Drink 171: I Get Stupid I Mean Outrageous

Today we have the Stupid Cupid, a mix of citrus vodka, sloe gin, simple syrup, and lemon juice.  You might think it would make more sense to have had this drink back during Romance Week, but you would be wrong.  A stupid Cupid would show up late, most likely some time in late July or early August.  It has nothing to do with trying to have a bunch of drinks with sloe gin now that we finally acquired some.

All that and a cherry on the bottom

The drink had a prominent lemon bouquet thanks to the lemon juice and citrus vodka.  I didn’t think the flavor was crazy-lemony, but Mrs. Bottle felt the citrus was powerful.  I think my taste buds may have been de-lemonized because right before we had the drink I had just eaten enough enormous lemon cookies to send me into sugar shock.  They arrived in the mail from Mrs. Bottle’s mother and it would have been rude to just let them sit there. I am eating one right now.

37 whole lemons go into every Kroger lemon cookie

As far as the drink, while we disagreed on the lemon, Mrs. Bottle and I both concurred that the drink had a strong alcohol burn. You know a drink is strong when you feel the warmth in your stomach.  That isn’t too surprising when you consider the Stupid Cupid is 37% alcohol. We had a little trouble coming to an agreement on whether it should be a three or a four but we easily concluded that a few of these will make anyone stupid.

Overall Rating for the Stupid Cupid

Taste: 3
Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackouts: 2 – 37% Alcohol

Ingredients

2 oz Citrus-flavored Vodka

0.5 oz Sloe Gin

1 splash Simple Syrup

1 splash Lemon Juice

Drink 170: Who Has Been Putting Out Their Kools on My Floor?

A Stinger is made with brandy and crème de menthe.  We have not tried that and we are not trying it today. Back in February we had the Vodka Stinger which is made with vodka and crème de menthe.  We are not trying that again today.  Instead we have the Scotch Stinger.  It is made with Scotch and crème de menthe.  I think there must be some connection between these drinks since they all have Stinger in the name but I can’t quite put my finger on it.  I may need to set the TBIAW iTeam on it.  We will put that aside for now and move on to the drink.

I used flash in this photo.
It really enhanced the lint
on our backdrop.

Hmm...this is in
all the Stinger
recipes.  Maybe
Mr. DeKuyper knows
the connection.

Anyone who has spent time with Mrs. Bottle knows she is always going on about how mint “makes everything better.”  The Scotch Stinger would really put her mint fanaticism to the test. Why? Because it might have mint but it also contains our most dreaded ingredient (in case you aren’t sure to what I am referring, it is the Scotch).  So far we have had seven drinks with Scotch and their ratings have been 2,2,2,1,1,2,1.  That pattern is like a reverse Fibonacci sequence of suckitude.

 

It turned out that the mint did make the Scotch Stinger almost tolerable. Don’t get me wrong; it was still gross, but probably the least gross Scotch drink so far thanks to the mint. It was kind of like the difference between a menthol cigarette and a regular cigarette.  In either case, I wouldn’t want to kiss you after you had one unless it was extremely late at night.  Anyway, the Scotch Stinger was tasty enough that it allowed us to make it our highest rated Scotch drink (tie).

Overall Rating for the Scotch Stinger

Taste: 2

Presentation: 2 – Kind of looked like a glass of wee

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackouts: 2 – 38% Alcohol

Ingredients

1.5 oz Scotch

.5 oz Crème de Menthe (white)

Drink 169: Seven Silver Spiders Swam Silently Seaward

It does look silver

When we first started this blog one hundred and sixty-eight cocktails ago we thought the majority of the posts would just be a description of the drink and a rating of said drink.  Today we finally realize that goal with the Silver Spider, a shooter made from vodka, rum, triple sec, and crème de menthe.  This drink tasted mostly like alcohol with a bit of mint.  It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything special.  One thing it will do is get you drunk.  There you have it. 

Overall Rating for the Silver Spider

Taste: 3

Presentation: 3

Ease of Preparation: 3

Drinks Until Blackouts: 3 – 33% Alcohol

Ingredients

.5 oz Vodka

.5 oz Rum

.5 oz Triple Sec

.5 oz Crème de Menthe (white)

Drink 168: Sloe Ride

Several drinks in the Mr. Boston guide feature Sloe Gin, most famously the Alabama Slammer and the Sloe Gin Fizz.  We would like to try those drinks, but the problem is that it is tough to find authentic sloe gin.  Most of the sloe gin you see at the liquor store isn’t made using the traditional method of infusing gin with sloes.  Instead, they use grain alcohol.  I’m not sure why they are allowed to call that stuff sloe gin instead of sloeshine. 

I can't tell you the name of
this drink yet because we
haven't gotten to that
 part of the post

We conducted a multi-state search several months ago (true fact) and were unable to locate any real sloe gin.  That all changed recently when Mrs. Bottle finally located some Plymouth Traditional Sloe Gin.  I’m pretty sure she was supposed to be at work at the time, but priorities are priorities.  This was exciting news since it now allowed us a whole new spectrum of drinks.  I became a bit less excited when I saw that the bottle cost over $30.  Maybe sloeshine wouldn’t have been a bad choice after all.

