Image lifted from Feasting on… Pixels. (See below)

And so here we go. Monday, Sept. 20th was the fifty first Mixology Monday carnival of cocktails, the monthly roundup of related posts that originally forged the first, disparate cocktail blogs into today’s thriving Cocktailosphere.

As the designated glutton for punishment host of this month’s round up, I called for posts on the subject of limes. And the Internet delivered.

[UPDATE: And speaking of the Internet delivering, welcome Instapundit readers! I hope you enjoy yourselves as you check out another corner of the blogosphere. Thanks, Professor.]

The first thing the Internet delivered was an Operation Overlord-sized landing of… Gimlets. All manner of Gimlets.

Things were calm until someone brought vodka to the party,
and G.I. Gimlet here got angry….

Gimlets are among the most basic of cocktails, and I’ve always sneered at them. So I mixed one up last night for the first time in years in honor of all this Gimletry, and damned if I didn’t end up drinking three.

DJ Hawaiian Shirt manned the bunkers, defending the shores with a traditionalist’s reminder that a Gimlet means Rose’s Lime Cordial, and don’t forget it!

Jason, of the Ancient Fire Wine Blog (who invited in the wine bloggers? Oh right, we did.) lead the attack onto the beach with his Basil Vodka Gimlet. Using vodka in a traditionally gin drink is always a good way to pour oil on troubled waters in the Cocktailosphere, Jason….

Bi-lingual blogger Malty Puppy, makes his own lime cordial replacement for Rose’s and compares gins and service methods for Gimlets.

It’s the first ever MxMo post for Polish blogger Artur of Tarasco Bar. He makes me wish he posted bilingually more often, if only so I’d have an excuse to check out the ridiculously gorgeous header on his blog. He fully internationalizes the Gimlet fray by taking this english cocktail, borrowing Brazilian methods, and offering up the Gimletinha.

Janet A. Zimmerman posted her own recipe for lime cordial in this month’s eGullet discussion board thread. She also references her posting last November that is a comprehensive, scholarly, and award winning history and appreciation of Rose’s Lime Cordial.

Oh, and Camper English joins in too.

Wait!
What?
I didn’t write a….

Yes, yes you did Camper. Or at least your post on Gimlets was timed perfectly to suck you into this whole Gimlet-palooza subset of Mixology Monday. Enjoy G-Day, Camp!

Tiare of A Mountain of Crushed Ice steers us clear of this bloodshed by bringing (of course) the Tiki. She employs one of the real superweapons of cocktailia to do so. Was she really thinking hard about limes for this post? I doubt it. She just wanted to have a ridiculously potent Mai Tai, post another of her photos that are so much better than mine, and rub in the fact that she still has Lemon Hart 151 lying around.

Frederic, the Cocktail Slut (His URL says something different, but the URL is old, IYKWIMAITYD) Teases us me with the Peguweiser, a beer-based sacrilege, then gives us the complex and mysterious McMenomy.

Paul, the Cocktailosphere’s Godfather, and proprietor of the essential Cocktail Chronicles notes the lime’s utilitarian nature. He uses it for background acidity rather than flavor in his offering this month, but mostly as an excuse to write about banana liqueur and the Planet of the Apes…. Um, that makes perfect sense.

If you don’t know Reese, he blogs as Cocktail Hacker, where he makes his name fixing things that ain’t broke. His jailbreak this Mixology Monday ramps up one of lime’s greatest hits, giving us the Noon Day Sun Margarita.

“Guy“, the guy who comments on my blog so much he usually sticks his oar in before I get the posts finis…

That’s me!

Shut up.
Guy has posted a roundup of his own of general lime trivia, information, and lore. Feel free to smack him around in the comments if he steps out of line.
It’s so hard to get good sockpuppets these days.

New(ish) blogger Jordan Devereaux of Chemistry of the Cocktail uses lime in just about everything. He offers us the sweetly delicious Caroni Rum Sling. As you can see from his nifty photo, he gives the lie to a point made by said worthless sockpuppet about lime twists.

