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 148: Throwing Stones

What is up with that orange?

It’s Sunday so that means it’s time for Mrs. Bottle to wow you with another fabulous review of a mediocre (at best) adult beverage. Today’s drink is the Glass Tower, a combination of many, many ingredients. First, you throw in some vodka, followed by peach schnapps. Next comes rum and then triple sec. Finally you add sambuca and finish it off with some lemon-lime soda. In case you haven’t kept count, that’s six ingredients. But don’t forget the last touch of the garnish, which is an orange slice and cherry. So technically you have eight ingredients. I just want to say, that’s a lot of crap to throw into a drink and still expect something tasty to come out in the end. Maybe that wasn’t the expectation, and if that’s true, then it actually DID live up to expectations. Did you follow that logic?

Since my parents are here visiting the sprawling TBIAW estate, I’m going to keep this relatively short. Here’s the reaction from Mr. Bottle, my folks and myself after tasting this drink, in no particular order: “That’s weird”, “It’s just weird”, “I don’t like that. Tastes weird”, “How can this only taste like Sambuca with all these ingredients?? I’m not drinking this weird thing”.  So I like to compare the results of drinking the Glass Tower to a moment from the 70’s blockbuster movie, The Towering Inferno. As he looks up at his Glass Tower building in ruins, Paul Newman tells Faye Dunaway that maybe it should be left as a symbol of all that is wrong in society. What? Maybe that’s a little strong, but at the very least the Glass Tower should remain as a symbol of all that’s wrong with society thinking it’s ok to have so many ingredients in one drink. It’s just too weird.

Overall Rating for the Glass Tower

Taste: 2 – Mr. Bottle said he could drink it if push came to shove

Presentation: 5

Ease of Preparation: 2 – You did see the ingredients list, right?

Drinks Until Blackout: 7 – 17% Alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Vodka

1 oz Peach Schapps

1 oz Rum

1 oz Triple Sec

½ oz Sambvca

Lemon-lime Soda

Drink 132: Blogger’s Block

Actual appearance of
the Purple Passion Tea

I have run out of ideas for blog posts.  I know this because I have been staring at the blinking cursor for an hour while “The Devil’s Advocate” plays on a TV on the background.  In retrospect, I should have put the TV on a different channel since Keanu Reeves’ “southern” accent in that movie could distract anyone.  Even Kevin Costner thought it sucked. The other problem is that all of the obvious angles for our latest drink the Purple Passion Tea have been covered, forcing me to come up with something original.  TBIAW readers know that is not my strong suit. 

The first problem is the drink’s color. The PPT has “purple” right in the name, but the drink is yellow.  Unfortunately (for me), Mrs. Bottle already covered miscolored (is that a word?) drinks in her Purple Hooter review. Next, this drink tasted nothing like tea, but we have also covered drinks that taste nothing like their namesakes a few times, too.  I even already used the word “namesake” in one of those posts.  Counting this sentence I have written “namesake” four times in 2011, raising my lifetime total to four.

Expected appearance of
the Purple Passion Tea

Here is where I normally list the ingredients.  I wrote that last sentence to pad the entry a bit.  I hope you didn’t notice. The Purple Passion Tea is made with vodka, rum, gin, black raspberry liqueur, simple syrup, lemon juice, and lemon-lime soda.  You might think that with four different types of alcohol that it would be strong, but you would be wrong.  There is less than a shot of alcohol total, which would be weak in any drink, but it is especially so when you also have seven ounces of sugar, juice, and sugar juice (otherwise known as soda).

As far as flavor, this drink was way too sweet.  I actually thought the first sip was pretty good, but as we continued to drink it, the sweetness became overwhelming.  It was also a little thick and had a syrup-like mouth feel.  It was so cloying that adding additional soda actually cut down on the sweetness.  In fact, it was so sweet that it may have put me into a sugar coma leaving me unable to form blog ideas.  Yes, that must be it.

Overall Rating for the Purple Passion Tea

Taste: 3

Presentation: 0 – Would be a 5 if it was called the Yellow Passion Tea

Ease of Preparation: 1

Drinks Until Blackout: 33 –  5% Alcohol

Ingredients

0.25 oz Vodka

0.25 oz Rum

0.25 oz Gin

0.5 oz Black Raspberry Liqueur

2 oz Simple Syrup

2 oz Lemon Juice

3 oz Lemon-lime Soda

Drink 107: Slow News Day

Not Peachy Keen

I know this is going to blow your mind, but Mrs. Bottle is here two days in a row. Super amazing, I know. Mr. Bottle is too busy ready all the stories about Osama Bin Laden  so I am taking the opportunity to discuss today’s drink, the Rocky Mountain Cooler.  Since we’ve been cooling our heels for 10 years waiting for this moment, this seems a fitting drink (feel free to groan out loud because I certainly did as those words poured out).  Anyone who has read the Boston Gold entry knows that I actually create the menu on Saturdays and I assure you that the CIA did not give me a heads up on the operation in order for me to pick out the perfect drink for today’s blog. If they had, I’m pretty sure it would not have been this one. Because something called the Osama is Gone drink would have been even more fitting. If only Mr. Boston had included something clever and prophetic like that. Then my mind would have been blown.

On to the drink. The Rocky Mountain Cooler is made from peach schnapps, pineapple juice and lemon-lime soda (we used Sprite Zero). When Mr. Bottle and I had our first sips of the drink, we thought it was pretty darn good and that it certainly merited a “4” on the TBIAW scale of drink awesomeness. Then we continued to drink it and the peach flavor became more and more pronounced. By the end of the drink, I had Mr. Bottle in a headlock and was trying to force it down his gullet because I really didn’t want a single additional drop of that sickly sweet stuff. Needless to say our final rating dropped, as you can see below.

