Monday 18 February 2013

A Tale Of Cocktails #38

Indian Summer
.
Ingredients
.
2 oz Kahlua
1 oz vodka
1 oz gin
2 oz pineapple juice
2 oz tonic water
.
Taste: 6
Look: 7      
Cost: 8
Name: 8
Prep: 8
Alcohol: 4
Overall: 6.8

Preparation: Stir all non-fizzy ingredients with ice.  Strain and pour into a wine glass. Top up with tonic water.
.
General Comments: This was one of those rare occasions when I tasted something utterly without precedent.  Not in the sense of it being incomparably good, that's not it at all.  Just something I'm completely incapable of likening to anything else.  The last time I remember trying a drink so far outside what I could comprehend, it was root beer, and even that is basically Dr Pepper mixed with mouthwash.  I'd probably have to go all the way back into my childhood and that time I mixed milk with Ribena for a comparative paradigm shift.

How does one describe the indescribable? Well, all five elements can be tasted, so there's that.  Beyond that, it's basically fizzy alcoholic coffee with pineapple, only with some presumptive effect against malarial infection.  I don't even know whether I like it or not.  But it's certainly something I recommend everyone try at least once.  Genuinely new forms of taste-bud stimulation are hard to come by.

(I also quite like the idea that when things got particularly hot in colonial India the accepted solution was to add a South American fruit, a Mexican liqueur, and a Russian spirit to one's gin and tonic.  That sounds like an awful lot of effort to go to on the Subcontinent in July, but then I guess the Venn diagram of those preparing this drink and those drinking this drink had a pretty much empty intersection.)

No comments: