobra Tamer No. 1 so we have room to grow.

Overall Rating for the Dragon Street Cobra Tamer No. 1

Taste: 4

Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackout: 5 – 26% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Vodka

0.5 oz Orange Juice

0.25 oz Lime Juice

0.25 oz Lemon Juice

Simple Syrup to taste

Logo images: 1upgamers.com, howstuffworks.com,streetsigngenerator.com