Drink 157: Buck Wild

Also tasted slightly
out of focus

Today’s drink is the New Orleans Buck which is comprised of light rum, orange and lemon juices and then some ginger ale. And yes, it is me, Mrs. Bottle, here to update everyone on all I’ve learned about this wondrous concoction. But first let me just get down to it and provide the critique because I know all thirteen readers out there (readership is on the rise!) are waiting in serious anticipation.

Mr. Bottle and I both had high expectations for this beverage because what’s not to like? All parts are tasty so they must be good when combined, right? Let me break it down in three languages: No (English), Non (French), and No (Spanish). Actually, that’s harsh because it wasn’t too bad. It was just a little watery tasting, probably due to the fact that the recipe didn’t specify the amount of ginger ale. It just instructed me to fill the glass and stir. Maybe if it had said to “fill to taste” I would have been more precise and ended up with a tastier drink. Like the mouthwatering Dragon Street Cobra Tamer No. 1. But we’ll never know now because unless the drink scores above a 3 on our scientific rating scale, it’s unlikely to be made again.

Let’s get back to my research. I initially followed a red herring and focused on the New Orleans part of the drink name. It seemed obvious that this drink originated in New Orleans but all I could really find was info about New Orleans Buck Jumping. What, pray tell, is this activity you might ask. After more digging, I discovered that it’s another name for second line dancing in New Orleans brass band parades. I would latch on to those folks who watch HBO’s “Treme” because I know second line dancing would be familiar to you, but I believe there might be fewer “Treme” viewers than readers of our blog.

Scene from HBO's  Treme.  By seeing a scene
from Treme you are part of a very exclusive club
img: hbo.com

So after an exhaustive eight minutes focusing on the New Orleans aspect, I happened upon a link discussing the New Orleans Buck’s ample history as it belongs to the Buck family of drinks. Excitedly, my mind started reeling with the possibilities of a whole line of alcohol by this Buck family and a new alcohol website to ridicule investigate. Alas, it turns out that the Buck drinks are beverages that include any alcohol, lemon or lime juice, a piece of citrus fruit (maybe), and ginger beer or ginger ale. I was going to explain more here but Mr. Bottle read what I’d written so far and said “Wait- we already wrote about the Buck drinks. Don’t you remember?” To which I replied, “Oh, am I supposed to be reading your posts?”

Overall Rating for the New Orleans Buck

Taste: 3

Presentation: 5 – Looks mighty refreshing

Ease of Preparation: 5

Drinks Until Blackout: 10 – 9% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Light Rum

1 oz Orange Juice

0.5 oz Lemon Juice

Ginger Ale

Drink 138: Leaping Tall Blogdings in a Single Bound

Congratulations!  You are reading the 23,460^th most influential blog in the blogosphere.  That is, if you believe in the authority rankings at Technorati.com.  This puts us squarely in 98^th percentile of all blogs!  Except for those blogs which have never registered with Technorati.  That turns out to be a lot of blogs.  I did a thorough check of  blogs I read and none of the two of them were there.  Of course they were the blogs of my brother and sister-in-law so maybe they just didn’t know about Technorati.  I then looked for The Everywhereist (one of Time Magazine’s best blogs of 2011) and it wasn’t there either.  This probably means that TBIAW is in reality no higher than the 23,463^rd most influential blog on the blogosphere.  I’m hoping that one of the ranking criteria is the number of times you write a variation of “blog” in a blog entry. Blog.

Of course, this assumes a Normal distribution of blogs

Even if their rankings don’t include everyone, I am setting my sites on their #1 rated blog, The Huffington Post.  AOL recently bought them for $315 million.  We are doing okay here, but if someone offered $315 million to buy TBIAW we would certainly give it proper consideration.  Since it might take a while to get to #1, we will start by trying to move up to 22,208.  This only requires our score to go up one point (of course, our score recently fell a point.  I think we may have peaked with our Foodista mention).  If we can get that point back, we will be tied with such notable blogs as Apitherapy News (bees!) and What I Ate For Lunch And Why (self explanatory).  Coincidentally, one of the names we kicked around for TBIAW was “What I Drank To Numb The Pain And Why” but decided to go with something more whimsical.  We are also testing the theory that parenthetical asides improve our authority ranking (probably not).

