(Volcano Scorpion Bowl, available from Amazon.com)

Thursday Drink Night can lead to some strange things.

Every Thursday, a group of like-minded cocktail enthusiasts get together in the Mixoloseum chat room to discuss life and create and try original cocktails based on a central theme.

You are invited, too. Come give it a try. The chat room is always open, but TDN starts Thursdays at 8:00 PM in the US Eastern Time Zone.

Yesterday, the theme was simply Kaiser Penguin. Kaiser Penguin is the blog of one Rick Stutz, a long-time cocktail blogger and one of our fearless leaders in the CSOWG (our little blogging guild). Rick is synonymous in the minds of those who know him in this context with three things (at least):

1. Homemade ingredients.
2. Magnificent, gorgeous, ridiculously complex garnishes.
3. An unhealthy affinity for Fernet Branca, the Triple Lindy of cocktail ingredients.

Now, I can’t abide Fernet. And this Tiki month I’ve concentrated on stuff other than making my own syrups. So I was left searching for garnish ideas…

As the picture above will show, I came up with something.

Here’s the recipe:

HALIKAI HOT TUB

• 2 oz. El Dorado 12 yr. demerara rum
• 2 oz. The Gin From Watershed Distillery
• 1 oz. cognac
• 2 oz. orange juice
• 1 oz. fresh lime juice
• 1 oz. Trader Tiki Hazelnut Orgeat
• 1/2 oz. simple syrup
• 10 oz. ice

Combine ingredients in a blender and flash blend for about five seconds. Pour into a scorpion bowl “hot tub”.

Carve a face on a full-sized lime with zester. Skewer lime top down with fireworks pick, and add two key limes for the body. Attach two more key limes with toothpicks to the side of the torso as arms. Use a toothpick behind the head as hook and nestle Mr. Halikai into the “hot tub”.

Place a sugar cube in the volcano crater and fill with J. Wray 151 proof rum. Light it (carefully).

Serves two happily.

This drink is really all about the garnish. (A less pretty but better lit picture is here.) Don’t get me wrong, the drink is really tasty, but all it is is a tiny tweak on the house Scorpion Bowl recipe of the old Luau Restaurant in Beverly Hills (real recipe of this and other Scorpions to be found in Beach Bum Berry Remixed.) But the real point here is one of the fun elements of Tiki drinks: The Garnish. Just like you don’t need to wear an aloha shirt, or listen to Martin Denny, or use a fancy ceramic vessel to enjoy a great tiki drink, you don’t need a silly, wild, creative garnish. And you also don’t need box seats behind home plate to enjoy a baseball game. But if they are available….

Use whatever strikes your fancy. Carve up some tropical fruit, or employ the leaves from atop a pineapple. Mint and other herbs make a great and fragrant garnish that can actually enhance the flavor of the drink. Hell, a cheap paper umbrella or pink flamingo on a toothpick can set your mood. Just experiment, and you’ll have fun.

And once you have a cool idea, don’t hesitate to riff on it. You cannot go too far with Tiki garnishes!”

“No, Mr. Stay Puft, I expect you to DIE!”

Halloween time, folks!

Among the spook-tide offering from the Liquor Fairy this year was a bottle of Three Olives Purple. Three Olives has one of the larger spread of flavors available, with more coming all the time. Purple is a bit more differentiated than most, as we’ll see in a moment.

I’ve written before about the difficulty vodka makers have in differentiating their products from their competitors. Some use sex. (Some are bit more on the nose about this than others.) Others use beautiful or gimicky packaging. The most useful thing the distillers do to make themselves stand out is to offer a flavored or infused variant or two.

Three Olives has used all these methods over the years, but they seem to have chosen to be the king of flavored vodkas as their core competency. They show sixteen flavored vodkas on their website currently, including all the basics called for in most decent cocktails that use flavored vodka, such as a citrus and a vanilla.
Purple, along with the unfortunately(?) named Rangtang, are part of a new evolution in the flavored vodka field: Color. Purple looks just that, a dark, opaque concord grape purple. It makes for some very interesting looking mixtures.
The flavor is also just that, Purple. The label says “grape-flavored vodka”, but it’s purple-flavored vodka. That’s not a bad thing, by the way, just a thing you need to know when deciding what to do with this product. I happen to like purple flavored things, others don’t. That’s no different from any other infusion choice in vodka.

Now, if you like the basic flavor, what do you do with it in a drink? The initial, and easy, route to go is sweet flavors. I think most bars will use Purple in shooter-like drinks. It looks distinctive, and the flavor is a powerful quick hit. Try playing with orange curaçao, cranberry, or even real grape juice.
You can also produce an interesting Cosmopolitan variant with a sweet red wine in place of the cranberry juice.

But this is a serious cocktail blog (har!) and I wanted to come up with a drink using Purple that was more dry and/or spicy, in the vein I prefer. After a few rather unfortunate dead ends, it hit me that Purple would marry well with ginger. Purple, Canton, a splash of lime, and some orange bitters (in all sorts of different ratios) yields a tasty cocktail.

The drink that I hit on that I really like, and that I think goes really well with this whole Halloween time we have right now, is my Skeletal Mule. It is essentially nothing but a Moscow Mule, modified for spookiness. Use Purple in place of plain Three Olives or other brand vodka. And replace the copper cup with the best drinkware you can find at one of the fifty temporary Halloween supply stores that are open near you right now.

This drink looks all Halloweeny without the dry ice, and positively Vincent Price with it. I plan on having one close at hand when answering the door for the trick or treaters this Sunday.

(A few words about Dry Ice: You can usually get it, year-round at good ice cream shops. They keep it to pack with ice cream for travel. And do not use dry ice to garnish shooters or shots! If someone drinks even a sliver of the stuff, the consequences don’t bear dwelling on. And even if there are no accidents, the bubbles in a small glass are going to splash Purple all over the place and make a mess.)

The Liquor Fairy Was Here!
The following product, Three Olives Purple, was recently provided to me as promotional consideration to encourage me to discuss it.
For a complete disclosure of my policies regarding promotional items and all other financial interests, please click this link, or follow the Liquor Fairy link in the header of this page.

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.

The mere word Zombie is one of the most evocative in the modern English language. Both the word and the things it evokes are simultaneously silly and scary.
What is a Zombie? It’s either a dead human somehow still able to stumble around mindlessly, or a drink that allegedly turns living humans into reasonable facsimiles of definition one.
The walking dead kind of zombies are scary because they’re, well, dead. And they want to eat your brains. An entire motion picture industry revolves around finding new ways to produce zombies and put them on screen.
They’re silly because… they are! In practical terms, monsters that move slower than a walk and have no mental acuity require some pretty mental acuity-free victims to chow down on. Memo to movie chicks: If you’d ditch the fragile, four-inch, come-bang-me heels, and instead wear sneakers or flats, the body-count in your films will drop down to something more on the order of The Wiggles: Hot Potato Live!. (Note: Hello to Twitter heads rolling in here from pyngvild!)
The Zombie cocktail is scary because it generally is brewed up with lots of alcohol, some of it traditionally high proof. Then you cover that fire-water up with fruit juices, and syrups, and crushed ice, and Tiki mugs, and paper umbrellas, and fog generators, laser light shows. Or whatever items among that list that you have on hand. Even wearing flats when drinking Zombies won’t save you from the fate of ending up flat on your face at the end of the scene.
The Zombie is silly because… it’s Tiki, damn it. And because it is such marvelous overkill.
Like many of the great Tiki cocktails, Don the Beachcomber claims to be the Zombie’s inventor, with typically scant evidence beyond the fact that he’s Don. And like many of the great Tiki cocktails, if you order one in 99.44% of bars today, you will receive an undrinkably sweet mess made with mostly 151, if you get one at all. It will likely be closer to the Bacardi Rum Punch you get on the Jolly Roger Pirate Cruises you find all over the Caribbean. In short, a modern Zombie is more of a maximum buzz for minimum pucker device, rather than a real cocktail. Which is neither spooky, nor silly, but simply sad.
The fact is, it is hard to establish what is the original Zombie recipe, since it appears in print from different sources, in different forms, all at about the same time. I will print Don’s (or what is alleged to be his, since he guarded his recipes quite jealously) here as a starting point:

For the record, you approximate Don’s Mix with a 2-1 blend of grapefruit juice and cinnamon simple syrup.
This is not a bad drink. But it is just that, not a bad drink. The majesty of the Zombie comes when you slide into the sweet spot between this bare-bones presentation and the 1990′s debased rum kool-aid.
Last Thursday Drink Night was Zombie Night at the Mixosoleum. I think the Zombie was an excellent choice for the drunken chat room treatment. It is hard to completely screw up a Zombie, if your cocktail heart is pure. Just follow the basic rules of Zombie construction (eat your heart out, Hollywood) as illustrated by Don’s recipe:

• Include several rums, including one high-proof for scare factor.
• Mix in several juices, mostly tart or citrus.
• Add some spices and some sweetener.
• Blend it briefly.

