Monday, August 19, 2013

The Bottomless Bottle

Sometimes, when I can't sleep at night, I daydream of what my life would be like if I had a fully stocked bar. Sad, isn't it? Usually these daydreams devolve into me foiling a rogue government plot with a trusty revolver and a bottle of whiskey...which kinda makes it even more sad. I go from wanting a stocked bar to turning into an inebriated, slightly bumbling James Bond or pudgy Philip Marlowe / Sam Spade.

And I always, magically, lose 60 pounds. Funny that.

More often than not, when I can't sleep, you can find me on Twitter or chatting with friends in a variety of formats available to me. So the other day, when chatting with a drunk friend who had come back from the bars, I got the idea for this post. His query, and I quote:

Friend: you are stranded on an island
Friend: you have 1 choice for booze
In With Bacchus: fuuuuck
Friend: it is:
In With Bacchus: this is the worst question for a distiller

It really is the worst question. In such a veritable smorgasbord of booze, how can I pick one? How can ANYONE pick just one? Would you go with the expensive? The tried-and-true? The utilitarian? How do you choose just one spirit? My eventual answer depended on not just what I liked, but the environment. Here's how it went down:


In With Bacchus: does the island have coconuts?
Friend: the island bows down to your choice
In With Bacchus: then Jamaican rum
In With Bacchus: overproof
In With Bacchus: Smith and Cross, I guess
In With Bacchus: tiki drinks forever
Friend: cant fault you for [sic] chosing rum

In the end, I settled on one of my favorite rums, the classic blended Jamaican rum: Smith and Cross. I was going to go for J. Wray and Nephew but I'm more of a sucker for aged things and I don't have the cooperage skills to make a barrel out of anything on an island. I can, however, crack coconuts, cut up pineapples, and juice limes. And I suppose I can chalk this up to my knowledge of drinks and engineering mindset of "work with what you've got to improve". I guess it also kinda says that I need a vacation or something. Who knows.

It is a question I pose to you, as well, dear readers. If you were to be stranded on an island, what would be in your proverbial washed up liquor crate? And what does it say about you?

In hind sight, if the island bows down to my choice I guess I could have asked for a bottle of "rescue me". Maybe it would have spawned a yacht plant or something.

1 comment:

  1. If, on the assumption that the Island bows down to my choice, I would chose (1): an island with a mountain high enough to produce easily retreived pure hard ICE; (2): a natural spring that produces (A): a clean light minerality, soft, water [always good for survival]; that after running from its pool down the slight slope produces the equivalentt of (B): the World's finest soda water, AND; (3): a clean Double Old Fashion glass. NOW with those pre-requisites met, I would chose (assuming that I could 'only' have a single case) a case of non-chill filtered, non-colored, 18 to 35 year old Single Malt Scotch Whisky [minimum 100 British proof (57.1%ABV)] that was distilled (via an in-house peat fired malting floor) that was bottled prior to 1978 and aged in both first-fill sherry and ex-borboun casks .

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