Drink 195: The 24 Days of Christmas

Greetings and welcome to the 2011 TBIAW Holiday Gift Guide!  Some poor misguided souls might think that mid-January 2012 is too late for a 2011 holiday gift guide.   Those people do not work for the US Postal Service.  Here in the cosmopolitan Charlotte Metroplex, home of such landmarks as the Bottle is a Wonderland Estate, South Carolina,  and the NASCAR Hall of Fame, people are still receiving mail from November.  This is why I always use FedEx to deliver transplant organs.

Sadly, Mrs. Bottle and I were victims of this horrible tragedy of delayed mail.  I did not receive my December 16^th issue of Forbes magazine until January 7^th.  This was an important one, too, for it contained the annual ForbesLife Gift Guide.  I rely on this each year to help me figure out what luxury items to purchase for Mrs. Bottle.  Had this issue arrived on time I would have known that the Burgundy Persian-lamb Wulling jacket by the Row ($12,000 – Barneys) should be under the tree.  Instead Mrs. Bottle received a White Chinese-polyester jacket by the Wal-Mart ($43.99 – Wal-Mart).  In fact, my issue was so late that Barneys no longer has the clearly superior jacket.  Maybe I can find a different one for next year.

The tree is made from bumble bones
image: Forbes.com

I don’t have time to cover everything.  It is January after all.  I have time to mention a few, though.  For men I was going to recommend the Halston Velvet slippers until I saw that they are “price upon request”.  Something tells me that they will be more than these superior ones.  Alternately you could get this $7,000 ping pong table.  It is actually a good deal because it doubles as a beer pong table dining room table so you are getting two pieces of furniture for the price of one.  Its 900 pounds of concrete could also be useful if you ever need to make sure a body never floats to the surface.  You are practically losing money by not owning one.

For the audiophile in your life they suggest the Basis Inspiration Turntable.  A turntable?  Seriously? People who insist on vinyl can be kind of annoying.  I’m guessing that people who insist on vinyl and own a $54,000 turntable are probably not an exception.  For the same price as that turntable you could buy  a USB turntable to convert your precious records to MP3 and 215 160GB iPods so you can listen to them.

Finally, for those of you with precious darling children, they bring you $1,200 ladybug earrings. I say go for it.  If you think you can't afford it go ahead and use the college fund money.  It will pay off.  When you have to get a doctor to remove thousands of dollars of jewelry from your little angel’s nose it will create a fun story for years to come.  College can’t teach you those kind of life experiences.

Vampire Eric really
wishes he had legs
so he could get a sip

In honor of these high-falutin’  gifts we decided to have the Grand Mimosa, a mix of Champagne,  Grand Marnier, and orange juice.  Since we just spent all that money on gifts, we used cava instead of champagne.  We are not made of money after all.  The drink was okay, but both Mrs. Bottle and I thought that it was not as good as a classic Mimosa which excludes the Grand Marnier.  Even better is plain cava, which excludes the orange juice as well.

Overall Rating for Grand Mimosa

Taste: 3

Presentation: 3

Ease of Preparation: 5

Drinks Until Blackout: ??? – The recipe did not give champagne proportions

Ingredients

0.5 oz Grand Marnier

1 oz Orange Juice

Champagne

Drink 194: Malibu's Least Wanted

If you are like me you spend most of your time studying Kanye West lyrics. I was recently analyzing his song Monster (with guest vocalists Bon Iver, Rick Ross, Jay-Z, and Nicki Minaj – I’m a little disappointed I wasn’t asked to drop a few rhymes, too) and couldn’t help but notice this line:

Garnish with pâté 

Mix the Goose and Malibu and call it Malibooya

A drink recipe!  Since Kanye likes it we figured it must be good. The die was cast.  We had to try out this Malibooya (or is it Malibu-ja?).   Unfortunately Kanye left the rest of the recipe as an exercise for the listener.  Therefore we had to make some educated guesses about the proportions, serving vessel, and preparation techniques.  Would it have killed him to add some details?

Mix the Goose and Malibu and call it Malibooya

One ounce of each in a chilled shot glass’ll do ya

There, was that so hard?  Maybe he was too busy lining up 13 additional artists to feature on his next track to think about the predicament of the mixologist MC. 

We had to assume that by “Goose”, Mr. West is talking about Grey Goose, although with his high end tastes, there is a reasonable chance he meant pâté de foie gras.  I don’t believe in force feeding most fowl, so we’ll stick with the vodka.  I don’t know if Kanye is aware that Grey Goose is only the third best tasting vodka in the world. Maybe I will send him a tweet. 

The only Grey Goose currently on hand at the Estate is Grey Goose L’Orange so that is what we used.  Since we aren’t allowed to keep Malibu in the house, we had to run to the local ABC store and pick up a mini-bottle.  They only had Malibu Black which has higher proof and less sweetness than regular Malibu but we figured that would be okay.

Tom Brady added for scale

Before we get to the drink, we have to address something about Malibu Rum.  When I say “rum” what country do you think of?  Jamaica? Puerto Rico? (not a country, BTW) Cuba?   What about Malibu? That one is easy: California (also  not a country).  When you see palm trees on a bottle you probably think of someplace tropical.  Well, if you are drinking Malibu Rum, you should be thinking only one thing: “Canada”.  That’s right; Malibu Rum is a product of Canada. Wait, what?  Just another in the long line of products exposed by the TBIAW iTeam.

It also appears the Canucks want to buy New York

If you zoom way in
on the "palm" trees
on the bottle, this is
what you'll find

We put that troubling piece of info out of our minds and prepared the drink.  We decided to go with even proportions of Goose and Malibu and treat it as a shooter.  Mrs. Bottle thought it was like drinking suntan lotion with an SPF rating of gross.  She said it was slightly better if you drink it quickly because you only got the suntan lotion taste at the end.  I agreed that it was bad.  The coconut and orange flavors did not make a good combination, and it was kind of ugly, too. A more appropriate name for the drink would be the Malibutthole.  Which would be worth a minimum of 23 points  in Words With Friends.  

Mrs. Bottle after trying the Malibooya
(Artist's Rendition)

Maybe we made a mistake with the proportions.  Maybe it would be better with regular Malibu.  It is possible the problem was the orange-flavored vodka.  Perhaps we were supposed to use pâté after all. I guess we'll never know.  I can leave you with these words from Kanye, though:

I'm trippin', this drink got me sayin' a lot

Overall Rating for the Malibooya

Taste: 1

Presentation: 2

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackout: 3 – 38% Alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Goose

1 oz Malibu