Notice the artful use of shadow and light
This is the stuff that gets you into the
twenty-three thousands

Even though there is nothing in the world we want more than an iPhone 5 a higher Technorati ranking, we aren’t going to resort to gimmicks like nudity or interesting content.  We are going to get there by doing what we know how to do best.  And that thing is drinking.  Today we have the Leap Frog Highball, a combination of gin, ginger ale, and lemon juice.  It is starting to seem like the combination of gin and ginger ale/beer is a recurring theme, but that isn’t a bad thing.  The combination works well.  The Leap Frog Highball had a pronounced tartness from the lemon juice but the ginger ale and sweet delicious gin balanced it out.  It also scores points for having “highball” right in the name, thereby eliminating any possible confusion about the proper glassware.  Hopefully it will let us Leap Frog right over our competition. You better watch your back, Baptist Standard!

Overall Rating for the Leap Frog Highball

Taste: 4

Presentation: 3

Ease of Preparation: 5

Drinks Until Blackout: 8 – 13% Alcohol

Ingredients

2 oz Gin

1 oz Lemon Juice

Ginger Ale

Drink 123: Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Do not be deceived
by its looks

We have a few things to discuss today, so let’s start with our latest drink, the Mamie Gilroy, a combination of Scotch whisky, lime juice, and ginger ale.  This was by far the best drink we’ve had that contained Scotch. Unfortunately that is like being the best Dane Cook joke.  In other words, it sucked.  Even the lime juice and ginger ale weren’t enough to save it.  The only redeeming thing about this drink is that we finally polished off our bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.  I think we will try a different brand for our next Scotch.  Feel free to suggest one in the comments.

Why the pot shots?

The Scotch was only the difference between this drink and our last drink the Mamie’s Sister, which used gin as its spirit.  There was actually one other difference: the Mamie’s Sister rated a perfect five.  Going from the Mamie’s Sister to the Mamie Gilroy is like having a date with Marcia Brady and thinking, “Man, she is cute, I wonder if she has any sisters” and then having a date with the New Jan Brady.  Next time I'll stick with Marcia. If replacing gin with Scotch can turn a drink from Marcia to Jan, it makes me wonder if there will ever be a drink with Scotch that tastes good.  I think a Venn diagram of cocktails probably looks like this:

Finding a drink that both contains Scotch and tastes good is like finding a white buffalo.  Or possibly a unicorn.  Or maybe a leprechaun riding a unicorn.  We won’t stop trying though, because that’s who we are.

This is probably more accurate

The other thing I would like to discuss is our new found “fame.”  As noted, we were the Foodista Featured Drink Blog of the Day yesterday.  We were expecting a lot of new visitors and we were genuinely excited about it.  They might not ever read more than the one featured post, but at least we would get some exposure. I spruced up the place, adding their nifty badge and updating the Top Drinks and the All Drinks lists.  We were ready for the onslaught. It didn’t quite work out that way, though.  The best I can tell from Blogger’s stats is that we got about a dozen clicks from Foodista.  A dozen!  I haven’t been this let down since Mrs. Bottle told me she wanted to do a downward dog with me and I found out it was yoga.

Reenactment
img: hotandhealthymom.com
Formerly known as fitmilfs.com

I can’t blame Foodista, though, since they did put us on their home page all day yesterday.  They also said, “we will also post a couple shout outs on our Twitter and Facebook pages.”  I was shocked that with 110,000+ Twitter followers and almost 25,000 Facebook fans that more people didn’t click through those shout outs.  Except the shout outs never occurred. Maybe I can blame them a little.  Either way, I am keeping the badge.

