A Tale Of Cocktails #62

Tea Thyme

Ingredients

80ml vodka
40ml lemon juice
30ml honey
30ml water
2 thyme sprigs

Taste: 7
Look: 6
Cost: 8
Name: 6
Prep: 5
Alcohol: 4
Overall: 6.4

Preparation: Let a tea bag steep in 320ml of vodka for two hours. Meanwhile, heat120ml of honey and 120ml of water in a pan, stirring until the honey dissolves. Remove tea bag from vodka, and add in honey/water mixture. Add 6 to 8 thyme sprigs and muddle. Shake with ice, and serve.

General Comments: Whenever I got a cold as a kid, my mum would make me hot honey and lemon. That's what this reminds me of, despite the added taste of the thyme (sophisticated, elegant, stick your little finger out) and vodka (vodka). In fact, were I in charge of cocktail names, this would 100% be called a "Cheeky Lemsip", copyright laws be damned.

It's weird to drink something so reminiscent of medicine; not unpleasant so much as incongruous. I'm sure for those more used to ice tea, and less used to a Yorkshire woman's idea of how to shut a sick child up, the effect is more pleasing - particularly in the kind of sweltering heat we're currently cursed with - but this is my blog and so my subjective experience rules supreme. 

Less idiosyncratically, I'm also not a fan of how much faff is required to make this. I could probably have steeped less vodka for less time, but the honey/water mixture won't scale down too well. You end up with quite a bit of this on your hands, then, and you have to plan ahead, which doesn't really match my chaotic approach to cocktail preparation. It's not without its charm, but I don't see myself making more.

A Tale Of Cocktails #61

South Side

Ingredients:

50ml gin
25ml lemon juice

25ml simple syrup
5 mint leaves

Taste: 8
Look: 7
Cost: 8
Name: 6
Prep: 7
Alcohol: 5
Overall: 7.2

Preparation: Gently muddle mint leaves and lemon juice. Add other ingredients and shake with ice. Garish with a mint sprig.

General Comments: SURPRISE! We are EXTREMLY BRIEFLY back!

A south side is a mojito without the faff or the dead wood. Half the time, twice the strength. MATHS.

A Tale Of Cocktails #60 (Easter Special)

Mini Egg Martini

Ingredients:

3 oz vodka
2 oz chocolate liqueur1 1/2oz Irish cream

Taste: 8
Look: 5
Cost: 7
Name: 6
Prep: 6
Alcohol: 7
Overall: 6.7

Preparation: Crush a few chocolate mini eggs with a pestle and mortar. Rub the rim of a glass with honey, and press into crushed mini eggs.  Shake all ingredients with ice and strain. Add more mini-egg pieces and serve.

General Comments: OK, so I guess it doesn't look great. Maybe I should've used a less runny honey; the visual impact of pieces of brown chunks sliding down the inside of your glass, leaving glistening yellow/brown trails, is not necessarily a feast for the eyes.

But it tastes absolutely great. The cocktail itself is sweet and thick, though not too thick thanks to the vodka. Add in the chocolate and the honey, though, and you end up with what can best be described as a boozy Toblerone smoothie. If that isn't your thing than I quite simply don't think this blog, or this planet, has anything to offer you. Indeed, if this thing has a weakness, it's that the vodka thins things out too much. I can easily imagine myself playing around with the mix to provide more delicious gloopiness.  Or at least, I could if it wasn't such a bloody pain to make in the first place.

(And yes, I realise it's more than a week too late for this to really be an Easter special. I was ill as balls over the actual holiday. I'm celebrating on behalf of all the bunnies that didn't get any fucking in during the first week of spring because they were tucked up in their beds having weird dreams about Marxist Gundam suits, or whatever the lagamorphic equivalent is of same.)

A Tale Of Cocktails #59

Brazilian Bellini

Ingredients:

4oz cava
1oz cachaca
2 oz passion fruit juice
1 tsp sugar

Taste: 5
Look: 6
Cost: 9
Name: 7
Prep: 7
Alcohol: 3
Overall: 7.2

Preparation: Combine all non-sparkly ingredients and stir. Add the cava, very slowly otherwise it will react with the sugar and overflow. Add quarter of a passion fruit as garnish and serve.

