Drink 171: I Get Stupid I Mean Outrageous

Today we have the Stupid Cupid, a mix of citrus vodka, sloe gin, simple syrup, and lemon juice.  You might think it would make more sense to have had this drink back during Romance Week, but you would be wrong.  A stupid Cupid would show up late, most likely some time in late July or early August.  It has nothing to do with trying to have a bunch of drinks with sloe gin now that we finally acquired some.

All that and a cherry on the bottom

The drink had a prominent lemon bouquet thanks to the lemon juice and citrus vodka.  I didn’t think the flavor was crazy-lemony, but Mrs. Bottle felt the citrus was powerful.  I think my taste buds may have been de-lemonized because right before we had the drink I had just eaten enough enormous lemon cookies to send me into sugar shock.  They arrived in the mail from Mrs. Bottle’s mother and it would have been rude to just let them sit there. I am eating one right now.

37 whole lemons go into every Kroger lemon cookie

As far as the drink, while we disagreed on the lemon, Mrs. Bottle and I both concurred that the drink had a strong alcohol burn. You know a drink is strong when you feel the warmth in your stomach.  That isn’t too surprising when you consider the Stupid Cupid is 37% alcohol. We had a little trouble coming to an agreement on whether it should be a three or a four but we easily concluded that a few of these will make anyone stupid.

Overall Rating for the Stupid Cupid

Taste: 3
Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackouts: 2 – 37% Alcohol

Ingredients

2 oz Citrus-flavored Vodka

0.5 oz Sloe Gin

1 splash Simple Syrup

1 splash Lemon Juice

Drink 154: Crocodile Rocked

The flamingo straw
was not explicitly
specified but we felt
it was a nice touch

So after missing my regularly scheduled post, Mrs. Bottle is finally here to talk about Sunday’s drink. On Tuesday. Just so you don’t think I was being lazy and not properly devoted to all eleven of you readers out there, let me give a brief background on what happened. You may remember that we recently added two kittens to the household count. This has nothing to do with them but it has everything to do with our 13 year old cat, Mrs. Fatty Needs-A-Lot McCrankyPants (Mrs. FNM for short - formerly known as Bottle Wonderland Cat). She got a little sickly last week and after picking her up from the vet, turns out she has developed an even pickier palate than she already had. After turning her nose up at her normal prescription food that costs half of TBIAW estate’s mortgage payment, Mr. Bottle went in search of any food that might interest her taste buds. The result was that I spent most of Sunday sorting through a bag of Friskies Surfin’ Turfin’ Favorites picking out the pink fishies and brown drumsticks for her to eat from our hands every few hours. This was in between playing referee while Mr. Bottle wrestled her to the ground to force pills and syringes of medicine down her throat. But we are determined to get Mrs. FNM back to her normal finicky but still eating self.

Found some!

And speaking of finicky taste buds, let’s talk about today’s drink. The Crocodile Cooler is made with citrus-flavored vodka, melon liqueur, triple sec, simple syrup, lemon juice and lemon-lime soda. I was a little skeptical because of the melon liqueur, but it turned out to be quite tasty and the Bottle’s delicate taste buds were singing. In fact, we even had a guest try it who we’ll call Mrs. Older-than-Mrs. Bottle. This is what she gets for not reading the blog. Anyway, even though Mrs. OTMB also doesn’t like melon liqueur, she did enjoy the drink as well. Luckily for her I didn’t make her sort out the melon liqueur from the rest of the drinks and then serve it to me from her hand.

Overall Rating for the Crocodile Cooler

Taste: 5

Presentation: 5 – Extra points for not being the real color of a crocodile

Ease of Preparation: 4 – Lots of ingredients or it would rate a 5

Drinks Until Blackout: 10 – 11% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Citrus-flavored Vodka

1 oz Melon Liqueur

0.75 oz Triple Sec

1 oz Simple Syrup

1 oz Lemon Juice

Lemon-Lime Soda

Drink 139: Ice, Ice, Melty

Despite the book's
insistence, we do not
own a parfait glass

Mrs. Bottle here on a gorgeous Sunday morning to discuss today’s lucky drink of the day. The winning drink is the Frozen Citron Neon which is made with citrus-flavored vodka, melon liqueur, blue Curaçao, lime juice, lemon juice and simple syrup. A veritable bevy of ingredients that Mr. Bottle and I both thought was pretty tasty. Since it’s been quite hot lately (yesterday registered 183 degrees on my internal thermometer), it seemed appropriate to have what Mr. Boston calls a “FROZEN drink”.

