Drink 190: Meet the New Blog, Same as the Old Blog

Why does Mrs. Bottle hate me?  It has been almost a month since we have posted a drink and yesterday she suggested we fire things up again.  “Sure” I said, not knowing what drink she had chosen.  It turns out she had selected the Caruso, a mixture of gin, dry vermouth, and crème de menthe.   It was not good.   The combination of mint and vermouth is the worst pairing since Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

David Caruso does not approve

Honestly, I would have never agreed to resume blogging if I’d known she would make me drink this crap.  The Caruso is bad enough that the Wall Street Journal has an entire article about the perplexing nature of the drink’s origins and longevity.  The freaking Wall Street Journal!  You’d think they would be too busy writing about the collapse of the world economy instead.  I guess in 2009 things didn’t look so dire. Maybe if they had been a little more focused we wouldn’t be in this mess. 

Here’s what they wrote:

A Caruso cocktail survives, dusty from disuse, in the pages of the average bartender’s guide. That drink is compounded of equal parts gin, dry vermouth and crème de menthe [Ed Note: slightly different than ours], and it’s not very good. If no one drinks it, and it’s not very good, what’s it doing in the books? Perhaps the Caruso has persisted for the same reason as most of the cocktails in such compendia—to fill space. If a bad recipe gets printed in one bar guide—especially a prominent one like the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, in which the less than palatable Caruso was listed—it soon finds its way into all the others.

Coincidentally, “filling space” is also the same reason most of NBC’s fall lineup exists.  Unfortunately for me, the Caruso is now filling space in my belly, on our blog and in your brainpan.  Space that could be better filled by other things.  Well, at least the space in my belly.

Overall Rating for the Caruso

Taste: 2

Presentation: 3

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackout: 3 – 30% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Gin

1 oz Dry Vermouth

0.5 oz Crème de Menthe

Drink 167: Slop Sloppy Joe

Today’s drink is the Sloppy Joe’s Cocktail No. 1, a mix of rum, triple sec, dry vermouth, grenadine, and lime juice. According to the USDA’s MyDrink, a cocktail should never be more than 23.3% lime juice.  This is an improvement over the outdated Tipple Pyramid’s maximum of 34.0%.  Regardless of whether you follow the old-school Pyramid or the new-school MyDrink, the Sloppy Joe’s Cocktail No. 1 exceeds the limit since it is 38.7% lime juice.

Seems strangely specific

Note: I literally spent hours working
on the video in Sunday's blog. Since
no one actually watched it, I decided
to spend no more than three minutes on
any future customized pictures for TBIAW.
This is the type of quality to expect
going forward.

Due to the high concentration of lime juice, the primary taste of this drink was tartness. In fact wasn’t the just the primary taste, it was the only taste.  It was so tart that if we had tried the SJCN1 during the first few weeks of our journey, we would have probably given it a rating of one.  Since we have become more accustomed to these sour assaults we were able to up the rating all the way to a two. There was some extra credit given because the lime juice thankfully overwhelmed the vermouth.

Not Sloppy

It also didn’t help that the drink called for only a quarter teaspoon of two of the other ingredients.  Pouring a quarter teaspoon is kind of a pain. You can almost justify the quarter teaspoon of grenadine since it makes the drink a pleasant pink tint. The quarter teaspoon of triple sec is another story. It isn’t enough to add any sweetness or orange flavor to the drink.  It is as superfluous as this picture:

Image:  scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Overall Rating for the Sloppy Joe’s Cocktail No. 1

Taste: 2

Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 2

Drinks Until Blackouts: 7 – 17% Alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Lime Juice