General Comments: I think really this should use passion fruit syrup rather than juice plus sugar, but the final result is pretty similar, just a bit less thick and a lot easier to source. Whether you want to source it is another matter, of course; as is so often the case with cocktails containing cachaca, the best thing you can really say about its inclusion here is that it doesn't do too much damage to the taste. Cachaca is even worse than vodka in this regard; you don't add it to drinks to improve them, you do it to get rid of cachaca you've somehow ended up with if you find the smell too unpleasant when using it to scour your floors. [1]

Still, the passion fruit is nice (though the chunk floating towards your face each time to take a drink is a little disconcerting), and its low-level tartness is offset by the sugar. Bubbles, as usual, are fun and ticklish, and the whole thing is pretty cheap. Really, though, there's nothing here to recommend this over other sparking white-based cocktails, especially since it's a little more hassle than most.

[1] I should really note here that we only have cachaca because some friends of ours were ludicrously generous and brought a bottle of it to one of our cocktail parties (which are rather more free-form and shouty than that phrase typically implies: dress code is casual/vomit-stained). They weren't to know I would take so utterly against it, and we remain grateful for any and all additions to our booze supply AKA the Magic Cupboard.

A Tale Of Cocktails #58

Bramble

Ingredients:

1 1/2oz gin
1/2 oz creme de cassis
3/4 oz lemon juice
1 tsp sugar syrup

Taste: 5
Look: 7
Cost: 9
Name: 8
Prep: 6
Alcohol: 6 (For, like, twenty seconds)
Overall:  6.7

Preparation: Combine ingredients and stir. Fill glasses with crushed ice and pour in mixture.

General Comments: I've never been a fan of drinks that require you to fill a glass with crushed ice, and this hasn't changed my mind. Every time I get a drink like this I either have to drink it at extreme speed (not the best idea given its high alcohol content) or experience the cocktail getting worse with every sip as the ice melts and dilutes the taste.

Not that the taste is all that amazing to begin with; it's basically a French 75 with a blackcurrant twist replacing the fizz. Which isn't a bad idea, really, but combined with the surfeit of ice the switch leaves you with a flat, almost dead drink, neither tasty enough to chug nor worth the effort of savouring, even beyond the issue with the ice. It's also a pain to make if like me you don't have sugar syrup or crushed ice to hand. Really the ice is only there to lessen the impact of the alcohol; I'm wondering whether replacing the ice and syrup with lemonade wouldn't both improve the drink and simplify its prep. Still, this is the recipe the BBC gave me. Looks like its grotesque conservative bias isn't its only idea for making the world worse.

On the other hand, as my northern friend observed, at least it's named after a bramble and not one of those shitty southern blackberries. So at least it gets a mild spike in score for some petty jingoism.  That's a nice note to end on.

A Tale Of Cocktails #57

Blue Hawaiian

Ingredients:

2oz white rum
1oz blue curacao
2oz pineapple juice
1oz coconut cream

Taste: 6
Look: 7
Cost: 8
Name: 6
Prep: 6
Alcohol: 5
Overall: 6.5

Preparation:  Add crushed ice to ingredients and put it through a blender. Add cherry and pineapple garnish and serve.

General Comments: What a difference a shade makes.

Obviously, this should be called Aunt Beru's Blue Milk.  No wonder Luke was so tetchy on Tatooine; the poor bastard must have been constantly hungover. But you can see why she was so into it; this is fairly tasty. It's much sweeter than its Casablanca cousin, which helps the pineapple settle in with the coconut cream. The thickness now feels much more reasonable too; it really does taste like a shake now, rather than some abominable "health" drink designed to suck your will to have fun. The only way this is a step down from its predecessor is it's slightly less interesting name, though I can hardly deny its appropriateness, at least at the stereotypical level which is all I have the knowledge to consider.

Anyway, tasty, even if I suspect that were I actually in Hawaii, this might be too thick of a drink to really cool me down.

A Tale Of Cocktails #56

Casablanca

Ingredients:

3oz white rum
4oz pineapple juice
2oz coconut cream
Dash grenadine

Taste: 3
Look: 7
Cost: 8
Name: 7
Prep: 6
Alcohol: 4
Overall: 5.6

Preparation:  Add crushed ice to ingredients and put it through a blender. Add cherry and pineapple garnish and serve.