Besides Frederic, with his blasphemously funny Peguweiser, two bloggers apparently thought they needed to suck up to me. (No one needs to suck up to me):

Keith the Speakista brings the best cocktail EVAR, and uploads the biggest cocktail photo EVAR, too. Click the pic on his blog to see what I mean. He also offers a drink named after relatively obscure (compared to me) public figure, Pedro Martinez….

And the inimitable Jacob Grier goes all molecular mixology on us, with agar clarification of lime juice. Crystal clear lime juice just upsets the natural order of the universe. Cats and dogs, living together, etc., etc. He does know how to choose a good cocktail to try it with, though.

Londoner Andy, who writes about Good Drinks, etc., goes all avant garde with the fascinating Cubre, an up version of the Cuba Libré. As a Georgia boy, I am driven by genetics and bound by honor to note that he probably ruins it by using Pepsi instead of Coke….

Kim, of understandingcocktails, (another first time MxMoer) deconstructs the Caipirinha while constructing one. While you are visiting his page, be sure to refresh your browser a couple of times in hopes of seeing the header picture that is most appropriate for this month’s festivities….

Food and drink blogger Andy presents the Stiletto on his blog, Sybaritic Wanderings. It’s your basic three-ingredient goodness that marries what is to me a very unexpected trio.

Speaking of food blogging, the PeguWife has actually taken the plunge and written her first post here! It’s not about cocktails, but it is about limes, key limes and pies to be exact. And she is my wife, so you will read it!

Also in the food blogging vein, the image I lifted to start this article comes from an old post on the blog Feasting on… Pixels. The fresh lime sorbet she makes in the post, along with its awesome presentation, has all sorts of limey mixological implications. Your extra credit assignment for this month: Play with her idea and report back in the comments!

Dan Chadwick posts his Caipirinha variant, the Old Sao Paolo at kindred cocktails. It’s database format over there, so he takes the unusual step of putting up the MxMo portion as a comment on his own post!

Chris Amirault also has an offering in the eGullet thread. As we all do regularly, Chris rotated out his inventory of white cardamon recently. This month’s MxMo helped him hit on a mixological use for the expiring stuff. A little Tito’s, the cardamon, and a lime later….

Scomorokh, of Science of Drink, brings us two drinks made with a product I’ve never seen before: Lime Liqueur. His Lime Daiquiri picture is one of the prettiest cocktail photos I’ve seen in a good while.

Carly Kocurek brings us a Brown Sugar Basil Mojito at her blog, My Life In Cocktails. I’ve made Basiljitos before, but her version sounds better. The PeguWife will want one with her Key Lime Pie.

Time for another grouping of like-minded thinkers:

Really Marcia? Puns?
Sigh.
Drink of the Week puts de lime in de coconut, ‘n plays wit’ de name. The results look good.

AJR, who sometimes tends bar at Tonic at Quigley’s Pharmacy in Washington, DC (Just added you to the BlogBarCrawl, Anthony!) writes a site named Done Like Dundee, Gone Like Gandhi. He frets that choosing Lime in the Coconut will make him redundant, but if he’d posted 41 minutes earlier, Marcia would be the redundant one. And since their executions are totally different, no worries. It’s not like they were doing Gimlets….

Ed, the Wordsmithing Pantagruel, offers his own Marchetti Falcon for us to try. I like the lime zest garnish, and it meshes thematically with my entry (which is next). And don’t bother rushing to Google to figure out that the heck a “Pantagruel” is, just check Ed’s sidebar.

Speaking of my own entry, behold my tattooed lime wedges. As someone who has admitted in public that he doesn’t always garnish his cocktails, (The CSOWG held hearings. I was allowed to remain a member anyway.) this is as fancy-schmancy as I get.

Dennis, at Rock & Rye, offers excuses for his late post. Then he complains about the syllabus I’ve assigned. After that he vamps a while about the subject matter to make sure his work doesn’t look too short. And he finishes off with stock photography. All this, like his drink the Daiquiri, creates a post “that is altogether greater than the sum of its ingredients.”

