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 156: Frisky Business

Today’s drink is the Frisky Witch, a duo made from vodka and sambuca.  As with most duos, the Frisky Witch is very strong, weighing in with an alcohol content of 41%.  The anise flavor is very strong as well, weighing in with a licorice score of 93%.  It was a bit too much for Mrs. Bottle to handle even though she thinks that plain sambuca tastes fine.  I liked the Frisky Witch although I wouldn’t want to drink more than six or seven of them at a time.

Please ignore the licorice surgery

If you think six or seven drinks are too many, you are not a college student.  According to a recent survey of college students, binge drinking brings benefits such as “more courage, improved communication skills, and better social abilities.”  I attended college and I can assure you that binge drinking can lead to a lot of things, but “improved communication skills” is not one of them. Unless of course you are looking to increase your slurring and volume level because you are normally soft spoken and people make fun of you because of your precise enunciation.  “Better social abilities” is questionable, too.  If “regrettable sexual encounter” falls under that umbrella then I suppose it makes sense. 

Not sure if this falls under "better social abilities"
or "improved communication skills"

In addition to the benefits that the college students enumerated, there are actual benefits as well including a reduction in the chances of cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and Type-2 diabetes.  Of course those benefits are achieved by only having one (if you are a woman) or two (if you a man) drinks per day.  Doctors can really be a buzzkill.  They didn’t even give a recommended amount for children.  Why do they want kids to catch Alzheimer’s?

Overall Rating for the Frisky Witch

 

Taste: 4 (Mr. Bottle) 2 (Mrs. Bottle)

Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 5

Drinks Until Blackout: 2 – 41% Alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Vodka

1 oz Sambuca

Drink 155: Ain't That a Jicama Head

While our drink selections may at times appear completely random it is only because they are usually random. The genius of it is that sometimes they appear random when they are really carefully chosen by our selection committee (Mrs. Bottle).  Sometimes she chooses a drink because it is related to a holiday.  Other times it is because she wants to make sure we don’t have too many good drinks in a row. Today it is because we had an ingredient that she didn’t want to let go to waste.  That ingredient is fresh mint.

If you know what this is it is attractive.
Otherwise it might skeeze you out

We have fresh mint because Mrs. Bottle was going to make a delicious orange and jicama salad this past weekend for the neighborhood 4^th of July blowout.  Not the big blowout down the road, but the one we got invited to.  It happens that the salad includes fresh mint and we had a lot left over.  Why did we have so much mint left over?  Because Mrs. Bottle couldn’t make the salad.  Why couldn’t she make the salad?  Because we could not find a decent jicama within a 30 mile radius of the Estate.

Don’t get me wrong, we found jicama at our usual grocery store (we won’t name it here, but it rhymes with Ferris Jeter); we just didn’t find a good one.  When Mrs. Bottle picked up the first one she found, it had a hole in it and then bug flew out of said hole.  That is considered good luck in some countries, but in America it is considered gross.  She picked out a second one but when she cut it open at home it too had a hole in it cleverly concealed within the center of the root. The non-hole portion was black with rot.  Mrs. Bottle ignored my suggestion of using the rotted tuber anyway and insisted I find another one.  I spent the next several hours trolling every grocery store that wasn’t too inconvenient but still came a cropper. 

Not to scale
Moth

Since Mrs. Bottle also ignored my other suggestion of making an orange and rutabaga salad, we had a lot of mint left over.  We ended up using the mint in the Frozen Mint Daiquiri which also has rum, lime juice and sugar.  This isn’t to be confused with the previously reviewed Daiquiri which has no mint and is not frozen but conversely also tasted good.  Mint and lime is a good combo, but the Frozen Mint Daiquiri was too tart for our liking.  This is likely due to the fact that it called for sugar instead of simple syrup.  I guess no one told Mr. Boston that sugar doesn’t really dissolve in a frozen drink.  We salvaged the drink by adding some simple syrup, making it quite tasty.  If only the recipe called for “simple syrup to taste” like the Dragon Street Cobra Tamer No. 1, it would have been a big hit. Then again there are few drinks that are as big as the DSCTn1.