0.25 tsp Triple Sec

0.25 tsp Grenadine

.75 oz Light Rum

.75 oz Dry Vermouth

Drink 160: Never Neverblog

Garnish with a faerie

Lately I have been having a little trouble coming up with topics for the blog.  You may have noticed that the frequency has dipped a little over the last two weeks. The quality, of course, is as sterling as ever. Hopefully I will rally soon and a fountain of fresh ideas will spring forward.  The first step is admitting I have a problem.  Now that we have that admission out of the way I am trying to determine the root cause for the idea deficit.  I think it is either concern over the debt ceiling or that I am over 18 hours behind in watching Harry Potter movies.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person to run into this problem.  In fact, while researching today’s drink the Peter Pan Cocktail, I ran into someone else who seemingly suffered a similar fate.  His name is Jerry and he has (had?) a blog called Drinking With Jerry that is pretty much the same concept as TBIAW (with the same inspiration).  His version of the Peter Pan Cocktail is the same as ours, too with gin, dry vermouth, orange juice, and bitters.  He thought it tasted like “shampoo” but we didn’t.  We didn’t love it, but it was decent even though it contained dry vermouth.  Mrs. Bottle pointed out that gin seems to have a better relationship with vermouth than other liquors do. I think it is because gin is so delicious it can make anything taste good.  In this case it allowed the drink to be more palatable than one might think.  The orange juice probably helped as well. We both felt that the Peter Pan Cocktail had potential to grow on you if you gave it enough time and if you leave your window open.

  

Not Jerry
img: http://pixyland.org/peterpan/



Speaking of time, it looks like Jerry’s blog was pretty time-consuming.  He clearly went to a lot of effort in his photography and I have to say that the design of his blog is nice.  The pictures are certainly more interesting than our “drink with a black background and occasionally a lame prop” motif.  He had initially been writing a few sentences with each drink but that ended after April 21 and on May 19 he stopped his blog for good.  Maybe the time commitment got to be too much.  Maybe the fact that no one was voting on his drinks made him frustrated. Perhaps his lack of Facebook fans frustrated him (the same as TBIAW!!).  I don’t know Jerry, but I don’t want to think that he just gave up.  Quitting is not cool.  I prefer to imagine that he is dead

Overall Rating for the Peter Pan Cocktail

Taste: 3

Presentation: 4 – It has a faerie!

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackouts: 7 – 19% Alcohol

Ingredients

.75 oz Gin

.75 oz Dry Vermouth

.75 oz Orange Juice

2 dashes Bitters

Drink 151: Something Borrowed, Something Ew

We frequently try to find the origins of the cocktails we review.  It gives us something to write about and it might give you a nugget of knowledge to drop on someone Cliff Clavin-style when the time is right.  We frequently come a cropper, though, due to the inability of Google to give me what I want.  Instead I get a list of recipes copy-and-pasted from each other or a dozen dumb questions from answers.com or Yahoo Answers where one anonymous dummy gets his or her question answered by some other anonymous dummy. 

Today’s drink the Miami Beach Cocktail was no exception. Since its recipe of Scotch whisky, dry vermouth, and grapefruit juice is similar to the Manhattan’s combination of bourbon, sweet vermouth and bitters I thought we might find an answer.  I figure some very lazy Miamian Miamier Miamiite bartender from Miami named Sonny Tubbs wanted to create a signature drink for his city.  Instead of coming up with something original, he just decided to steal someone else’s recipe and change it a little.  “Oooh, I’ll add grapefruit juice. That will really bring home the beach flavor.”

Someone decided to take
the Manhattan's talents to South Beach

Maybe the drink was actually invented by a bartender in Miami, Ohio, because it didn’t seem very Florida to me.  The grapefruit juice did a reasonable job of masking the Scotch, but it wasn’t enough.  The overall effect was tart feet.  I can see why the inventor might want all evidence scrubbed from the Internet. There wasn’t even a maraschino berry garnish to punch it up.  You might be wondering what a maraschino berry is.  Luckily we have the answer.
 

This image which I named
"maraschino berry" is now
the only place on the web
that references a "maraschino berry"
that does not contain a recipe
from the Absolut web site

During our fruitless (heh) search for the Miami Beach back story, we found a (different) recipe for the drink at the Absolut web site.  Absolut’s drink is garnished with a maraschino berry, which turns out not to be a typo but instead is the name they use for a maraschino cherry.  I think it is also a clever plan to find all the web sites that steal share their recipes since the only references I can find to maraschino berries are all just copies of the Absolut recipes. Can’t these web sites do anything more useful than copy someone else’s work?  They are just lucky that you can’t copyright a list of ingredients.

Ingredients

0.75 oz Scotch Whisky

0.75 oz Dry Vermouth

0.75 oz Grapefruit Juice

Overall Rating for the Miami Beach Cocktail

Taste: 2

Presentation: 3

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackout: 7 – 19% Alcohol

Drink 146: Umami Weer All Crazee Now

We frequently discuss our taste buds here at TBIAW.  It is because taste is an important part of any cocktail and when one talks about taste, one will occasionally mention the body part responsible for delivering its sensual experience.  It is not because the blog is in any way repetitive or bereft of new ideas. We do not want to be repetitive.  While repetition is good for learning a new skill or an idea, it isn’t great for a blog.  We are firmly in the anti-repetition camp.  We feel the same why about repetition that we do about redundancy.   I don’t know about you, but when something gets repetitive I start to tune out and I might miss out on something interesting. No danger of that happening here!