Tacoma bar, 1022 South has its own blog. If all blogging bartenders I run across go on the BlogBarCrawl map, blogging bars certainly must! The bar offers us two drinks made with their house-made kava kava tincture, married with both lime juice and the limey goodness of falernum….
I have got to find a client or two in the SeaTac area….

And our final entry is from Chad Robinson, who left this for us in the comments of my announcement post:

Where’s the picture, Chad?

I want to thank everyone who participated in this month’s lime mayhem (especially those I drafted). Now I must go back to my regular routine of producing my own content, rather than having you all provide it for me.
Sigh.
Be sure to check back at the Mixology Monday website soon for next month’s theme and host announcement, and I hope all you new visitors will come back and visit me again!

Howdy, folks! Guy here. This month, Mixology Monday has got itself a lime theme. Since the bossman offered space to other folks who wanted to write a MxMo post, I thought I’d belly up to the bar myself. How’s about we round up a whole bunch of miscellaneous information about limes in cocktails?
A lot of this stuff is cribbed from the prior posted wisdom of our esteemed main blogger here, that sage of the cocktail, Doug, who….

Wow dear.
Sucking up much?

I beg your pardon?

“Sage of the cocktail?”
Doug’s ego doesn’t need that much of a boost, does it?

We’re sockpuppets, dear. Pimping the hand that makes us talk is what we do.

Of course.
How silly of me.
Doug really is teh awesome, isn’t he?

Yes. Yes he is.

And so are limes. Limes are the closest thing you can get to a Swiss Army Knife of cocktail ingredients, as I think we’ll see when all the drink posts for this month are in.
Still there are a lot of details to the lime, lots of things they are great for, and even a few they are not so great for. I thought I’d do a roundup of my own of general lime information in the form of a FAQ. Hopefully, it will be useful to someone, and even more importantly, be a source of good traffic for Doug’s awesome blog in the future!

Well then, you should probably stop wasting scroll-space on the Dance of the Sockpuppetplum Fairies, hmmm?

Frequently Asked Questions About Limes

• How much juice will I get from a lime?
  This will depend on three things:
  1. How large is the lime (obviously)
  2. How old the lime is. Elderly limes will yield less juice
  3. How cold the lime is. If you store your limes in the fridge, they will last slightly longer, but yield less juice. A lot less.

  All that said, an average grocery store lime in good condition will give you about an ounce of juice. The larger varieties can yield as much as two ounces, though, if fresh.
  It is best to measure your juice when you can to get the amount called for in the recipe.

• What if the recipe calls for “the juice of one lime?”
  In most cases, older recipes that call for the juice of one lime mean about 3/4′s ounce. Start with that and add a quarter more to taste. Or you could just juice one lime and be done with it. I assume since you are asking that you are using bottled juice?
• Keeping fresh limes on hand is a pain in the ass. Any suggestions there?
  Air flow and attention.
  Store your limes in a container outside of the chill chest. A wire bowl or basket is best to maintain the best airflow. Your limes will exude fumes as they sit that will brown their neighbors.
  Keep an eye on the limes you have and discard or use any that show any brown spots, as these will ruin the others at a much faster rate.
  If you must buy the bags of limes, open them as soon as you get them home and hunt out the inevitable oldsters who will ruin the entire bag in but a day or two if you let them stay.
• Sounds like a hassle. How about I just buy the juice bottled?
  Sounds good to me. But True Believers™ of the Church of the Cocktails® will unleash these guys on you if you do.
  
