one hundred cocktails

drinking with a purpose

Don the Beachcomber's Zombie

20 Aug 2012

This is the last cocktail in the book. My work here is done. The project is finished. This blog is no more. I’ll get to the drink in a bit, but I want to rant a bit before I close things out.

“One Hundred Cocktails?” More like 87, by my count, if we’re being generous. It turns out the only way to get 100 is to make all of the “extra credit” cocktails which aren’t particularly classic or vintage. I didn’t realize this until I finished the book, and the cocktail count was still at … 87. The front cover says “100 rediscovered recipes and the stories behind them.” The extra credit recipes, which would bring the total to 100, include things like the Old Fashioned, Negroni, Manhattan, Martini, … you get the point. Are you kidding me?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to not be procuring yet another absurdly esoteric and expensive ingredient to finish this book. Ignoring the cost of the base spirits, I’ve spent at least two grand on this project. Base spirits included, we can probably add at least another grand in the process. Wow. It took a bit under two years to get through the book.

The toughest things to procure were:

All said and done, in the timeframe of this blog, access to ingredients I’ve needed has gotten markedly easier as the craft cocktail thing has taken off. That’s pretty cool.

Was it all worth it? Not really. Most of the cocktails in this book are outright terrible. On the other hand, I’ve gotten into cocktails pretty hardcore, and have discovered a bunch of fantastic drinks not included in the book. So, the book may be full of a lot of sentimental and seminal junk, but it still pushed me in a pretty interesting direction, so that’s cool.

Anyway, the last drink in the book is another damn rum punch. It calls for three specific rums, but whatever, who the hell cares?

Zombie Ingredients

Seriously, Another punch with a lot of rum and not really anything to make it special?

Zombie Finished

Too much passion fruit. Crazy, right? But it’s sort of an acid-rum bomb, and just … eh. There are better tiki drinks.

And we’re done. It’s been fun, folks. Time for a new project.