Mid-April is one of my favorite times of the year. It’s one of the only times of the year where I can wear a sweater outdoors without a jacket, as the weather generally has that chilly-but-not-really quality to it. This is one of those drinks that are perfect for this time of the year - not necessarily a winter drink, but not really a summer favorite, either. If I were behind a bar this week, this is what I’d be recommending.

Royal Jack - Recipe:

• 2 ounces applejack
• 1 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon homemade grenadine, recipe follows
• 3 ounces brut Champagne
• Sliced or diced apple or red apple peel

Fill a cocktail shaker or small pitcher with ice. Add the apple jack, lemon juice, and grenadine. Cover and shake vigorously until thoroughly mixed and chilled (about 30 seconds, or until your shaker mists up.) Strain into 2 Champagne flutes. Top each drink off with 1 1/2 ounces of Champagne, and garnish with the apple slices.
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I’m back! (Did you miss me?)

Sorry about the delay, and all; I was preparing for a big Spring for Underground Bartender, so I had to analyze some the strengths and weaknesses of the site to make sure I was bringing my A-game at all times for you guys. It’s like when your mom would take time to slow-cook a meal, and tell you that it was made with love.

And speaking of cooking, today’s beverage is Bacon-infused vodka. I know we all like the infusions, but I think this one’s a bridge to far. I will admit that I’m biased in this case–because I don’t eat pork to begin with–so I figure I’ll post this one up anyway; just because it’s not my cup of tea isn’t any reason not to post it up, right? Besides, I’ll probably end up trying this out with beef bacon or something.

Bacon Infused Vodka - Recipe:

• Fry up three strips of bacon.
• Add cooked bacon to a clean pint sized mason jar. Chop the strips if necessary.
• Fill the jar up with vodka. Cap and place in a dark cupboard for at least three weeks. They say not to refrigerate it; I imagine the alcohol would be a pretty strong preservative, so it should be fine.
• At the end of the three week resting period, place the bacon vodka in the freezer to solidify the fats. Strain out the fats through a coffee filter to yield a clear filtered pale yellow-bacon vodka.

Bottle it up - if you want bottles like the ones I used for my vodka infusions, I went to the Container Store.

via Brownie Points.

Designated drivers are important, and it’s important to take care of them. As I’ve intimated in the past, bartending isn’t about getting people blasted; it’s about serving great tasting beverages and keeping people happy. Every now and then, it’s good to have some options on-hand. So, I’ve started a new category for Non-Alcoholic beverages.

Cherry Bing - Recipe:

• 3 oz Cherry Juice
• 3 oz Orange Juice
• Balance Club Soda

Mix ingredients in a highball or pint glass with ice, and serve.

Last Friday night, I tried out the grape Jolly Ranchers Vodka; in fact, a few of us did. We all came to the same conclusion: It’s not bad at all, but it also tastes like cough syrup; verily, something was missing.

Instantly, I knew what I had to do.

Thinking of the color and the taste, I began channeling Homer Simpson. I poured some of this “purple drank” into a mug, then I topped it off with a little bit of overproof liquor. Immediately thereafter, I set it on fire. And much like Homer Simpson, “I don’t know the scientific explanation, but fire made it good.”

If you get a chance to make some of the grape Jolly Ranchers Vodka, try topping it off with, say, a teensy bit of 151, and setting it on fire. If you’re unfamiliar with flammable drinks, you’re supposed to blow out the fire, and make sure it’s out before you ingest the beverage. Otherwise, you run the risk of ending up like these guys:

Another month, another candy to infuse with my liquor.

Once you’ve mixed as many cocktails as I have, you start to get over the regular way of making drinks, and want to find new ways to create something delicious. Hence me trying out the Skittles thing last month. And while the Skittles vodka tasted like, well, Skittles, the resulting beverage was way too thick for me to really enjoy it without feeling like I was sipping on liquid diabetes. Two different friends independently suggested I try Jolly Ranchers next, so I gave that a shot with both rum and vodka (not at the same time).

The process is so simple, it barely merits it’s own outline, but here’s one anyway; I’ll describe the process with vodka, but it’s the same for with rum:

• Step One: Get some Vodka. As with the Skittles infusion, going cheap is okay, but not that much cheaper than, say, Absolut. If you really want a cheap vodka that is pretty good quality, I recommend Svedka.
• Step Two: Get some Jolly Ranchers. I went to the supermarket and got one of those big-ass bags of Jolly Ranchers; there were over 20 candies of each flavor in the package, which is just about the right number for my purposes.
• Step Three: Separate the flavors, and add to the Vodka.  From a 750ml bottle of Vodka, I made two batches; that is, I poured out half the bottle into an empty bottle, and put a different colored batch of candies into each bottle. In the picture above, you can see that I chose Sour Apple and Grape.
• Step Four: Just set it and forget it. Yes, just like the Ronco chicken cooker thing, you can just leave this one be. You can speed the process up if you shake it, but leaving it overnight should be cool.
• Step Five: Chill, pour and enjoy. This is a lot easier than the Skittles vodka, insofar as you don’t have to do anything to it once the infusion has taken place. No messy straining necessary.