For example, we used this picture once before.
We wouldn't use it again because that
would be repetitive

Oh yeah, I forgot the point I was trying to make about taste buds.  For many years, so-called “scientists” told us that the four basic tastes were sweet, sour, bitter, and salty and that different regions of the tongue had receptors for detecting each taste (ed. note: the taste-map thing is one of many lies perpetrated by “science”).  Then along came a Japanese scientist who discovered a fifth taste called umami.   He then dedicated the rest of his life trying to become the next Ninja Warrior.  Umami roughly translates to a “pleasant savory taste”. I am a fan of umami.  You would know this if you ever saw how much soy sauce I put on white rice.



We agreed to never try
this drink again. We
are calling this agreement
the "Warsaw Pact"



Alert readers may have noticed that we haven’t yet brought up today’s drink, the Warsaw Cocktail.  They may also wonder what a drink made from vodka, blackberry-flavored brandy, dry vermouth, and lemon juice has to do with umami.  Everything, my friends.  Everything.  My first reaction when I tried the Warsaw Cocktail was that it tasted like soy sauce.  The umami was strong in this one.  That is not generally considered a positive quality for a cocktail. 

I don’t enjoy drinking straight soy sauce, (unless it is Kikkoman, that stuff is delicious!), but I thought the Warsaw Cocktail was safe for consumption if there were no alternatives.  Mrs. Bottle really hated the drink, though, and called it many things unfit for a family blog.  She thought it was so bad that maybe our blackberry-flavored brandy had gone bad. It is definitely at least 8 years old as it was purchased when we were caught up in the great Rum Runner craze of the early 2000s. I’m not sure how wide-spread this craze was, but it certainly engulfed the previous Bottle Wonderland Estate.  You can be sure that there will never be a Warsaw Cocktail craze and if there is one, we will abstain.

Overall Rating for the Warsaw Cocktail

Taste: 2 – Mrs. Bottle fought hard for a 1, but she got pwnd again

Presentation: 1

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackout: 4 – 32% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Vodka

0.5 oz Blackberry-flavored Brandy

0.5 oz Dry Vermouth

1 tsp Lemon Juice

Drink 114: Sucks and the City 2

Still better than Sex and the City 2

Early on in TBIAW, Mrs. Bottle and I tried the Manhattan.  If you didn't just click that link (and I recommend you always click our links), here is the short version of our review: "The Manhattan consists of whiskey, sweet vermouth, and Angostura bitters. It tastes more like it is made out of ass."  Why am I bringing this up?  Because today we bring you the Manhattan (Dry) and here is the review: The Manhattan (Dry) consists of whiskey, dry vermouth, and Angostura bitters. It tastes more like it is made out of slightly less ass.

The only difference in the two Manhattans is the vermouth.  Luckily for us, this one used dry vermouth, which is slightly less gross than sweet vermouth.  We also used rye this time instead of bourbon. I'm not sure why we did that since both of us preferred bourbon to rye in our whiskey taste test.  Regardless it did seem slightly better than the Manhattan. We were also supposed to garnish with an olive, but Mrs. Bottle hates olives and doesn't allow them in the house so that was a non-starter.  She won't let me eat olives, either, so I don't even know if I like them.  I'm sure that the olive would have made this drink awesome, though.

Overall Rating for the Manhattan (Dry)

Taste: 2
Ease of Preparation: 4

Presentation: 3
Drinks until blackout: 4 – A little over 35% alcohol

Ingredients:

2 oz Whiskey

.5 oz Dry Vermouth

1 dash Angostura Bitters

Drink 103: A Twist We Never Saw Coming

Vodka Martini aka
Kangaroo Cocktail

Greetings, fair readers!  Things have been a little hectic around the Bottle Wonderland Estate this week so our posts have been a little late and less verbose than usual.  Fortunately the quality has not been affected whatsoever.  We commissioned a survey and 99% of the respondents said, “I have never read The Bottle Is a Wonderland.”    1% hadn’t noticed any change.   Another 1% questioned the math behind the survey.