Overall Rating for the Mamie Gilroy

Taste: 2
Presentation: 4
Ease of Preparation: 5
Drinks Until Blackout: 9 – 12% Alcohol

Ingredients

2 oz Scotch
0.5 oz Lime Juice
Ginger Ale

Drink 122: The Atom's Family

I really need to
pay more attention
to the lighting

Today’s drink is the Mamie’s Sister, a combination of gin, lime juice, and ginger ale. This drink happens to be named after one of the few women in California who has not had a baby with Arnold Schwarzenegger.  I am not sure about any relationship between the former Governator and Mamie herself, though.  I have been working on a joke on this topic.  It starts off, “Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn walk into a bar”.  It ends with “I’m sure of one thing, it wasn’t his wife”, but I need to work on the middle section a bit.

There have been a lot of stories over the last few days trying to figure out why powerful men cheat on their spouses and otherwise treat women badly.  I’m guessing the equation goes something like this:

(Opportunity + Overconfidence) * Outsized Sense of Entitlement = Cheating

It doesn’t seem like quantum physics to me, but there is probably a little more to it than that. Maybe those guys who just spent ten years studying the shape of an electron could help refine my findings.  In case you were wondering the shape of an electron, it is round.



They could have saved 10
years if they had just looked
up "atom" on Wikipedia



Once they figure it out, I would be happy to recommend they celebrate by having Mamie’s Sister (the drink).  It was really delicious.  Everyone knows that gin and lime juice complement each other.  After all, they are the main flavors of a Gin & Tonic, my favorite drink. Replacing tonic water with ginger ale makes it a little sweeter than a G&T, but yummy nonetheless.  I can’t wait to meet Mamie now.

Overall Rating for the Mamie’s Sister

Taste: 5

Presentation: 4
Ease of Preparation: 4
Drinks Until Blackout: 9 – 11% Alcohol

Ingredients

2 oz Gin

1 oz Lime Juice

Ginger Ale

Day 78: My Body is a Temple

Shirley Temple,
you can't be serious

Today is a day of great shame at the Bottle Wonderland Estate.  And no it is not because the blog is late again today or because this entry isn’t going to live up to the phenomenally high level of our 88 previous posts (spoiler alert!). It is because today’s drink doesn’t even have any alcohol.

(I’ll pause while you finish gasping)

The Mr. Boston Platinum Edition contains over 1,500 recipes.  39 of those are non-alcoholic.  Mathematically that works out to about one non-alcoholic drink for every 38.5 days. So if you look at it like that, we are way overdue to have a drink sans alcohol.  We don’t look at it like that, though.  When we started this blog, Mrs. Bottle said, “we’re not doing any of those non-alcoholic drinks; they are a complete waste of time.” The waste of time part might be true, but here we are anyway.

As Mrs. Bottle mentioned yesterday, one of our friends turned 40 on Saturday and we went out to celebrate.  We agreed to go out even though we are both much younger than our friend.  I am in my late mid-30s and Mrs. Bottle said not to reveal her age under pain of death.  Regardless, even at our young ages our recovery time from a night out is a bit longer than it used to be.  As a result, neither of us was really in the mood for a drink on Sunday.   We had to provide a post though, so we decided to go non-alcoholic.  The sound you hear is my liver exhaling a sigh of relief.

We decided to go with the Shirley Temple, the classic favorite of cookie crunchers everywhere.  I doubt you were wondering, but a Shirley Temple is made from grenadine and ginger ale.  The Mr. Boston guide cares as little about this drink as I do, since it doesn’t even bother to put measurements for the ingredients.   We did our best to make it anyway.  The drink looked nice I suppose.  I think it tasted like ginger ale but I wasn’t really paying attention.   I would keep going but I’ve already wasted enough of your time.

They should rename this drink the
Miley Cyrus, the modern equivalent
of Shirley Temple's innocence
(Img)

Overall Rating for the Shirley Temple

Taste: 3

Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackout: ∞

Ingredients

Grenadine

Ginger Ale