  Seriously, fresh juice is a lot better than any bottled lime juice. But the bottled stuff still makes a good drink, so pick your battles as you delve into cocktails. Here’s an old post of the Boss’s that looks at a few brands.
• What about Key Lime juice?
  There are all sorts of high quality Key Lime juices out there. Often they will look like higher quality juice than RealLime, or whatever else your grocer carries. But please understand that Key Lime juice is not lime juice. The fruits have distinctly different flavors, and they are not interchangeable. A drink made with Key Lime juice will taste different from one made with regular lime juice. It might taste better. It’ll probably taste worse. It’ll absolutely taste different.
• OK, then I’ll just use Rose’s. It’s a known brand and everyone has it.
  A: That’s not a question. And
  B: Hush your mouth.
  Rose’s is not lime juice. It is a sweetened lime syrup with a unique taste. It has a place in exactly one great cocktail, the Gimlet. It is about as interchangeable with lime juice as cinnamon toast is with french bread.
• If I’m in a bar and the bartender reaches for the Rose’s when I’ve asked for a Pegu or other drink that needs fresh lime juice, what do I do?
  Bar snacks.
• ???
  Throw bar snacks at him to get his attention, then tell him to put down the Rose’s and walk away slowly.
• If I’m just playing around, what spirits should I use limes with?
  Limes can go well with most any spirit, but they marry especially well with gin and rum. They can work with whiskey and brandy too, but try lemons first there.
• What about Vodka?
  Everything goes with vodka. That’s because it’s vodka.
• Got any tips for garnishing with limes?
  Well, His Awesomeness’s MxMo post this month is about a lime garnish option that he ripped off from offers as an homage to Pegu Club. And Ed’s Marchetti Falcon shows how nifty a garnish a little lime zest can make. But limes are traditionally just used in wheel or wedge fashion. Also, many drinks, like the venerable Rickey or the G&T leave a spent wedge or even lime half floating in the drink as if as proof of the freshness of the juice.
• How about a twist?
  Leave the twist to lemons (or oranges). First, lemons have a lot more oil in the skin to flavor the drink with. Remember, a good garnish will excite more senses than just the eyes.
  Second, lemons have nice thick skins and you can make twists with just a knife, a vegetable peeler, or even a sharpened spoon. If you are handy enough with a knife to easily and routinely produce twists from the paper-thin skin of limes, the Mayo Clinic has work for you.

Enough questions!
I’m thirsty. Make me something limey.

Of course, dear. Just go read through this month’s roundup, and tell me what you want.

But it’s not up yet.

Well, don’t look at me. Talk to Doug.

Key lime pie must never be green!

No.

If you are in the Keys (or, really, anywhere) and the “Key lime” pie you are served is a rather off-putting shade of beige, just close your eyes and enjoy.

Yes.

Even better, get it frozen… on a stick… dipped in dark chocolate!

The fifty-first installment of Mixology Monday (a.k.a. The Carnival That Created the Cocktailosphere) has the theme of Lime, and is being hosted at… well, here! I’ll thus skip all the general introductory discussion, leaving that for the announcement and the eventual roundup, and delve right into my offering.

I’m a fan of Audrey Saunders’ Pegu Club, for numerous reasons beyond just the obvious, and I’ve reviewed the place twice. But one perfect detail of the joint is the magnificently crafted garnishes they offer, each used to highlight but one or two of their signature cocktails.
In particular, I love the tattooed lime wedges that perch on the rim of their Pegus. While there is virtually nothing Tiki about Pegu Club, this garnish does produce a subliminal sense of Far Eastern (as opposed to Polynesian) exoticism.
The wedges, which look very like the one pictured above, evoke the region of the Pegu’s origin like some totem of the Thugee cult. Of course, I don’t think the Thugees extended their reach into Burma, and I’m sure they didn’t accept citrus fruits as members….
I was mystified as to how they made these little rim-hugging gems, until the Peguwife had a chance to look at them. It took her about thirty seconds to figure how to at least approximate the results.

Making a lime’s worth of wedges takes but a few minutes at most, and they are a great way of showing off without going the Full Penguin.

You will need the following:

• Cutting board
• Serrated knife
• A good, beautiful, richly green lime. The bigger, the better.
• A five hole citrus zester (like this one, for example.)

You will use the zester to tattoo the whole lime, then slice it into wedges. (This order of things may seem obvious to you, it wasn’t to me!)
I could get really wordy about how you create various designs (shut up, Guy!) but instead I decided to make a video tutorial of the process. Behold the awesomeness of the Pegu Blog’s first vlog entry!