After the survey was completed, we tried the Kangaroo Cocktail, a mixture of vodka and dry vermouth.  “Hmm,” I thought, “that sounds a lot like a Vodka Martini.”  In fact, it is exactly the same as a vodka martini, which is too bad. This drink was not good. I don’t love martinis in general (because of the vermouth), but a so-called vodka martini really pales in comparison to a genuine gin martini. Given that a real martini has gin and tastes far better,  I propose that the name should be changed back to the Kangaroo Cocktail. Someone should really hop to it.

The one redeeming quality of this drink was Mrs. Bottle’s lemon twist.  She has not been happy with her lemon twists up to this point, so she has been researching twist techniques.  She actually did more research on lemon twists than she did on her last car purchase. Her research paid off, though, because her lemon twist was beautiful.  The picture doesn’t really do it justice.   I hardly noticed the 20 minute wait before she served the drink.

Before

After

Overall Rating for the Kangaroo Cocktail

Taste: 1

Presentation: 5

Ease of Preparation: 2 – 4 if you can make a lemon twist

Drinks Until Blackout: 3– 32% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Vodka

0.75 oz Dry Vermouth

Drink 92: Refund Denied

Possibly subject to AMT

We decided to have the Income Tax Cocktail for April 15th, the day that Federal taxes are due.  Of course when made that decision we didn't realize that  this year's due date was pushed out to April 18th even though April 15th is a Friday.  You are probably thinking, "Why is the due date the 18th?"  Even if you aren't thinking that, it is a convenient technique for telling you why anyway.  It is because April 16th is a holiday in Washington DC called Emancipation Day.  Since the 16th is on Saturday, the holiday is being observed on Friday, which pushes tax day to Monday.  That is almost as confusing as the tax code itself. Well it would be if I use 9,000,000+ more words to describe it.  You might also be wondering, "What is Emancipation Day?" I'm so glad you asked. Emancipation Day commemorates the day that Abraham Lincoln signed the law that freed the slaves in Washington DC.  I have lived in the south most of my life and for some reason people around here don't celebrate Emancipation Day.  I'll have to look into why that is.

Even though this is now 3 days early, we still bring you the Income Tax Cocktail, a mix of gin, sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, orange juice, and bitters.   I'm still not sold on vermouth, but Mrs. Bottle seems to have grown accustomed to it. Thus she liked the drink better than I did. I thought had an unusual taste which I attributed to the combination of vermouths and bitters.  The vermouth taste was slight enough that I still thought the drink was acceptable, though. On the flip side, leaving out the vermouth and bitters would have made for a better albeit less complex drink.  Now if we could only have a better and less complex tax code.  Like vermouth, it would still leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Overall Rating for the Income Tax Cocktail

Taste: 3

Presentation: 2 – This is about the 13th drink that looks exactly the same

Ease of Preparation: 4
Drinks Until Blackout: 5 – 28% Alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Gin
1.5 tsp Sweet Vermouth
1.5 tsp Dry Vermouth
1 dash Bitters
1 oz Orange Juice

Day 79: How About a Nice Game of Chess?

Remember the movie WarGames? At first David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is excited to break into the WOPR and play Global Thermonuclear War.  After he realizes that he almost causes World War III he throws everything away and hopes no one finds out it was him.  Then the WOPR calls him back.  At that point David realizes he is in big trouble.  No matter what he does he can’t get away. That is kind of like our relationship with vermouth.  I don’t want vermouth to call me back, but it keeps showing up.  That connection might be a stretch, but man I love WarGames and it was on TV last night.

Poor quality assurance

Anyway, today’s drink is the Bronx Cocktail, a mixture of gin, dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, and orange juice.  It is called the Bronx Cocktail because A-Rod has about four of these before every Yankees game. Actually that isn’t true.  As far as I know David Wells is the only Yankee to play while drunk. And A-Rod only admitted to using PEDs while with the Rangers.  There are no PEDs in the Bronx Cocktail so he is in the clear.

That orange is sucking in its gut for the photo

I am really distracted today and keep forgetting that the point of this thing is that vermouth tastes funny.  And not funny ha-ha, but funny weird. Unfortunately vermouth is a common ingredient in cocktails, so we will be having a lot of it.  Since the Bronx Cocktail has two kinds of vermouth, I was a little worried.  At first the weird vermouth flavor was a little off-putting in this drink.  After a few sips, though, it seemed okay.  We think we may be developing a taste for vermouth and that eventually we will appreciate it.  It actually went well with the orange juice and the gin making the Bronx Cocktail reasonably palatable.  It wasn’t great, but it was certainly more palatable than the Yankees. 