General Comments: Well, this is awful. Just a pina colada - which I'm already not much of a fan of - with coconut cream replacing the milk, making the whole thing thick and cloying and savoury; just this big lumpen boring mess. A milkshake for self-flagellating alcoholics, or for deep-sea divers wanting something to reduce buoyancy whilst they tipsily search through shipwrecks. The fact that it looks so tasty and creamy just makes things worse; presumably the cocktail umbrella is for scraping the vile mess from the insides of your throat so you can breathe and feel joy once more.

It doesn't even taste nice out of my nice new seasonal goblets.

A Tale Of Cocktails #55

El Diablo

Ingredients:

2oz tequila
3/4oz creme de cassis
1oz lime juice
ginger beer

Taste: 7
Look: 6
Cost: 8
Name: 9
Prep: 8
Alcohol: 3
Overall: 7.1

Preparation:  Shake all non-fizzy ingredients, pour into iced-filled glasses and top with ginger beer.

General Comments: Hail Satan!

What with the most wonderful time of the year rapidly heading towards us, Fliss and I decided to seek out an appropriately themed cocktail. Unfortunately, most of what we found we didn't have the ingredients for (having not yet fully replaced the stock used up at our last ludicrously debauched cocktail soiree-cum-orgy), but we were able to slap together this thing.

I'm not much of a fan of ginger beer, and I actively dislike tequila, so hopes here were decidedly not high. And yet this really does work. The ginger beer takes the edge of the tequila, and the lime in turn prevents the ginger from going too far, as well as limiting the sweetness from the creme de cassis, which is doubtless good news for those who find my usual cocktail choices too sugary. The end result is a cocktail that should kick in about four different directions, but, like some clever trick of Newtonian physics, ends up perfectly balanced.  And with a kick-ass name, too.

Hail Satan!

A Tale Of Cocktails #54

Henley Skullfucker

Ingredients:

1 bottle of Smirnoff Ice
1/2 pint of cider
50ml Pimms
35ml gin
35ml grenadine
50ml lemonade
50ml soda water

Taste: 7
Look: 7
Cost: 6
Name: 9
Prep: 7
Alcohol: 2
Overall: 6.5

Preparation:  Mix all ingredients together into a jug, add orange and lemon slices, and serve. Serves four. Well, it makes four cocktails. How many that serves is none of my business.

General Comments: This absolutely shouldn't in any sense work. The ingredients list looks like it was compiled at random from a dipsomaniac's wheelie bin. But somehow it's actually really pleasant. Everything shows up in the taste, and nothing overwhelms. The basic refreshing hit of the Pimms is still there, but the grenadine adds a touch of sharp sweetness and the cider adds depth even though it really shouldn't. Plus it takes no skill to make, and with an alcohol content equal to strong beer, you can safely drink it in some volume whilst outside on a hot day. Not that we did drink whilst outside on a hot day; we drank it on a cool evening while yelling at the television. But I assume the experience is transferable.

Plus, I love that name. Nuts to your Slippery Nipples/Sex on the Beaches.  If you want to give a cocktail a sex-name with some chest hair, you go the full Ostrogoth.

(Apologies to any actual Ostrogoths in the audience if I am misrepresenting your people. For all I know the Ostros of Gothia were best known for their skills at flower-arranging and for inventing the barbershop quartet. Skull-fucking might have been at most a passing trend.)

A Tale Of Cocktails #53

Puppet On A String

Ingredients:

1 oz vodka
1/4 oz hazelnut liqueur
5oz pear juice
1/4 lemon juice
Peeled pear

Taste: 7
Look: 5
Cost: 8
Name: 7
Prep: 6
Alcohol: 2
Overall: 6.2

Preparation:  Peel pear, then peel strips from the flesh and cover them with the lemon juice. Shake the alcohol with ice and strain into glass. Add pear juice and lemon-soaked pears and serve.

General Comments: It occurs to me that that score might be a little harsh. This isn't actually a bad drink. But it doesn't come by its quality honestly. It piggy-backs on memories, conjuring up the feeling of eating hot spiced pears at the end of a winter meal. That's clearly cheating,  On top of which, it takes some effort to make, it's pretty weak, and whilst I appreciate the name's Eurovision reference as much as the next man, it doesn't make much sense beyond the pear peelings being a bit string-ish in a way maybe.

So harsh, yes, but fair. Like the Tories. Except for the fair bit, obviously. Also, this review isn't an array of guffawing murderous shit-bags.