In addition, time and evolved Tiki tradition demands more garnish than Don’s original sprig of mint.
I actually had some recipes ready for TDN, for the first time. One, the Red-Headed Zombie was a finalist for the night (Yay!), but got exactly zero votes (Boo!).

No votes?
You didn’t vote for yourself?

Shut up. I forgot.

All I’ll say about my version is that Canton is awesome in the Zombie application. It is also the genesis of the name. Ginger, get it?
I have pictures of my Zombie that I took. But they stink on (crushed) ice compared to those taken by BOTI member, Rick Stutz. So I’ll rip his off here as I discuss garnish on a Zombie. I have made the case that the Zombie is one of the most over-the-top Tiki drinks there is, so it needs an over top garnish.
Here was my suggestion: Shake while dancing around like a grass-skirted witch doctor and strain into a pith helmet. Add ice to fill. Garnish with a pineapple spear.
Had I had a pith helmet to hand, you’d see the picture, no matter how dark and muddy. But since I didn’t, here is Rick’s picture, which shows a slightly elaborate but visually very appropriate garnish:

Cool, huh?
During Drink night itself, Rick offered a different picture. One which shows why you do not want to get into a knife fight with the Penguin.

Get the idea of what is needed for Zombie garnish?
The garnish I suggested for my other (less awesome!) Zombie will be the subject of a soon-to-follow post on Tiki garnishes themselves.
Stay tuned!

If it wasn’t Tiki Month round these parts, I would not have made this cocktail… ever. Just take a single look at the Jet Pilot’s recipe and the tiki-ness will practically poke your eyes out. It’s got wads of liquors in it, multiple juices, and stuff that I either don’t like (Pernod), or don’t know what the hell it is (Falernum).
Oh, and it’s a blender drink. I do not do blender drinks. Well, Doug the Pegu Blogger doesn’t do blender drinks. For Tiki month, my trusty but dusty blender is getting twenty-eight days of continuous counter time.
So, why is this rather baroque drink my first deployment of said blender? Well, I’ve read about it several times in the past from BOTI members Dr. Bamboo and Kaiser Penguin, as well as one of my very favorite bloggers, Robert Heugel, who I’m glad to see back blogging a bit more. He writes great stuff, but apparently he has some side project that has been pushing aside important stuff like blogging….
The Kaiser seemed to like the Jet Pilot so much that he forgot to go ape-sh*t with the garnish, so it has to be good.
Finally, Dr. Bamboo really caught my eye with this illustration:

Ah ha!
So you just made this drink in order to rip off more of Doc’s awesome pictures, didn’t you?

I resent that. It’s not true, and besides, it’s on the Internet so it’s free, right?
Actually, I did have the Jet Pilot on my list, but I only remembered to try it after thinking about a certain very level-headed jet pilot who has been in the news lately. (The following tape may or may not be completely accurate….)

I sailed down to the Pegu Tiki Lounge with the recipe clutched in my hot little hand and immediately realized that I was going to have to exercise some calm improvisation myself if I wanted to drink this right away. I had not made up any cinnamon syrup yet, and I was missing, well, all three rums in this concoction. Here’s my recipe, along with what it supposedly should have in parenthesis.

There is a lot to talk about with this drink.

1. It is really delicious.
2. It is a prime example of Tiki-ness in that it shows how amazingly well some very different flavors will blend together. The result is a drink where all sorts of flavors seem to actually line up in orderly fashion for a chance to entertain you. Each sip goes through about three or four distinct taste profiles, and they are all in harmony.
3. The Jet Pilot was Robert’s MxMo: Limit One entry; if you plan on mixing two, alert the authorities.
4. If you don’t have the cinnamon syrup already made, and divert to the powdered cinnamon, you have to drink this fairly quickly, or the cinnamon will precipitate out.
5. There is not enough ice, and you don’t blend it long enough, to get what I expected in a blender drink. Instead you get a frothy, slushy layer on top that you sip the cocktail through. From pictures and descriptions, I think this is what I will get with a lot of classic Tiki presentations. Whether you like this or not is a matter of taste. I found it very pleasant, the PeguWife was less enchanted. This summer, I think I’ll try upping the ice content considerably and go for the Fat Tuesdays plastic cup filled from a slurpee machine texture. If you hear about a case of spontaneous human combustion and odd, carved wooden idols seen fleeing the scene, you’ll know what happened.