Overall Rating for the Frozen Mint Daiquiri

 

Taste: 2 (4 if you add simple syrup)

Presentation: 5

Ease of Preparation: 3 – Frozen drinks are an automatic 1 point deduction

Drinks Until Blackout: 12 – 7% Alcohol

Ingredients

2 oz Light Rum

1 tbsp Lime Juice

6 Mint Leaves

1 tsp Sugar

1 cup Ice

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 153: Drinkee Doodle Dandy

TBIAW is pretty US-centric, which makes sense since that’s where the Bottle Wonderland Estate is located.  It is not intended to be a slight in any way to other countries, though.  We love all countries and the people in those countries, although we are keeping a very close eye on you, Moldova.  Even with our pro-US stance, we still attract visitors from around the world, as you can see here:

Unfortunately this map does not show our
tremendous popularity in Antarctica

You can also see that we don’t get many readers from the southern hemisphere.  That’s because their Internet runs in the opposite direction and they have a hard time getting here. 

For those visitors from other lands who don’t already know, today is the 4^th of July, also known here in the US as Independence Day. This is when we celebrate our country’s freedom by eating a lot of grilled meat, drinking delicious mass-produced American beer, and shooting off fireworks.  Coincidentally, that is also how we celebrate Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Black History Month.

To help celebrate we bring you today’s drink the 4^th of July Tooter, a combination of grenadine (derived from the French word for pomegranate), vodka (from Russia), and blue Curaçao (named after a foreign country). On first glance, you might think those ingredients belong in some effete America hater’s cocktail, but if you reflect deeply on it (an American strength) you can clearly see that they represent the great melting pot of our nation.  If you can’t see that, you should go back to Canada where you belong.

The ingredients also just happen to be red, white, and blue, the colors of Old Glory.  The idea is to float the ingredients to make a red, white, and blue shooter. This is the same concept that worked so well for us when we made the Irish Flag that we were excited to try it again.  We were rewarded because it worked just as well this time.  The vodka didn’t float at all on the grenadine, and the Curaçao didn’t work much better.

Caution! The sparklers are flammable.
They are also made in Thailand

Luckily here in the US of A we are more concerned with substance than style so the taste is more important than the looks. And in the taste department, the 4^th of July Tooter did well with a with a nice orange flavor, although it was a bit sweet.  The main issue is that it wasn’t chilled in any way which is a problem in the middle of summer.  The forecast today is calling for temperatures in the mid-nineties so something cold would be nicer.  In fact when we tested the drink we ended up using good old American ingenuity and we plopped an ice cube in it.  Not only did it chill the drink, the ice cube added a little white and made it an aesthetic victory as well. USA! USA!

Overall Rating for the 4^th of July Tooter

Taste: 4

Presentation: 5 – It doesn’t matter if it didn’t work, it tried!

Ease of Preparation: 2 – Floats

Drinks Until Blackout: 6 – 22% Alcohol

Ingredients

1 oz Grenadine

1 oz Vodka

1 oz Blue Curaçao

Those Who Can't Do, Blog

This certainly looks like the
next big thing to me

Over the past few months we have reviewed scores of drinks, critiqued liquors, rated beers, and even made the occasional restaurant review (what happened to that feature?).  Even though we have been reliably informative, hilarious, and touching, TBIAW still hasn’t caught fire with the masses.  We need something to set us apart from other blogs about drinking, and that something is a signature cocktail of our own.

That’s right, you read correctly, we are going to come up with our own original drink.  Once we perfect it we fully expect it to become the next big thing.  The current big thing is planking.  If something as dumb as that can become popular then I think we have a real chance.  Of course we are hurting ourselves by unveiling our first attempt on a holiday weekend when most people will be outside doing something fun instead of avoiding work by reading our blog.

This is a fad, really?
Img: whataplanker.com

Creating a signature cocktail isn’t as easy as it sounds.  The most difficult part is coming up with something original in light of the thousands upon thousands of recipes available online.  The easiest way to develop something unique is to invent your own liqueur.  Then any drink you make with it will be new.  You can put the brand of the liqueur in the name of every recipe to further strengthen your message.  To publicize it sufficiently it is also a must to create a web site with an annoying splash page with music and slowly developing graphics.  A cool logo and weird bottle don't hurt either.

Alas, I searched the entire grounds of the Bottle Wonderland Estate and I could not find a distillery or a cadre of web developers so we will have to use ingredients that have already been invented. For our first attempt we decided to use science to determine the right ingredients.  And by science, I mean an Excel spreadsheet.  We chose to use Excel 2003, widely agreed upon by the top spreadsheetologists in the country to be the version installed on our laptop.

Notice the sophistication, precision, and cell formatting

We took our spreadsheet and created a model to determine which ingredients were most likely to lead to a tasty beverage.  The model was quite sophisticated and used formulas such as SUM and COUNTIF.  The laptop smoked and sputtered and caused an area brownout but eventually it spit out a list of vodka, orange juice, lime juice, and lemon juice as the top four.  After determining that this was a unique set of ingredients we used a variation on the Hodge conjecture to optimize the proportions. 

Naming the drink was quite easy.  With the selected ingredients the only logical choice was to call it the Dragon Street Cobra Tamer.  With that settled, Mrs. Bottle carefully measured and mixed the inaugural Dragon Street Cobra Tamer (3 shakes over purified ice in a metallic shaker)  and poured it into our fanciest chilled cocktail glass.  It was good but a little too tart.  Recognizing that mixology is both art and science, we decided to add a little simple syrup to balance it out.  This was really a genius touch because by adding “simple syrup to taste” to the recipe it is on you if you think it is too sour or too sweet and we remain blameless.

Nailed the logo!

We ultimately felt that the drink was not a perfect five, but it was a solid four.  There is nothing wrong with a four and that gives us the opportunity to create additional drinks. Mrs. Bottle began planning out the ingredients of our next drink before we had even finished this one (sneak preview: there will be coffee liqueur).  The only downside is that we had to change the name of our drink to the Dragon Street Cobra Tamer No. 1 so we have room to grow.

Overall Rating for the Dragon Street Cobra Tamer No. 1

Taste: 4

Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackout: 5 – 26% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Vodka

0.5 oz Orange Juice

0.25 oz Lime Juice

0.25 oz Lemon Juice

Simple Syrup to taste

Logo images: 1upgamers.com, howstuffworks.com,streetsigngenerator.com

Drink 152: Labor Pains

If you don’t follow sports you may not have heard that the NBA is officially locked out today.  What does a lockout mean, exactly?  I don’t really care but I do know that it means there won’t be basketball until the lockout ends.  The NFL is locked out, too, so this winter it is looking like the only pro sports option will be hockey, which apparently has a pro league.  Who knew?  I hope someone starts a Calvinball league to fill the void. 

In both the NBA and NFL the lockouts are about the same thing: Money.  This is surprising to me because in a million years I never would have thought money could cause a disagreement.  We decided to pay tribute to money by having a green drink today.  It is called the Jade and it is made from rum, green crème de menthe, triple sec, lime juice, and simple syrup.  We’ve already covered that the only difference between regular crème de menthe and green crème de menthe is some food coloring.  Therefore we just used our regular stuff and some Rit dye. I was skeptical about the Jade’s combination of mint, rum, orange, and lime but it actually worked.  The mint and lime balanced each other like they do in a Mojito and there was a nice hint of sweetness from the triple sec and simple syrup. 

The emptiness of the glass symbolizes the
gap between the owners and players

We debated whether it should get a four or five but we reached an impasse.  I thought it rated a four but Mrs. Bottle questioned why it wouldn’t be a five.  I then explained to her that we must have a hard rating cap so the small market drinks like the Jade can compete fairly with the big market drinks like the Cuba Libre. She countered that the careers of these drinks can be short so they need to maximize their ratings when they can.   We are now firmly entrenched in our positions and I don't know when we can resume rating drinks. 

Overall Rating for the Jade

Taste: 4 or 5

Presentation: 5 – Hard to beat a fake green hue

Ease of Preparation: 2 – Lots of half teaspoons

Drinks Until Blackout: 5 – 27% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Light Rum

0.5 tsp Crème de Menthe (green)

0.5 tsp Triple Sec

1 tbsp Lime Juice

1 tsp Simple Syrup