Let me digress for a few moments about frozen drinks. I do like a nice icy concoction on a hot summer’s day, even the non-alcoholic kind. My one issue with these drinks that are made with crushed ice and blended into a smooth consistency is that they really don’t get to that smooth consistency unless everything melts before you finish. Take a Starbucks Frappucino. It’s all yummy with the coffee flavor and syrupy goodness until you get close to the end. Then it’s all bland ice with coffee-flavored remnants because those big chunky ice bits can’t get up the straw and they’re left behind to wallow in watered down coffee mixture. I have actually resorted to a system for drinking my Fraps where I take 2.75 hours to consume each one so any big chunks have melted. This means that at the end I’m just drinking iced coffee so maybe I should just order those from now on. Anyway, just take this whole diatribe and apply to any frozen drink, especially if you hate coffee.

That’s a nice segue into the next part of today’s story. From the picture you can tell that the name of this drink was pretty accurate. Neon, it is. But when I think of neon, it takes me back to one of the best cars ever made in America. That’s right, the Dodge Neon. Sadly, Chrysler stopped making the Neon on September 23, 2005 and I don’t think there’s been a nicer looking car made since then. Except maybe the Aston Martin Vanquish. It’s almost too close to call because the Neon is one unique automobile. Plus, apparently you can do quite a lot to a Neon to make it even snazzier.

"Snazzy" is the first word that comes to mind when I see this
img: automotive-insight.net

And speaking of snazzy, I would definitely recommend the Frozen Citron Neon. It’s got a great color and is one super cool drink. Pun totally intended.

Overall Rating for the Frozen Citron Neon

 

Taste: 4

Presentation: 5

Ease of Preparation: 3

Drinks Until Blackout: 11 – 8% Alcohol if you wait for all the ice to melt

Ingredients

1½ oz Citrus-flavored Vodka

1 oz Melon Liqueur

½ oz Blue Curaçao

½ oz Lime Juice

½ oz Lemon Juice

½ oz Simple Syrup

Drink 106: The Bartender Has Tritanopia

Brown Hooter

Mrs. Bottle here today to discuss the Purple Hooter. This is a shooter comprised of citrus vodka, triple sec, and black raspberry liqueur. It wasn’t bad, but my expectations when drinking something purple are that it’s going to look purple and taste purple. This was neither. I even ventured onto Google to see if I could learn why this is acceptable. There seem to be three common variations of this recipe and of course none match Mr. Boston’s recipe. One of the websites showed the recipe with vodka, black raspberry liqueur and 7-Up. However, the video on this same site showed how to make it used cranberry juice and club soda instead of 7-Up. I just don’t understand the world today. 

And this leads me to another thing that has me perplexed, but let me give some background first. Mr. Bottle has insisted that we undertake many home improvement projects this year. It’s thoroughly annoying because he knows how much I hate improving our home. Its mediocre nature suits me just fine. Plus he knows how very much I hate having to deal with contractors every day. However, because I need him to be happy so I remain happy, I complied and agreed that the bland, neutral tones in several of our rooms should be changed to more exciting colors.

So off to the home improvement stores we went to gather up several paint samples to help decide. And so here we are, back at my perplexing question. Who comes up with these paint color names? For instance, Benjamin Moore has a color called “Peace and Happiness”. What the hell is that? Apparently to someone at that company, it’s a light purplish hue. But when I polled Mr. Bottle about what he thinks peace and happiness look like, he said “a Chiptle burrito”. Which is not purple. And how about their color “Sweet Caroline”? According to the folks at Benji Moore, that’s a color in the green paint hue family (it looked awfully tan to me but there’s no time to pursue this angle). When I hear “Sweet Caroline”, all I see is a wall covered with Neil Diamonds, not a green (or tan) room. I could go on and on, but you get my point.

Vintage Charm Purple

It’s clear that the same people who name the paint colors at Benjamin Moore are the very same folks who created the so-called Purple Hooter.