Tiki Month is a lot of fun, folks. Stick with me. And join me in lifting a Jet Pilot up to Cap’n Sully.

So I missed virtually all of the Leblon Cachaça-sponsored Thursday Drink Night this week. Sue me, I had tickets to some obscure musician named Harry Connick Jr. What, you think I’m missing that?
Anyway, I felt a bit left out, and rather than try to come up with my own, pathetically late drink, or go out shopping for ingredients I don’t have to try everyone else’s recipes, I opted to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: Let the three bottles of Cachaça I have on hand duke it out in a no-holds-barred Caipirinha battle!
Those of you who know what a Caipirinha is, please skip this pre-fight paragraph. The Caipirinha is a drink made with Cachaça, the national spirit of Brazil. The chief difference between Cacahça and Rum is that Cachaça is make with cane juice, as opposed to molasses. The most famous cocktail using Cachça is the Caipirinha, which is a lowball cocktail that is refreshing and bracing.

If you don’t have a muddler (and you should!), the folks at Leblon will happily send you a reasonably nice one for free. It’s plastic, but I like that because it’s easier to clean than wood, and it is heavy enough to be useful. A word of warning, do not copy the muddling technique of the hot chick on the ordering page.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Let’s get ready to… RUMBLE!
In the first corner, weighing in at 750 ml, and costing $34, the undisputed reigning champion of sexually suggestive advertising… Cabana Cachaca!

In the other corner, also weighing in at 750 ml, and costing $15, the first bottle of Cachaca Doug ever tasted, Cachaca 61 Rum!

And in the the other other corner, weighing in coincidentally at 750ml, and costing $29, the most active brand in all the cocktailosphere, Leblon Cachaca!

OK boys!
Round One!

Actually, there’s only going to be one round for now. Just Caipirinhas.

Only one round?
What, I’m not pretty enough for you as a ring card girl?

What? No! You’re a perfectly smokin’… um… sock! Seriously!

Cabana comes out first, swishing distractingly. We take a cautious sip, with an eye out for our spouses. Oh! That had to hurt! There is a definite edge to this stuff, and not a good one. The Cabana has an oily, metallic bite that really only hits you when you take a big, full swig. Little sips, and you just sense… something… wrong.
Pow! Down goes Cabana!
61 moves out to the fore in workmanlike fashion. This makes a darn good, basic cocktail. I bought this bottle some time back after seeing a Caipirinha recipe in a book and liking the picture. The drink it produces is tart, tasty, but has bit of a rough edge. This is not the nasty edge of the Cabana, just rough.
Finally, Leblon slides into the center to mix things up, nearly stumbling over Cabana’s languidly recumbent form. This Caipirinha is a bit smoother than the 61. It has a kick, and it punches up the lime and lime oil flavors like the other Cachaças, but it is much less raw. There is a kind of ruggedness to Cachaça that Leblon mostly hides. It’s there, but hidden—like a nicely tailored suit on a body-builder.

And nooooow the winner!
By decision, the winner, and Pegu Blog Caipirinha Champion is…

I say by decision because the 61 is nice enough itself, and much cheaper. I suspect it is a much more authentic Cachaça than Leblon, in the sense that most Brazilians probably drink stuff that is closer to 61 than Leblon. But that would make Crystal Palace more authentic than Belvedere, which kinda limits the whole value of authenticity. The Leblon is the smoothest of the bunch, still richly flavorful, and reasonably, though not cheaply, priced. It mixes up one hell of a good Caipirinha. If you haven’t tried Cachaça at all, I’d suggest the first bottle you try be Leblon. If you can find the 61, and want to experiment, I’d buy a bottle of it second. See if you like it rough!
Oh, and the Cabana? Please buy a bottle of it too, if you have the budget. We all ought to support companies who run marketing campaigns like theirs….