one hundred cocktails

drinking with a purpose

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Twelve Mile Limit

16 Aug 2012

With this, we begin the last 20 cocktails in the book. The end is in sight! I’m realizing more and more that I’ve come to love cocktail craft and cocktail ingredients, but increasingly the recipes in this book have filled me with despair.

The Twelve Mile Limit combines rum, whiskey, and brandy – as with The Soother I’m made anxious by the preponderance of base ingredients here. I’ll give the rye/cognac thing a positive nod because cognac mixes with virtually anything, but as soon as we start tossing rum into the mix, things get weird.

Twelve Mile Limit Ingredients

If we look at the history of the cocktail (and indeed its name), it’s entirely possible this formulation comes from a desire to confuse the palate when confronted with a mess of awful ingredients.

It’s worth taking a moment for a quick sidebar: The Employee’s Only Grenadine is substantially better than any other I’ve had off the shelf. It’s got great pomegranate flavor and tons of spice and bitterness added in. Worth it if you’re going to bother with Grenadine for anything other than sweetness and color (and if it’s being used for sweetness and color, might as well skip the color and add simple syrup or agave).

Twelve Mile Limit Finished

The end result isn’t bad, it just isn’t that interesting, either. It’s probably my favorite dead horse, but if a cocktail has a bunch of ingredients, I expect the final result to be superior to drinking the constituents, and that just didn’t happen here. There’s too much going on in the base spirits and the end result is just muted and pleasant – easy enough to get wasted on one, I suppose, but it’s nothing memorable.