I also tried this out with rum, as I stated before; for the rum, I used Wray and Nephew’s white overproof rum from Jamaica. I didn’t really like the mixture as much; because it’s much stronger than normal rum, it overpowered the candy’s flavor. It might work with other light rums, but I’m biased towards Wray and Nephew, so I won’t bother with those. If any of you try it out with, say, Bacardi or anything like that, let me know how it turns out. I think rum would work well with candy, because it’s made from sugar cane, so it could complement the flavor nicely.

The vodka mixture I liked; in fact, I liked it better than the Skittles vodka. I still have plenty of Jolly Ranchers left, too, so I may be making these for friends in the upcoming weeks. Lots of birthdays coming up! I’ll be playing with these infusions a lot in the near future, so you’ll be seeing a few more of these soon!

Basically, it’s a Lychee Martini.

This is actually one of my favorite martini variations. There are two ways to make these:

1. With the lychee syrup you’d find in a can of lychees; or
2. With a lychee liqueur.

A company by the name of Soho apparently makes the most popular lychee liqueur on Earth, so I suppose they’d be the way to go if you went the second route. Personally, I find that the ones made with the syrup from the can taste better, but they’re also not as strong in terms of alcohol content, and I know some people are concerned primarily with that aspect.

Lycheetini - Recipe:

• 3 oz. Lychee syrup (or Lychee liqueur)
• 3 oz. Vodka
• 1 oz Sour Mix

Add to a shaker filled with ice. Shake until the outside of the shaker becomes frosty, and pour into two glasses.

Since you fine folks seem to like bootlegging history, I figured I’d talk about a more modern incarnation of the practice.

A couple of years ago, a story emerged out of eastern Europe that a group of smugglers in Russia and Estonia figured out an ingenious way to run vodka - through a two kilometer pipeline.

Back in 2004, some organized crime thugs hired a few crafty engineers and some eager construction workers, and secretly built a a huge pipeline through a reservoir along the Russian-Estonian border. Upon construction, the smugglers were able to pump around 1,640 gallons of vodka across before they were caught.

Just like in the past, the reason for doing so was to beat the tariffs on imports: In the European Union (which Estonia joined in 2004), a decent bottle of vodka costs more than it does here in the States - in fact, a top shelf bottle of vodka can fetch hundreds of euros per bottle. In Russia, on the other hand, vodka costs about as much as water does (in some places, even less!) - bottles can run for as little as two bucks. All told, the runners beat approximately $79,000 in import taxes.

As smart an idea as it was, there was an especially simple reason why they got caught: vodka from the tap sucks. The quality was so janky, nobody wanted to buy it. Eventually, they found a college town in Estonia to dump the stuff off on students who didn’t know any better, but the process of moving it to the new location tripped them up. The “Five-O” caught some gangsters in the middle of Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, with a truck carrying over 300 gallons of the hooch.

Even though it was unsuccessful in the end, it didn’t stop the copycats: in 2006, Estonian border guards found another pipeline, this time running through the Narva River. In that case, however, the guards caught wind of the operation before construction was complete.

This was just really funny to me, so I figured I’d post it for all of you guys to see. I got an iPod Touch recently (yes, for my birthday XD) and downloaded a free Beer Pong game. I hadn’t ever actually played Beer Pong before; I’ve only seen others doing it, so I figured I’d look it up. Then I found this:

So I’ll admit when I messed up. This is one of those times; or, well, two of those times in one.

I had the electrapour prizes for Mikey and Taylor returned to me for insufficient postage; just got them back in the mail Friday and yesterday, respectively. Evidently, you can’t just put two stamps on each, and ship them off, but I didn’t really have the time to stand around in the Post Office with all the other work I had going on.

So, I apologize; you two should be getting your prizes shortly, as you’re both in pretty much the same general area as I am, so first class mail won’t take too long. And to answer an earlier inquiry: The winner of the Breathalyzer was not announced on the site; he was contacted by email, just like everyone else who has ever won anything on the site. This is done because:

1. Not everyone wants their name broadcasted as the winner;
2. Contacting by email helps verify that it’s a real person who won;
3. I need to ask for an address to send the stuff to, in order to mail the stuff out; and
4. It’s easier for me to do; especially if someone doesn’t reply soon enough, and I have to retry and followup anyway.

The Electrapours are, specifically, the only prizes this post pertains to, because I had these items in hand. For the Martini Set prize (for which I received confirmation that it arrived) and the Breathalyzer from last week, I ordered the prizes directly from the stores online as gifts, and had them shipped to the winners. So, there you have it: stupid when it comes to calculating postage, sure; unreliable when it comes to mailing things out from my home, absolutely; shady, or in any way dishonest or disingenuous — that, I will not cop to. Not that I’d have anything to gain by not sending over these things, anyway.