Boozy McGuzzles

Verano Verde

As mentioned in my previous post about honeydew-infused rum, I had a cocktail invention in mind when I infused the rum. And that invention is this: a honeydew-basil mojito. Because I prefer cocktail names that are more poetic than descriptive, though, I gave the drink the name “Verano Verde”. It’s a beautiful green color, and tastes just like summer should.

Ingredients:
2 oz. honeydew-infused rum
1 oz lime juice (or the juice of one lime, if you don’t want to get fussy about it)
3-4 basil leaves
1 teaspoon sugar
club soda

Muddle the basil leaves and the sugar in the bottom of a glass (buying a muddler was one of the best things I’ve done; I got this nice one at Crate & Barrel, but the back of a spoon will do in a pinch). When they’re sufficently muddled, add ice, lime juice, rum, give it a stir, and top up with club soda. If you’re feeling fancy, you could garnish with a piece of honeydew; I just put frozen pieces of the rum-soaked honeydew from the infusion in my guests’ glasses.

The drink is fresh, green, refreshing and clean. Lovely for a hot summer night.

In case it is not obvious enough in the sidebar, I’d like to draw attention to the two twitter feeds I maintain: My personal one, full of nonsense and jokes, @whitneyarner, and the one specifically for this blog and things boozy, @boozymcguzzles. I’ll be updating the latter when I make new posts, and also with less verbose thoughts on booze. Who needs RSS when you have Twitter, am I right! (this is what someone who does not know how to do RSS says)

Honeydew Infused Rum

A while ago, I had a delicious dessert that involved pieces of frozen watermelon. It was so good that I kept thinking about it later, and thought, “Say, I should infuse watermelon into some sort of liquor.” I followed this with the thought “Watermelon? How pedestrian. Let’s go with honeydew!” And finally, I had the thought “Now, how do you go about infusing things?”

After some minor research on the internet, I found that it was easier than I’d ever thought. Booze + flavored item + time = infusion! I decided to go with rum, because I pretty much call bullshit on vodka. Plus I had a pretty brilliant cocktail idea forming that will be gone into in a later post.

The ingredients are pretty simple:
1 750ml bottle of light rum
1/2 a honeydew melon, cut into small chunks.

I put the whole mess into the only thing I had lying around that could hold that amount of liquids and solids: a growler from the Whole Foods Beer Room. It was dark glass, had a resealable lid, and could hold half a gallon of stuff, so it was perfect. I didn’t refrigerate it, but left it in my dark and mostly air-conditioned living room for eight days. Other fruits may take less time, but my dear friend the internet suggested at least a week for melon.

The end result was a lovely pale green liquid. The taste was smooth and cool, the flavor of the honeydew evening out any harshness of the rum. The best part was the aftertaste, this flood of cool honeydew flavor on my tongue and in my nose.

This is only the first of my infusion experiments; I’ve got grand plans for the future in the world of things to soak in a bottle of booze.

If you’re here, you must like drinking, and it’s possible that you might like television shows, too. Let’s pretend this is the case, so that I may tell you to watch Three Sheets.

Three Sheets is a show where a fun-lovin’ guy, Zane Lamprey, goes to different locations around the world, takes in the local drinking culture, eats the local boozy delicacies, and then tests the local hangover cure. It’s a great look at the ways of drunkenness around the world, and it even has a mascot, the monkey named Pleeplius.

Some of my favorite episodes: Jamaica, South Korea, and The Phillipines. All of the episodes are available to watch free on Hulu, and the fourth season just started.

Watch it, play the drinking game, and learn what it means to be Steve McKenna’d.

I’m back, baby!

So, yes, it has been almost two years since I last had a sip of booze blogging. It’s been so long that the original boozymcguzzles.com domain expired and was snatched right out from under me. But it’s okay! I’ve got a new domain and new business behind the scenes! Things are the real deal right now, man!

So, what have I been up to since 2007? Well…

• I underwent a four and a half month period of sobriety in the beginning of 2008. It started as a month-long experiment to see if I could do it (“Straightedguary”), and then I decided to turn it into a serious time for growing and learning things about myself, so I went from New Years until my birthday. So that was Straightedguary, Sobruary, Parch, Teetapril, and I Didn’t Think of a Name for May Because I Was Only Sober 9 Days Into It. I grew and changed as a person! But don’t worry, I’m still a drunk.
• I drank many, many more absinthes, to the point where I could possibly be considered some sort of fiend. I even drank Marilyn Manson’s absinthe. It was good! Review possibly forthcoming.
• I invented several cocktails, the recipes of which will be appearing here.
• I went on two trips out to California to have wild times in wine country.
• And most recently, I started infusing my own liquors.

So, plenty of drinking has been done. And plenty more will occur! I’m going to expand the focus of this blog a bit, to more than just reviews. These days sometimes I actually go out places to drink, so I might just talk about that. The point is, I’m back, and drunker than ever.