Overall Rating for the Bronx Cocktail

Taste: 3

Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 3

Drinks Until Blackout: 5 – 25% alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Gin

.5 oz Dry Vermouth

.5 oz Sweet Vermouth

1 oz Orange Juice

Day 45: Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kodos

You can see the Federalism plain as day

Happy Presidents Day Washington’s Birthday! We were all set for a special Presidents Day edition of The Bottle Is A Wonderland.  We chose the El Presidente Cocktail #2 as our drink and we planned to have a Hail to the Chief midi-file play in a continuous loop with no mute button. Then we learned that the official name of the Federal holiday is actually Washington’s Birthday and all our plans flew out the window.  If only we hadn’t already had the El Presidente Cocktail #1 we could have honored America’s first Presidente properly.   Now that we have had the EPC#2, we won’t have anything special for John Adams Day, either.  It is like a double rainbow, only the exact opposite.  What does it mean?

The El Presidente Cocktail #2 is a mix of light rum, dry vermouth, and bitters.  Since all of these ingredients contain alcohol, the drink is quite strong.  Earlier in our journey we might have found the strength of the drink off-putting, but we have become more accustomed to these powerful drinks as we’ve progressed.  Either that or our taste buds have been totally decimated by our vodka taste test.  We may not have found the strength alone reason enough to dislike the drink, but the flavor of it certainly did the trick.  The bitter dry vermouth and the bitter bitters lead to a bitter drink.   It perfectly represents Adams’ feelings over Mercy Warren’s perceived mischaracterizations of his revolutionary bona fides.

They would find a way
(Image via Shirtoid)

We have some strong opinions on both Mr. Adams and Ms Warren, but here at TBIAW we keep our political views private.  Enjoying an adult beverage should really be a bi-partisan activity.  If you want to read political views, stick to the Daily Kos, Townhall.com, or our political spin-off blog, The [redacted] Party is Filled With Mouth Breathing Imbeciles Who Care More About Their Own Power Than They Do About The Welfare of the Country.  I’m sure most of you can figure out who to whom we are referring.  If you guessed “the other side” then you are correct.

Overall Rating for the El Presidente Cocktail #2

Taste: 2

Presentation: 2

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackout: 4 – 32% alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Light Rum

.75 oz Dry Vermouth

1 dash bitters

Day 43: Swan vs. Swan

Brown Feather would not
sound as appetizing

Last night I had to make a rare trip away from the Bottle Wonderland Estate.  When I returned Mrs. Bottle was waiting to make our next drink.  I had already looked at the ingredients and wasn’t hopeful about how it would taste.  “Tonight’s drink is going to be bad” I speculated.  “I don’t care” replied Mrs. Bottle, “I’m going to drink it all anyway.”   I guess she had a bad day.  If we ever talked I would probably have more details to share.

The aforementioned drink is the Black Feather, a mix of brandy, dry vermouth, triple sec, and angostura bitters.  I wouldn’t call this drink my favorite, but it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. The brandy flavor shines through with just a hint of sweetness thanks to the triple sec.  It is the type of drink where if I had it on a regular basis I would probably start to really enjoy it.  We only have  about 1,460 more drinks to try before we can start thinking about adding a new drink to the standard rotation, so I will be sure to stock up on brandy and vermouth in early 2015.  Based on history, we will probably have some of our current supply left so that won't be necessary.

The name Black Feather reminds me of the scene in Black Swan where Nina (Natalie Portman), who is embracing her role as the sensual Black Swan, begins to sprout black feathers from her back.  In a panic, she goes to see her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis).  Nina and Lily have a complex relationship since they are bitter rivals yet find themselves strangely attracted to one another.  When Lily unlocks herself from Nina's sultry gaze, she plucks a feather from Nina's back.  Much to Lily's surprise, the feather is actually a bomb that explodes and instantly kills her.  Needless to say, this was shocking to see.

My memory isn't what is used to be, so I may have some of that last bit conflated with a Spy vs. Spy episode. 

Black Swan Poster

Overall Rating for the Black Feather

Taste: 3

Presentation: 4 – Classy with a lemon twist

Ease of Preparation: 3 – Making a lemon twist is tricky

Drinks Until Blackout: 4 –25% alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Brandy

1 oz Dry Vermouth

.5 oz Triple Sec

1 dash Angostura Bitters