I may be wandering off the point a bit. Um, drinks. Drinks are good. I like drinks. They do some small good at numbing the pain.

A Tale Of Cocktails #52

Screwed Banana

Ingredients

1oz creme de banane
1oz peach schnapps
4oz orange juice

Taste: 7
Look: 5
Cost: 9
Name: 8
Prep: 9
Alcohol: 2
Overall: 6.8

Preparation:  Fill hi-ball glass halfway with ice. Add ingredients and serve.

General Comments: Apparently you're supposed to stir this, but I don't hold with such nonsense. If you stir it you spread the creme de banane through the whole drink; far better to let it pool at the bottom and let this get steadily thicker and sweeter as you go.  Oddly, this also has the effect of making the first half of this drink almost indistinguishable from pineapple juice, albeit with some of the tartness replaced with alcohol.

That's a trade-off I, at least, am prepared to make. As to other factors; well, it's a bit dull to look at, and it's not very strong. On the other hand, it's the work of seconds to make, and I love the name, which combines standard pointless cocktail filth with a play on "screwdriver", the vodka and orange combination this beats into the rancid mashed potatoes it always was.

A Tale Of Cocktails #51

Eggnog 

Ingredients

1oz whisky
1oz rum
5oz milk
2oz cream
1 egg yolk
60g Sugar
Pinch cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
Pinch nutmeg

Taste: 6
Look: 6
Cost: 8
Name: 7
Prep: 2
Alcohol: 2
Overall:  5.7

Preparation:  Beat egg yolks until light and fluffy, whilst adding sugar a little at a time. Heat milk, cinnamon and nutmeg until near boiling. Add to egg yolks and whisk furiously. Add mixture to remaining milk, stirring continuously over heat until it thickens. Remove from heat and stir in cream. Leave to cool for one hour, then add in alcohol and vanilla essence. Then chill.

General Comments: DO NOT DRINK THIS WARM! Don't make the same mistake we did. Warm egg nog tastes like risotto thrown into a blender. I have an almost unhealthy love for risotto, but even I realise that it should only be served al dente, not fluid.

Drunk when sufficiently chilled, however, and with enough nutmeg, this isn't too bad. It's sweet and thick and creamy, which is always a good combination, though it tastes so bad when warm I can't help wondering why people bother with it at Christmas. Really though, it's nothing above average, and considering the quite ridiculous level of preparation required to get it into my belly, I submit we all have better things we could be doing, or at least pummelling our internal organs with more readily assembled drinks.

A Tale Of Cocktails #50

Lemon Raspberry Fizz

Ingredients

8 oz champagne
2 oz limoncello
Raspberries

Taste: 7
Look: 7
Cost: 7
Name: 5
Prep: 7
Alcohol: 5
Overall: 6.6

Preparation: Place three crushed ice cubes in a champagne glass along with the raspberries. Mix the champagne with limoncello from  the freezer and pour into the glass.

General Comments: This is the most dangerous type of cocktail, one that reminds you of a drink from childhood. Well, not a drink, exactly; one of those lemonade ice lollies I used to tear through on the days we'd run out of Mars Bar ice-creams. But then, they were always best when they were on the verge of melting, so it was never far from being a drink, not if you timed it right. As wonderful as they were, though, I always had the sneaking suspicion they could be fairly cheaply replicated at home, thereby freeing me forever from the terrifying thought that this time I'd be too late and the electronic "Greensleeves" remix would recede whilst I was still busy wheedling a fifty pence piece from my harassed mother.

And lookit! Turns out you can, indeed, generate this stuff domestically (sorry it took 28 years to work that out, mum).  With alcohol, no less. There's even raspberries in there for a nice snack once the cocktail is done, though the champagne and limoncello make the fruit rather bitter.  Nothing wrong with that in moderation, obviously, and whilst the vagaries of fate led to me trying this in the depths of winter, it's not hard to imagine this being a smart choice when the sun decides to kick off its next brief tour of the country.

A Tale Of Cocktails #49

Sex in the Water

Ingredients

1 1/2 oz blue curacao
3/4 oz vodka
3/4 oz peach Schnapps
8 oz lemonade

Taste: 7
Look: 6  
Cost: 9
Name: 6
Prep: 8
Alcohol: 2
Overall: 6.7

Preparation: Pour ingredients into collins glass one after another, then add ice, and a lemon slice to garnish.