Overall Rating for the Purple Hooter

Taste: 3
Presentation: 2 – The purple was sort of missing
Ease of Preparation: 4
Drinks Until Blackout: 3 – 32% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Citrus-flavored Vodka
½ oz Triple Sec
¼ oz Black Saspberry Liqueur

Day 46: Broken Charted

I want to reach through
the screen and drink that

The Casco Bay Lemonade is made from citrus vodka, simple syrup, lemon juice, cranberry juice, and lemon-lime soda.  I have no idea what this drink tastes like, because Mrs. Bottle immediately chugged the whole thing right after she made it.  I asked her for a sip and she said that if I tried to put my hand on her drink that I would pull back a stump.  To be fair, I made up those last two sentences, but this drink was good enough to make that scenario completely plausible. It has just enough sweetness and a nice lemonade taste.  The lemon-lime soda gives it a little fizz for a good mouth-feel.  It even has a lemon wheel on top for an attractive presentation. 

The only real downside is that the Casco Bay Lemonade is only 10% alcohol.  We decided that even with this flaw it rated a score of a perfect five.  Then I began to wonder if it rated a five because it was weak instead of rating a five despite its weakness.  This could turn out to be a crushing blow to my machismo, if I had any.   Unlike some who may choose to remain ignorant, Mrs. Bottle and I value truth above all.  Therefore we conducted a minutes-long TBIAW investigation in order to answer this mystery once and for all. The results can be boiled down by a simple chart:

It seemed clear that the highest rated drinks have the lowest average alcohol content. Things were looking bad.  I was briefly heartened when I saw that the drinks with a rating of four have the second highest average alcohol content.  Then I came up with the bright idea to plot a trend line (the red line).  The trend line clearly shows that the higher the alcohol content, the lower the rating. The 84% correlation leaves me little wiggle room.  This is probably the most convincing demonstration that correlation equals causation since it was definitively proven that global warming is caused by the shrinking number of pirates.

Overall Rating for the Casco Bay Lemonade

Taste: 5

Presentation: 5

Ease of Preparation: 3
Drinks Until Blackout: 9 – 10% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Citrus-flavored Vodka

2 oz Simple Syrup

2 oz Lemon Juice

1 splash Cranberry Juice

1 splash Lemon-Lime Soda

Day 40: A Citronella Story

Will not repel mosquitos

G’day!  Bienvenue! Goedendag! Konnichiwa!  Welcome!  We are at day 40 of our journey.  The astute reader may notice that there are more than forty posts, but we are only counting the official Mr. Boston drink days as days. Since 40 is a nice round number we thought we would reflect a little on our journey. I took a look at our blog statistics to see the global impact of TBIAW. It turns out that so far we have had visitors from 10 different countries.  We only have relatives in 3 of them, so at least 7 people have visited by mistake.

We’ll have more time for reflection later, so let’s talk about today’s drink, the Citronella Cooler.  It is made from citrus-flavored vodka, lemonade, cranberry juice, and lime juice.  As you might guess, it had a strong lemon flavor, although Mrs. Bottle thought the cranberry was also quite distinct.  I thought it mostly tasted like lemonade with a bit of zing.  This would make an excellent drink on a warm summer’s day.  It certainly kicks the crap out of a glass of plain lemonade. It probably isn’t too manly, but I can live with that.

The Citronella Cooler rated a perfect score of 5.  This is our fifth drink to make our top drinks list. In the same time we have only added three drinks to the bottom drinks list. In the last 40 days we have learned that we have a way to go before we can fully appreciate whiskey, but we are making progress.  We have also had stunning investigations that exposed both Galliano (twice) and My Cousin Vinnie.  In the same time period, the government of Egypt has been peacefully toppled.  We could debate for hours which thing is more important, but I think there is no debate on who had more fun.

Otherwise they can't get to TBIAW

Overall Rating for Citronella Cooler

Taste: 5
Presentation: 4 – A garnish other than a watermelon slice would have pushed it to a 5
Ease of Preparation: 5
Drinks Until Blackout: 10 – 10% alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Citrus-Flavored Vodka
2 oz Lemonade
1 oz Cranberry Juice
1 dash Lime Juice