As you get some experience with this technique, you’ll see that you can make your cuts in ways that will look better when you cut the wedges, and conversely that you can choose where to cut to make whatever design you have carved look better. It is especially a good idea not to run scratches very far longitudinally. They will likely take up an entire wedge and leave very little visual complexity. Even simple patterns will look very complex after slicing if you do them right.

You can do this method with any citrus wedge or peel, though I think it looks best with limes and worst with lemons. The lemons don’t give enough contrast to really look good. And it works with any cocktail (including lots of tiki drinks) but you are honor-bound to mix a Pegu for the first drink you decorate with it….

The next round of Mixology Monday (a.k.a. The Carnival That Created the Cocktailosphere) will once again be hosted here at the Pegu Blog. This month, I thought we should examine one of the most ubiquitous items in any decent bar: Limes.

Limes are an ingredient. Limes are a garnish. A bowl of them makes a beautiful and functional ornament for the bar. While they aren’t a floor wax, at least they can be a dessert topping….

The date to make with your favorite green citrus is September 20th, 2010. Pop me an email with a link to your post (Doug (at) cocktailcapersdotcom), or post a comment to this thread.

In case you are interested in writing about limes, but don’t have a blog or other place of your own to post right now, I’ll be happy to host your musings here as a guest blogger. You just need to let me know well enough in advance to get your article formatted and posted by the night of the 20th.

I aim to have the roundup written and posted here by Wednesday. Hopefully I’ll actually meet that deadline.

Brown, Bitter, and Stirred. That is this month’s invocation for Mixology Monday, hosted this round by Lindsey Johnson of Lush Life Productions at her blog, er, Brown Bitter and Stirred. At first glance, it is almost too easy. The phrase itself is practically a recipe for the first cocktail, and three mighty elders of classic cocktaildom leap immediately to mind: The Sazerac, the Old-Fashioned, and the mighty Gospel of Whiskey, the Manhattan. But the challenge with Mixology Monday for me is to offer something that may be a twist for at least some readers who stumble into this blog binge.
I’m going to discuss an Old Fashioned. Specifically, I’m going to offer up the much lesser known Rum Old Fashioned. Like Sours and Rickeys, Old Fashioneds are actually a class of cocktail. While a single spirit is best known as the base, a mixer can open up new worlds just by substituting another. The method of preparation is the same.
I’ll start right off with my recipe for an Old Fashioned. It is not the recipe for an Old Fashioned, which is too damn time-consuming to use for everyday work. Nor is it (thankfully) any of the other recipes for an Old Fashioned.
For the nonce, I’ll just say spirit. You can use most base liquors here, but it works best with certain brown ones like Bourbon, Rye, and Aged Rum.

I use simple syrup instead of the sugar cube in the recipe because I have things to do. I don’t use wads of citrus or cherries because this ain’t no fern bar beverage.

I recently made some disparaging remarks about ice geekery, but the quality and nature of the ice you use in an Old Fashioned has a greater effect on the experience of drinking it than with most any other cocktail I regularly drink. Old Fashioneds are sipping drinks, meant to be savored slowly, while thinking deep thoughts on matters of importance. Yet, they taste best cold. That’s why you serve them on the rocks, rather than up. But they also suffer greatly with dilution. The Old Fashioned is a potent potion, and if you let it get all watery, you go from Don Draper to Dwight Schrute.
This is why I stir the drink first, then strain. This gets the drink good and cold to start. Then I use the largest ice I have available in the drink when I serve it. The large ice will keep things cold, but does not melt with anything like the speed of smaller pieces and their vastly increased surface area. Clover Club takes this to an art form, but I’m pretty happy with what I do.

Hey!
That’s a cocktail glass!

Yes. Yes it is. Your point?

Well, there is a different kind of glass that people usually use. It’s got a funny name… Whatchacallit… Oh yeah, an Old Fashioned Glass!
What is wrong with you?

More things than I’ve got space for here….
I just think that the ice ball looks better in a cocktail glass than the traditional low ball. And I’m an iconoclast.