General Comments:You don't call it "Sex in the Water", obviously. It's "SEEEEEX! IN THE WAAAR-DUH!" in one's best Ian Gillan bellow, a fact which makes this cocktail's name fully two points better than that of its cousin, the unbearably named "Sex on the Beach".

Alas, the brief amusement had by bellowing this drink's name is probably the most fun you'll be having with it.  It's not that it's bad, by any means.  It's sweet and bubbly, and everything works perfectly fine together (though if you're not careful it's easy to overdo the lemonade and drown the other flavours), but it lacks the bite of say, the cranberry juice in a Woo Woo. There's an obvious void here which is just a little bit frustrating.

A Tale Of Cocktails #48

Easter Bunny

Ingredients

1 1/2 oz crème de cacao
1/2 oz vodka
1 teaspoon chocolate syrup
1 teaspoon cherry liqueur

Taste: 8
Look: 6  
Cost: 7
Name: 8
Prep: 7
Alcohol: 8
Overall: 7.3 

Preparation: Shake all ingredients over ice and pour.

General Comments: Well, this is rather tasty. The vodka is perhaps a little heavy in the mix, but the various chocolate flavours still come through easily, and the sweetness of the syrup offsets any sourness from the cherry liqueur.  Like all the best chocolate cocktails, this is almost as easy to imagine as a dessert sauce as a drink, though the fact this includes chocolate syrup renders that observation rather redundant.

But yeah, tasty drink.  I like the name as well, too, as it combines the two best elements of Easter; the pre-Christian celebration of spring (cherry blossoms) and the post-Christian celebration of far too much chocolate.

A Tale Of Cocktails #47

Mel's Swing

Ingredients

1 oz Midori
1 oz crème de cassis
4 oz grapefruit juice

Taste: 4
Look: 4  
Cost: 8
Name: 6
Prep: 8
Alcohol: 3
Overall: 5.3

Preparation: Shake all ingredients over ice and pour.

General Comments: Dear me, no.  There's an art to get sweetness and sourness working together, and it takes more than adding something ridiculously syrupy to something sour.  Rather than working together the crème de cassis and the grapefruit juice create some kind of hideous comment on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; you can't identify the mediocre sourness without losing it in cloying syrup, and vice versa. Occasionally the midori shines through, presumably as an attempt to apologise, but it's nowhere near enough.

Oh, and it looks terrible too. Avoid.

A Tale Of Cocktails #46

Banana Cow

Ingredients

.

1 oz rum
1 oz crème de bananes
1 1/2 oz creme
Dash grenadine
Nutmeg and banana to garnish

.

Taste: 7
Look: 8  

Cost: 8
Name: 7
Prep: 6

Alcohol: 4
Overall: 7.0

Preparation: Shake liquid ingredients with ice.  Pour into a cocktail glass.  Grate nutmeg over the cocktail and garnish with a banana slice.

General Comments: So Fliss found us a random cocktail generator the other day.  Which is awesome, obviously.  I have a huge yen for randomness.  It's how I pick comics to buy, my preferred way to listen to albums, how I choose which episode of Supernatural to put on whilst Fliss and I are playing Ghost Stories or Elder Sign... It throws up interesting combinations that spark new ideas.

Or, in this case, gets you drunk in ways you might never have thought about.

The banana cow - named, one presumes, for combination of banana liquor and cream - is sweet and thick. The combination works well; it's sweet enough to be moreish, and thick enough to stop you swigging it down in seconds - the nutmeg detracts just enough from the sweetness in this regard.  This rather limits the refreshment the drink can offer, but that's fine.  It just means this is something to try second or third during a cocktail evening.

I also assume you can't drink too many of them, lest you fall prey to diarrhoea, insanity, hallucinations and ultimately death. Again, this counts against the drink somewhat in terms of how often you'll want to reach for it, and the slightly fiddly nature of putting it together causes problems here as well.

But it looks nice and tastes nice. Nothing at all wrong with a cocktail best enjoyed in small doses.

A Tale Of Cocktails: Facts, We Haz Them

Been a while since we did this, so let's take another stupidly long look at the various ways I've been showing my exocrine system who's boss.