We didn’t want to shoot our sloe wad by bringing one of the more famous sloe-based drinks right off the bat, so today we bring you the Sloeberry Cocktail, a mix of sloe gin and bitters.  The drink tasted a little strange yet somewhat familiar.  Mrs. Bottle thought it smelt of cough syrup, but there was something else there.  After several sips, I figured it out: The Sloeberry Cocktail tasted sort of like prune juice.  I floated this theory by Mrs. Bottle and she could neither confirm nor deny it since she claims to have never tasted prune juice. I actually haven’t had prune juice either, but I’ve been known to enjoy a prune dried plum now and then.

"Slow Barry" is what Robin and Maurice called their brother

We had to know more so we turned to our go-to source for information to learn about the sloe (Wikipedia, making TBIAW possible for over 300 years^TM).  It turns out that the sloe is the fruit of the Prunus spinosa species of bushes. I don’t know if you caught the name…Prunus spinosa. That’s right; the sloe is related to the prune. I am here to tell you that a hint of that pruney flavor is present in the Sloeberry Cocktail, too.  It wasn’t overwhelming, though.  Probably because it cost so much.

Overall Rating for the Sloeberry Cocktail

Taste: 3
Presentation: 4

Ease of Preparation: 4

Drinks Until Blackouts: 5 – 26% Alcohol

Ingredients

2 oz Sloe Gin

1 dash Bitters

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 166: Don't Shoot the Memessenger

Everyone knows that Adolf Hitler loved Piña Coladas.  His love was controversial though since the Piña Colada supposedly wasn’t invented until 1954 when the key ingredient cream of coconut was first created.  What these so-called “historians” don’t know is that Hitler used the recipe shown in our Mr. Boston guide.  Well not our specific copy, but you know what I mean.  The recipe calls for coconut milk instead of cream of coconut as is typically used. Adding to the confusion is that the drink was known in Weimar Germany not as a Piña Colada but as Der Gerfrorenananasweiblichgetränk.

We did not love this Piña Colada

Mrs. Bottle and I were both excited to try the Piña Colada, but not because it was Hitler’s favorite.  Rather, we like tropical drinks and no drink symbolizes the tropics more than the Piña Colada.  It has even been famously immortalized in song.  Unfortunately the drink as described in the Mr. Boston book is truly horrible.  I can see how being stuck with Gerfrorenananasweiblichgetränk could make someone angry. The main problem is that it calls for coconut milk instead of cream of coconut.  Coconut milk is essentially the juice from a coconut.  It isn’t sweet, isn’t creamy, and in my opinion isn’t very tasty either. 

The rest of the recipe calls for light rum and crushed pineapple.  You mix it in a blender with ice and the strain it into your glass.  This is an additional flaw, since the crushed pineapple gets mostly strained out, leaving you with rum and coconut milk.  We kept tasting it hoping it would somehow magically improve but it never got better.  Mrs. Bottle was as crushed as the pineapple but instead of letting it get her down she just found the inner resolve to make a tasty Piña Colada.  It is effort like hers that makes America great.

USA! USA!

She found a recipe on our can of Coco López cream of coconut and used that instead. Their recipe uses cream of coconut and pineapple juice instead of coconut milk and strained pineapple.  This drink was sweet, creamy, and delicious.  It also happens to be closer to the recipe we found in all of our other cocktail guides and as you might imagine we have quite a few.  In fact, we added one to our collection yesterday at the Borders going out of business sale.  We saved $0.60!   It was totally worth it.

Overall Rating for the Piña Colada

Taste: 1

Presentation: 5

Ease of Preparation: 1

Drinks Until Blackout: 10 –  9% Alcohol

Ingredients

3 oz Light Rum

3 tbsp Coconut Milk

3 tbsp Crushed Pineapple

Drink 165: Blue Friday

The Wallis Blue Cocktail isn’t what you might expect. Namely, it isn’t blue.  This is due primarily to the fact that none of its ingredients are blue.  Instead they are gin, triple sec, and lime juice.  Think of it as a gin-based Margarita, but a bit sweeter. We liked the traditional Margarita a lot, but the Wallis Blue Cocktail was better.  The extra sweetness was the tipping point, perfectly balancing the tart lime juice.  The sugar-rimmed glass probably helped, too.  Has there ever been a beverage that wasn’t improved by a sugar-rimmed glass? Actually, yes.

As far as I can tell, not blue

It has been a while since we have had a bad drink. In fact, we haven’t had a drink rated lower than a three in over two weeks now.  This streak is long enough that I’m beginning to get nervous.  There will surely be an epically bad streak some time in the future providing karmic retribution.  It will likely feature several drinks with Scotch, Galliano, and prune juice.

Now we clumsily transition back to the drink at hand.  I was curious about the name of the cocktail so we launched a massive TBIAW investigation.  One of our iReporters quickly discovered that a fashion designer named Main Bocher created a color “Wallis Blue” named for Wallis Simpson and used it in her wedding dress. The dress doesn’t look blue to me, so that might explain why the drink isn’t blue.  Maybe the absence of blue is a statement on the patriarchal nature of pre-World War II society. 

Blueberries, as named by Main Bocher

In case you are not up on your anglophilic studies, Wallis Simpson was an American woman who tried to destroy the English monarchy using only the power of her femininity and almost succeeded.  For you youngsters, think of her like the Monica Lewinsky of the 30’s. Coincidentally Lewinsky is also known for a blue dress. But we recommend that you stay away from the Monica Blew Cocktail.

Overall Rating for the Wallis Blue Cocktail

Taste: 5

Presentation: 3

Ease of Preparation: 3

Drinks Until Blackouts: 6 – 21% Alcohol

 

 

Ingredients

1 oz Gin

1 oz Triple Sec

1 oz Lime Juice