Drink 201: Balls Well That Ends Well

Are you tired of drinking beverages that are entirely liquid?  Do you believe that America’s decline is due in large part to alcoholic beverages can be made simply by pouring the ingredients into a glass?  Is the prospect of making dozens of jokes about “blue balls” appealing to you?  Then the Cocktail R-evolution Gin Tonic is probably right up your alley.

You may recall from our last post that Mrs. Bottle and I have recently become chemists.  But instead of cooking up meth Walter White-style, we are mixing up interesting new drinks.  Even though our emulsification experiment was a bit of a failure, we remain undeterred.  This week we went with spherification, also know as balling. 

Actually, this looks a lot like Heisenberg meth.

Spherification is the process of turning a liquid into tiny spheres (or balls).  The spheres have the size and consistency of salmon roe.  The good news is that our balls didn’t taste like fish eggs.  Instead they were made with tonic water and blue Curaçao so they tasted like tonic water and blue Curaçao.  But the consistency was dead on.

Turning a liquid into blue balls takes a lot of teasing and a little chemistry.  The first step is to mix the tonic water and blue Curaçao with sodium alginate (NaC₆H₇O₆) powder.  Even though its empirical formula spells “nacho”, the powder tasted horrible on a Tostito.  That isn’t that surprising since it is extracted from brown algae. Its purpose is to create a gelatin-like substance out of liquid.

When Mrs. Bottle mixed the powder in using our last-century hand mixer, she happened to splash some of the blue liquigel onto the counter.  To the untrained observer it appeared to be a careless spill, but the trained observer would realize she was ritualistically pouring some on the counter as a tribute to our fallen homies.  Luckily our countertops are stain resistant since the same tribute happened last time she tried to mix something.

Spherification in action

After the NaCHO was assimilated into the liquid, we used a pipette to drip the mixture into a calcium lactate (C₆H₁₀CaO) bath and make little balls.  Sadly, calcium lactate’s empirical formula spells “chcao” which doesn’t lend itself to any cheap jokes.  I also am not sure what the point of the calcium bath is other that to wash our balls.   I guess it must somehow contribute to the making of the spheres, but our kit came with no details so I’ll just go with ball washing.

That lime slice looks suspiciously
like a lemon wedge

Once we had a sufficient number of balls, we made the drink.  The recipe DVD didn’t have many specifics on the recipe.  It just had us dip our balls into two ounces of gin with some lime slices.  No ice or other tonic water other than that which had been gellified.  Since we are sticklers for the rules we tried it that way even though we know it would probably be horrible.  Much to our surprise, it was indeed horrible.  It was pretty much just drinking straight lukewarm gin with a bunch of fish-egg looking things on the bottom of the glass.  I didn’t get any balls in my mouth and probably would have had to shoot the whole thing in order to get even one.  And not just because it would have relaxed my inhibitions.  Those suckers were stuck on the bottom.

After adding some ice and tonic water
Neato, eh?

We ultimately added some ice and tonic water and turned it into more of a traditional Gin and Tonic, which is delicious.  The balls floated in the tonic and I got some in my mouth in almost every sip. I actually thought the spheres were pretty good and added an interesting textural element to the drink.  Each time I bit into one there was a tiny orange explosion in my mouth.  Mrs. Bottle, on the other hand, did not enjoy chewing her drink and would prefer her next one to be ball free.  It probably will be unless I am feeling mischievous.

Overall Rating for Gin Tonic

Taste: 3

Presentation: 5

Ease of Preparation: 1

Drinks Until Blackout: 3 - All gin

Ingredients

Gin

Tonic Water

Blue Curaçao

Sodium Alginate

Calcium Lactate

Drink 125: A Tale of Two Kitties

Clear, cold, and delicious

Mrs. Bottle is back for my weekly piece and to report on the merits of today’s drink, the ever classic Gin and Tonic. This might be a surprise, but the drink consists of gin and tonic water and was actually pretty good. No garnish though, which I thought was odd since it’s always served with a lime (or sometimes lemon) in restaurants. This is actually Mr. Bottle’s drink of choice so I thought it would be hilarious to write about since I prefer the Vodka Tonic (or Vodka and Tonic as Mr. Boston calls it). Isn’t that funny? And ironic? Truth be told, we had the Gin and Tonic because I didn’t have the energy to make the frozen complicated drink I was supposed to. Why? See below for the details.

Mr. Bottle came to me not that long ago and told me he felt we needed babies in our life. I thought to myself, he can’t possibly mean human babies because I wouldn’t be able to drink these drinks I’d be preparing and how would that be fair? So I decided that he meant cat babies and off I went to the shelter to adopt two kittens. You might have anticipated Mr. Bottle’s surprise when I introduced him to our new two month old kitten babies but I didn’t. Since he wasn’t as delighted about this as I thought he’d be, I let him name them: Sam Adams and Stella Artois (real identities protected since they’re minors).

That leads us to yesterday when we realized that Sam Adams was going to give us both heart attacks at an early age. What we needed to do was to rig up a way to keep him from falling to his death from TBIAW estate’s second story open hallway onto the foyer below. This was no easy task, but after spending serious time noodling the problem and then shopping for items, we came up with a plan. It took a couple hours to complete but by the time we finished, we had a hideous, but kitten-saving poster board concoction which we are now considering marketing to the masses. Just need to work on that hideous part. And also the part where it is going to be just a tad challenging to get to the room at the end of that hallway. Minor details. Anyway, that brought us to late o’clock and I was pooped so I asked Mr. Bottle if I could just make a Gin and Tonic as our drink of the day because it was easy. And he agreed because he knew there was only one answer.

This is a slightly less impressive than
TBIAW's Great Wall of Poster Board
Img

The final lesson learned is that if you decide to adopt two kittens and continue to write a daily drinking blog, stick with the classics. Too bad we already did the Cosmopolitan. But the Vodka and Tonic is still available…

Overall Rating for the Gin and Tonic

Taste: 5
Presentation: 3 – Where’s the garnish?
Ease of Preparation: 5
Drinks Until Blackout: 7 – 16% Alcohol

Ingredients

2 oz Gin
Tonic Water