Lists

11 Best Cocktails

1. Brain Hemorrhage
2. Flying Grasshopper
3. Woo Woo
4. Fuzzy Shark
5. Choc Berry
=6. Baby Guinness
=6. Dennis the Menace
8. Sugarific Ciderific
=9. Malibu Pop
=9. Daiquiri

5 Worst Cocktails

1. Screwdriver
2. Champagne Cocktail
3. Orange Blossom
4. Tomorrow We Sail
5. Poinsettia Holiday

9 Tastiest Cocktails  

1. Woo Woo
=2. Flying Grasshopper
=2. Midori Sour
=2. Choc Berry
=2. After Six
=2. Baby Guinness
=2. Brain Hemorrhage
=2. Mudslide
=2. Malibu Pop  

Worst Tasting Cocktail

Screwdriver  

6 Prettiest Cocktails  

1. Brain Hemorrhage
=2. Metropolitan  
=2. Midori Sour
=2. Choc Berry
=2. Fuzzy Shark
=2. Baby Guinness  

Ugliest Cocktail

Snowball  

11 Cheapest Cocktails  

= Caribbean Milk
= Ciderific
= Sugarific Ciderific
= Screwdriver
= Daiquiri
= Raspberry Tipple Plus
= More Sunshine
= Dribena
= Fuzzy Shark
= Fuzzy Navel
= Snowball  

Most Expensive Cocktail

  Mudslide  

8 Best Named Cocktails  

=1. Woo Woo
=1. Brain Hemorrhage
=2. Flying Grasshopper
=2. Metropolitan
=2. Daiquiri
=2. Choc Berry
=2. Fuzzy Shark
=2. French 75

2 Worst Named Cocktails  

= Tomorrow We Sail
= Champagne Cocktail  

12 Easiest Cocktails  

=1. Elderflower Royale 
=1. Kir Imperial
=3. Sex on the Beach
=3. Flying Grasshopper
=3. Dribena
=3. Black Forest
=3. Ume Royale
=3. Kir Royale
=3. Blue Lagoon
=3. Baby Guinness
=3. Brain Hemorrhage
=3. Mimosa  

Most Fiddly Cocktail  

Mudslide

11 Strongest Cocktails  

1. Flying Grasshopper
=2. Baileys Cookie Martini
=2. Caipirinha
=2. White Lady
=3. Brain Hemorrhage
=3. Mudslide
=5. After Six
=5. Dennis The Menace
=5. Baby Guinness
=5. Malibu Pop
=5. Champagne Cocktail

Weakest Cocktail

Choc Berry

Supplies Consumed

Booze

Advocaat
Amaretto
Blue Curacao
Brandy
Cachaca
Chambord
Champagne
Cherry wine
Chocolate liqueur
Cider
Creme de Cacao
Creme de Cassis
Creme de Menthe
Elderflower liqueur
Gin
Irish Cream (Baileys)
Kahlua
Malibu
Midori
Peach Schnapps
Plum wine
Port
Rum (dark)
Rum (white)
Sloe gin
Tia Maria
Triple Sec
Vodka (standard)
Vodka (vanilla)

Mixers

Bitters
Cocoa
Cranberry juice
Cream
Grenadine
Lemon juice
Lemonade
Lime cordial
Lime juice
Milk
Orange juice
Pineapple juice
Sugar
Sugar syrup
Tonic water
Vanilla syrup

Garnish

Blackberry
Caster sugar
Cherry
Chocolate
Cookie
Cranberries
Lemon
Marshmallow
Mint Matchmaker
Orange slice
Orange peel
Whipped cream
A shark

Glasses

Champagne
Cocktail
Collins
Cordial
Highball
Shot

Estimated amount of ice used: 768 cubic centimetres.

Statistics

Mean cocktail score: 6.75

Standard deviation of cocktail score: 0.777

Range of scores: 4.2

Last time around we demonstrated a rough normal distribution of the cocktail scores.  But that was just lazily eyeballing the QQ plot.  This time let's get serious and run them through a Shapiro-Wilks test, the result of which is a p-value of 0.099.  Whew!

With that done, we can fit a linear regression, with the overall scores as output and the various booze types as the covariates.  This way we may be able to detect what ingredients have a significant effect upon my enjoyment or otherwise of mixed drinks.  45 cocktails is admittedly a fairly small sample size to subject to a linear analysis, particularly with so many covariates, but we'll see what happens.