Lastly, let’s talk about the spirit that makes this drink different from the regular Old Fashioneds that I more often make. Old Fashioneds are obviously going to be very sensitive to the quality of the liquor you use, since that liquor is almost the entire drink. Less expensive rums that may be just fine in more complex cocktails will be a waste of time, money, and liver in a Rum Old Fashioned. And many top shelf rums have the wrong profile to be really happy in the drink either. I prefer a rich, mellow rum on the sweeter side in an Old Fashioned.
I’ll make a suggestion here of Zaya Gran Reserva rum. I do so for two reasons: The Liquor Fairy sent me a bottle recently, so I’ve been experimenting with it; And since I first tried it in a Rum Old Fashioned, I’ve been hoarding the remaining amount solely for this use. (As is so often the case with really good stuff, it isn’t available locally in Ohio. Sigh.)
Zaya is a blackstrap rum from Trinidad. It is a luscious dark color, with a viscous consistency, and redolent aromas. It is a lot of fun in Tiki drinks, but it is so rich on its own that I think it best reserved for drinks like this one instead. The makers are positioning it as a sipper as well. RumDood points out that the connoisseurs may be split on how this rum ranks. I think that that is a good sign of interesting character in a product. I also like to see this since it means the stuff isn’t likely to cost twice as much next year….

Regardless of the rum you use, the Rum Old Fashioned is a markedly different drink from the more common whiskey variety. It is a happier and less introspective drink in general, though it will still do the job when deep thoughts must be thunk. Now, go back to Lindsey’s place for more Brown, Bitter and Stirred! Thanks for dropping by, and don’t be a stranger.

I’m happy to have discovered another cocktail blogger who actually works at this, Andrew Bohrer, of the blog Caskstrength. Andrew can carve an ice ball in 42 seconds, and creates famous bartender action figures out of Legos. I ran across Andrew’s blog because he is hosting the next Mixology Monday. The theme this month is MxMo: Tom Waits.

Wait.
What the hell does that even mean?
I’ve seen Tom Waits, and I’m not looking forward to him as an ingredient.

It took me a bit to puzzle it out myself, but Andrew has come up with a very cool idea. This month we are not so much to present a drink, as a drinking story. I assume that including a good recipe as well will not be looked at amiss, but it doesn’t seem necessary. Waits is the bard of late-night leaning on the mahogany, no matter which side, so Andrew invites us to tell a favorite drinking tale.
I have missed the last several MxMos because, well, I had nothing interesting to contribute, and you can only get away with crap like this once. I do have a story or two which are legen.., wait for it…, dary, but I’ll have to see if I can cast one in a light that works with a Tom Waits soundtrack. In the meantime, I get to explore a lot of cool music.
Lots of you who blog, but not usually about cocktails, might want to take this opportunity to try getting into a MxMo.
The other reason for this post is to mention that I added Andrew to the BlogBarCrawl, and to pimp that feature of the blog to any new readers I have accumulated since I first added it.
Lots of us travel, and if you are into cocktails, what better information to have than an indication of where to get a drink from someone who obviously cares about good drinks? After all, there aren’t too many cocktail bloggers out there writing odes to sour mix or their newly discovered, wicked awesome, pre-made strawberry daiquiris. These guys (and gals) care about that they are making enough to write about it. And even if the blogger in question isn’t working when you drop in, you’ll still likely be in a reasonably caring establishment.
Next time you are in a strange city, take a look at the BlogBarCrawl and check out someplace cool. And if you are a blogging bartender and your joint ain’t on the list, please let me know!
The main link to the BlogBarCrawl is in the left sidebar, but I’ll embed a smaller map, zoomed in on Mecca the US Northwest, where Andrew keeps the counter clean.

View Pegu Blog BlogBarCrawl in a larger map

As some none of you may have noticed, I have failed to participate in Mixology Monday for a while. Shame on me. I do hope to manage it this April 26th, when McSology will be hosting MxMo XLVIII: Pain in the Ass Drinks!
I had missed Mike McSorley’s blog before now, but was excited to see it, since Mike is a working bartender. I love the special insights a boozeblogger has if he or she actually does this stuff for a living. I also love finding new bloggers who work behind the mahogany, because it gives me an excuse to update the BlogBarCrawl. Check it out when you are traveling, so you can know where to drink and have some inside conversation as well! You’ll find Mike’s place of work, the Naga Cocktail Lounge, pinned on the map in Bellevue, Washington.