Final conclusion: This drink would have been better with no peach schnapps and vodka instead. Or just as plain Sprite Zero because that’s tasty too and it has almost as much alcohol.

Overall Rating for the Rocky Mountain Cooler

Taste: 3

Presentation: 3

Ease of Preparation: 5

Drinks Until Blackout: 25 – 3% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Peach schnapps

4 oz Pineapple juice

2 oz Lemon-lime soda

Day 53: Woman Bites Dog (food)

Electric Blue

For today’s drink we have the Electric Jam, a mixture of vodka, blue Curaçao, simple syrup, lemon juice and Sprite lemon-lime soda.  Being a relatively low-alcohol drink that has soda in it, I was confident we would like it and that confidence was rewarded.  The lemon juice keeps it from being overly sweet and, as usual, the carbonation from the soda gives it a pleasant bite.  The Electric Jam is not only easy on the palate; it is easy on the eyes as well.  There's something about an artificially blue drink that just works. Made a boring looking drink?  Just add blue Curaçao.We’ve already covered the fact that blue Curaçao isn’t made from oranges but tastes like oranges.  This is enough of a segue for me to do some patented TBIAW navel gazing.  Hopefully I won’t find much lint.

I keep telling myself that we are doing this blog for our own entertainment.  For Mrs. Bottle I think it is actually true.  For me, I would love to have more readers. It would give me some kind of validation, however pathetic that may be.  If you are reading this right now I don’t want you to think that you aren’t enough, though. I think you are very special.  Really, it’s not you, it’s me. 

I know that other blogs don’t blow up because they are funnier, more original, or more relevant than TBIAW.  That would be ridiculous.  I think the real issue is that we need a gimmick and I think I may have stumbled on something while I was listening to Howard Stern on the radio.  He had on an animal rights activist who has been trying to get an animal protection law passed in Ohio.



Yum!

To attract attention to her cause, she has been eating dog food every day and posting the videos on YouTube.  It's not exactly Gandhi's hunger strike, but it must be working, right?  She was on Howard Stern after all.  The King of All Media won’t have just anyone on his show.  Unless, of course, you are a porn star, stripper, or regular woman willing to get naked and/or ride the sybian.  He will also have you on if you have a speech impediment, are transgender, have a high voice, are a little person, or if you are mentally disabled.  I guess it really isn’t as hard to get on his show as I thought.

Regardless, her first dog food video has over 17,000 views.  That is a lot more than the total views of TBIAW since we started it.  If only we had thought to review dog food every day instead of drinking  we could have way more of the attention I crave.   Sample review:  "It sucked.  Again"  I then noticed that her video for day 14 only has 254 views so maybe eating dog food alone isn’t enough to hold an audience.  She must have noticed, too, because the next day she got naked and it got bumped up to 1,724 views.  Of course she wasn’t really naked so the following day the views dropped to under 200.  She got “naked” again a couple of days later, but the genius denizens of the YouTube community could not be fooled a second time and only 375 of them fell for it and she hasn’t gotten above 500 since then.

What did we learn from all this?

 

1. Eating dog food every day will get you a more attention than drinking a different drink each day but…
2. It will not get you that much more attention unless…
3. You get naked, but…
4. You shouldn’t say you are naked but not show anything

So I think our best bet is to skip the dog food, keep up the drinking, but start doing it fully nude. That might be a little awkward for our family members and co-workers who read this, but you can’t make an omelet without some huevos, so get ready!

Sneak Preview

 

Overall Rating for Electric Jam

Taste: 4 - So very close to a 5

Presentation: 5

Ease of Preparation: 3

Drinks Until Blackout: 8 – 13% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.25 oz Vodka

.5 oz Blue Curaçao

1 oz Simple Syrup

1 oz Lemon Juice

1 oz Lemon-lime soda

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 15: Tequila À La Mode

Where's the Rest?

When Mrs. Bottle and I decided to undertake this grand and important project, we agreed that it would be a collaborative effort.  Up until now it has been.  Last night, though, Mrs. Bottle was at some play about a dancing boy while I was home alone.  I’m not sure where she gets off having a life, but much like Billy Elliot, I was able to triumph over adversity and mix, photograph, taste, drink, and rate the Alamo Splash all by myself.  And just like Billy Elliot, I did it completely nude.  Or was that The Full Monty?  Either way, I was nude.

The Alamo Splash is a mix of tequila, orange juice, pineapple juice, and lemon-lime soda.  We found the recipe for this drink a bit puzzling.  After mixing the ingredients, we were told to strain the drink into a chilled Collins glass.  There are only about 3 ounces of liquid in an Alamo Splash so it looks pretty ridiculous in the glass without any ice.  The only person in the world who would think that drink looks right is John Stockton.



"I'll Take Two"



I was intrigued by this drink because the ingredients list looked pretty good, similar to a Tequila Sunrise.  Unfortunately it was a bit of a let down.  It seemed like the orange juice, pineapple juice, and lemon-lime soda clashed a bit.  I poured additional soda in the glass in an effort to improve it but even extra carbonated goodness couldn't save it.

I’m not sure about this drink’s name, either.  Presumably it is called the Alamo Splash because of the splash of lemon-lime soda and not because Davy Crockett and Sam Houston liked to playfully fight in the tub while sipping tequila. 

Overall rating:

Taste: 2

Ease of Preparation: 4

Presentation: 2

Drinks until blackout: 7 – A little over 20% alcohol

Ingredients:

1.5 oz Tequila

1 oz Orange Juice

.5 oz Pineapple juice

Splash Lemon-Lime soda