#37. After Dinner Cocktail

1:1 apricot brandy and curacao, plus lime juice and lime rind. Pretty good! Apricot brandy and curacao are both kind of mediocre drinks but the combination is pleasant enough and the lime pushes aside the bulk of the artificial taste that comes with low-end spirits. (Seriously: I'd get nice ones if I saw any for sale. But there isn't much of a market for apricot brandy, apparently.)

Pretty good. And, the first drink for the first practice podcast, "The New Old Fashioned." Look for it soon at an iTunes near you!

#36. Daiguiri Cocktail [SIC]

Rum, grenadine, lime. Done. The only question about this one is the loopy spelling. What's that about? No idea. Get it together, Hugo Ensslin, early 20th century bartender.

It's a classic, though. Just the right ratio of rum, sugar, and citrus. I don't know why the world needs so many variations. You don't need them all. Just drink daiquiris. Excuse me--daiguiris. Strike that. Just go with daiquiri.

#34. September Morn

Rum, juice of half a lime, three dashes grenadine, and an egg white.

So, yeah--a daiquiri with an egg white. Because your standard daiquiri simply wasn't eggy enough. What? You didn't feel like egg whites were missing from your daiquiri? Yeah, I agree with you. I do not understand quite how this one came to be. Skip it.

#31. Millionaire Cocktail 1

This made me feel like an absolute Millionaire. Or maybe more of a thousandaire. I mean, it's fine, but you'd expect more expensive ingredients, wouldn't you?

Rum, apricot brandy, sloe gin, grenadine, lime juice. Recipe calls for Jamaican rum, which we didn't have on hand. (Don't tell the booze police!)

This tastes exactly like fruit punch. It scarcely even tastes like it's a drink that you are drinking. It is the color of fruit punch, too. I feel like this is not so much for millionaires as nine year olds. Millionaire nine year olds? Richie Rich? Millionaire Cocktail 1, I rechristen you the Richie Rich. Please put on your short-pants tuxedo, and enjoy.

#30. Saxon Cocktail

Further adventures in nonsense names: The Saxon. Half a lime, a couple dashes of grenadine, Bacardi (specified by name as some sort of product placement arrangement), and orange peel.

Here's my opinion on this drink: how many different variations on rum plus citrus plus sugar do we really need? A dozen? A thousand? A dozen thousand?

Yes, that's right; we need a dozen thousand, and that's why we've got the Saxon. Which of these ingredients do you think makes it the saxon? The Caribbean rum? The Mediterranean fruits?

This is a fine drink but you have more room in your head for trivia than I if you see any value in keeping all these nearly-identical drinks straight in your brain.

#21. Gin Buck

Wow. We really hit a lot of these. Gin buck is the same as a London buck, only the gin buck is lime, ginger ale, and gin, not lemon.

It's great, obviously. Lots of lime and ginger ale. That would make anything taste great. I scarcely needed to actually make it to know it was great. I almost could have just thought about it, long and hard, and imagined it. But I made some anyway, in the interest of SCIENCE.

#8.1 Fluffy Ruffles- Copycat of Little Princess

How sensible that the Fluffy Ruffles would have a name equally as ridiculous as the Little Princess, since it's the same drink. Yet another copycat spotted. The only difference is that the Fluffy Ruffles gets some lime rind. Both are equal parts rum and dry vermouth, and both are terrifying. I consider this one tested as I was sure to slice up some lime when we tried the Little Princess, thinking that if nothing else it would help the rum go down a little smoother. It did not.

I should probably be trying some of these with white rum, as I think that's the preferred method. But, I might not. Mixing rum with vermouth, no matter the color of the rum or the vermouth, just strikes me as a horrible idea, so I have a hard time imaging it improving with any substitution, other than, of course, swapping out the vermouth for ginger ale.

#12. St. Croix Rum Sour

Another drink with tons of citrus taste. Lemon, lime, syrup, rum.

Cruzan is the St. Croix rum of choice at Cocktail Century headquarters, but you could make this with any rum, or possibly gasoline, and not notice much difference. The lemon and lime are so strong that this is pretty foolproof.

This is another drink that, while pretty good, is simply not good enough to compete with various other, less labor-intensive cocktails. For instance, I'd take a dark and stormy (rum & ginger beer) over a St. Croix rum sour every time. And, if you order this at your corner bar, you're likely to get one made with sour mix instead of lemon and lime, and no one wants that, do they?

#5. Bacardi cocktail / Cuban cocktail

These two are identical. Rum, sugar, lime. DONE. They get separate listings, though the only difference between the two is that Ensslin calls for a "drink" of Bacardi and a jigger of Cuban rum. The Bacardi cocktail is the stronger drink, but considering that we're dealing with units like "dashes" and "half a lime" I think it's fair to go ahead and count these two at once.

You cannot lose with this one. This is probably the way the majority of all rum has been consumed. Some combination of sugar, lime, and sometimes water is the typical way to make Caribbean rum tasty, and it works. No frills. I read all about it in And a Bottle of Rum which is a wonderful book about the history of rum.

There's no reason at all to use Bacardi, of course. I did, but only because Ensslin told me to, and I try to obey the letter of the law and the spirit. I would have rather used the perfectly good (perfectly better, in my opinion) bottle of Cruzan I've got, but that can wait for a recipe that asks for St. Croix rum since that's what it is.

Difford's guide includes a pretty interesting story about this one. Apparently Bacardi ended up suing a bar for not using Bacardi when people asked for a Bacardi cocktail. I'm not convinced it was worth suing over, but I see their point. It does only seem fair that a person get the liquor they ask for. Maybe if Bacardi has lost their lawsuit (they didn't) bartenders would just give us whatever they wanted when we say, "Ketel 1 and tonic, please," and we'd have to watch carefully to make sure we didn't get Cosmonaut or whatever. (I just made up cosmonaut, but I see no evidence that there's already a brand of vodka called Cosmonaut. I CLAIM IT. This will be my vanity vodka brand, ala Ciroc. Only mine will be better, because each bottle will have been FLOWN INTO SPACE. That is the COSMONAUT guarantee!)

Also I'm using simple syrup instead of gum syrup because I'm pretty confident it's the same thing, or near enough. Gum syrup might be a bit sweeter, and it might last longer at room temperature. Whatever. I'm calling simple syrup close enough.

Also, let's have another one of these, yeah?

#3. Polo Cocktail

Because I'll have to build up my bar quite substantially to make it through the book, I'm hitting some of the simpler recipes first, which means a lot of gin and vermouth. The polo cocktail is exactly like the perfect cocktail, with the inclusion of the juice of half a lime.

The lime makes a surprising difference. The addition makes the whole thing pleasantly citrusy, like a slightly sour grapefruit. I also find myself thinking of a fruit salad mixed in lime juice. Sour, but also sweet and fruity. I think it's a big improvement over the poorly named perfect cocktail.

I do think this all might be proving my theory that I don't like vermouth, though. I'm not sure if I'm enjoying the combination of lime and vermouth, or if I just like the lime covering up the vermouth. Hard to say but there are plenty of vermouth-heavy recipes left to go, so I may find out yet.

Difford's includes nothing that comes any closer to this recipe than the martini perfect, which has orange bitters instead of lime. I'm going to assume that that's about the only remaining legacy of these two different 1916 equal-parts sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, and dry gin recipes. Probably because I'm not the only one who doesn't rank vermouth as a favorite spirit.