Whew.

I was this close to writing another of my FAIL posts about how Mixology Monday has come again, and all my experiments yielded crap. It’s happened before. Also, it’s come close before as well. Well, it seemed to be happening again this time for real, in a big time way. Everything I had on tap just stank.

The Mixology Monday theme this month is a fabulous one. One that I’ve been looking forward to since Rumdood announced it: Ginger.

I wasted a lot of my precious supply of Canton Ginger Liqueur on several failed drinks. That sucked on several levels.

I tried making some cool dried ginger garnishes with a funky homemade drying rig idea that I stole from Alton Brown. They looked so awful, I trashed them.

My best idea, in keeping with my current exploration of Old Fashioneds, was to try a Ginger Old Fashioned. It suffered the worst fate of all: It was boring.

So I gave up. Another MxMo missed, I said, and decided to work on another post for later. I went back to the lab to work with my bottle of Bols Genever that I was sent for review. That’s when the Watson come here, I need you! moment came.

I intend to do a full review and discussion of genever and Bols in particular soon, but since they saved my MxMo, I’ll do a bit of my best thoughts here and now. Genever is one of those sadly almost forgotten spirits that our cocktail renaissance is allowing to emerge from the shadows of history. Commonly called Dutch Gin… genever ain’t gin. It is the precursor to the London Dry Gin so many love (or loathe) today, but while it is also a gin infused white spirit, it has an unmistakably different flavor and especially aroma. The reason I haven’t written my full review on this fascinating spirit is that I’m still searching for the right words to describe the difference between it and gin. I’m a wordy bastard though, so I’ll get it soon enough.

In the meantime, I have found the drink that I’ll be featuring when I do get to the review: The John Collins, which is a Tom Collins made with genever.

So I rolled down to the basement in a failed MxMo funk to make a John Collins and try to find those words I needed. I was halfway into it when I discovered that I had a problem. I rather contemptuously kicked around soda and seltzer water in a recent post, and the fizzy water gods were angry. I had no bubbly water on hand! I was even out of cartridges for my seltzer bottle!

Words failed me. Well, actually they didn’t. I won’t relate the word I used repeatedly, but you should be able to guess from the suggestion that my word choice was a bit scatological.

Then I looked around in frustration and my eyes were drawn to the word ginger! I recently bought a new six of Reed’s Extra Ginger Brew, to replace the bottles I received from the sample fairy. (This reminds me I need to review that stuff too! I’m so behind.)

I had no carbonation for my drink. I was still steamed at not finding a use for ginger. I was thirsty. This is what we in the fiction writing business call a coming together moment.

THE ANTOINE COLLINS

• 2 oz. Bols Genever
• 1 oz. fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 oz. simple syrup
• Reed’s Jamaican Style Ginger Beer

Mix genever, juice, and syrup in a tall glass. Add ice and fill with ginger beer. Garnish with a broad strip of lemon peel.

I was fully prepared for it to suck. To be swamp water. In short, for it to top off my weekend nicely.

But, it’s good. It is refreshing, spicy, and tart. It shows off the unique qualities of the Bols Genever in a gentle way. It leaves your mouth clean and tingly like ginger does. It makes me smile.

Try it, you’ll like it too.

Now go back to Rumdood’s for the rest of this month’s MxMo ginger proceedings. You’ll be glad you did!

Well, I missed MxMo XXXIX this month, as I have all too often recently. Sigh.
Chuck Taggart’s roundup is now posted at Looka!, so go take a gander. Hard as it is to imagine, a MxMo without me somehow manages to scrape by in its usual, thoroughly fascinating way.
The subject, by the way, is Amaro. It is a class of bitter digestifs. Those who like them, swear by them.