Eventually we'll want to consider combinations of drinks, but for now lets work through each booze type separately.  The first number is the  p-value; a p-value of 0.05 or less can be (tentatively) be considered significant (in layman's terms; it looks like the ingredient has an effect on my tastes above what might be accounted for by chance). The attached number tells us the average effect of the booze type upon cocktail score.

(As an example, then, Baileys might look like it has a larger effect on my opinion than champagne - and a positive one, since adding Baileys to a cocktail increases its score by 0.683 on average, but unlike champagne, we cannot say this effect is not down to chance. The reason we can't say that for Baileys even though the apparent effect is larger than that for champagne is that I've had fewer cocktails containing Baileys than including champagne, which makes it harder to pin down the effect.)

Advocaat 0.562 -0.464
Amaretto 0.309 -0.579
Baileys 0.064 0.683
Blue Curacao 0.422 0.300
Brandy 0.058 -1.49
Cachaca 0.651 -0.361 
Champagne 0.027 -0.573
Chambord 0.697 0.161
Cherry Wine 0.651 -0.361
Chocolate Liqueur 0.459 -0.422
Cider 0.258 0.652 
Creme de Cacao 0.043 1.58
Creme de Cassis 0.788 0.154
Creme de Menthe 0.078 0.991
Dark Rum 0.836 -0.086
Elderflower Liqueur 0.272 -0.873
Gin 0.236 -0.408
Kahlua 0.556 0.243
Malibu 0.458 0.278
Midori 0.952 0.048
Peach Schnapps 0.020 0.695
Plum Wine 0.952 0.048
Port 0.174 -1.08
Tia Maria 0.337 0.764
Triple Sec 0.697 0.161
Vanilla Vodka 0.952 0.048
Vodka 0.960 0.014
White Rum 0.483 0.559

So apparently cocktails with creme de cacao or peach Schnapps in them are significantly better, and those with champagne are significantly worse.  Of course, just saying such a thing reveals the problem here: there are plenty of cocktails adding Schnapps to probably cause problems (something involving creme de menthe, for instance, which itself came close to being significant and which apparently adds a full point on to each cocktail into which its placed), and there are some cocktails so hideous that a burst of bubbly would be helpful, if only to dilute the horror.

Ultimately what's really needed here is an analysis of the covariances.  That will have to wait until I've consumed more cocktails before it seems worth doing, however.  To the magic cupboard!

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A Tale Of Cocktails #45

Baileys Cookie Martini

Ingredients

.

2 oz Baileys Irish cream
1 oz vanilla vodka
A cookie
Sugar

.

Taste: 7
Look: 7   

Cost: 7
Name: 5
Prep: 7

Alcohol: 7
Overall: 6.8

Preparation: Crumble cookie into sugar, and frost the rim of your shot glass with the resulting mixture. Shake alcohol with crushed ice, and strain into glass.

General Comments: (We conclude here our run of tasty Christmas drinks, where I have somewhat idiosyncratically defined "Christmas" as hot and/or involving Baileys.)

Last time I complained about a drink with no Baileys in it tasting entirely too much like Baileys.  This, in contrast, is a drink which is made mostly of Baileys that tastes entirely of Baileys. On the plus side, it's marginally easier to create than the Caribbean milk, but at least that drink tastiest like one of the rarer, classier Baileys variants, and it was nice and warm. This is just a shot of strong Irish cream with a dull, functional name.  With, it must be admitted, some tasty cookie bits around the place, but when God came up with the idea of selling liqueur and cookies separately, you gotta figure he knew what he was doing.

A Tale Of Cocktails #44

Caribbean Milk

Ingredients

.

1 oz dark rum
1 oz Kahlua
4 oz milk
1/2 oz double cream

1 cinnamon stick
1 lemon slice

.

Taste: 8
Look: 5    

Cost: 9
Name: 8
Prep: 7

Alcohol: 3
Overall: 7.0

Preparation: Pour all ingredients into a saucepan, heating slowly and stirring occasionally until mixture begins to climb the pan. Remove from heat, strain, and serve.
 

General Comments: If I'd wanted a hot coffee Baileys with a dash of cinnamon, I'd have asked for it.

Actually though, I turns out I did want a hot coffee Baileys with a dash of cinnamon.  Is there any more?