And Now, Some Rejected Cocktails

It's Halloween and I'm bringing out all the skeletons in my liquor cabinet

I do a lot of different things on this newsletter, but one thing that I do consistently is share cocktails.

Every Friday, I share a newsletter that features an original recipe, a book recommendation, a music recommendation, reader pet photos, a few other things—and a cocktail. I find something very satisfying about the low-lift alchemy of making a cocktail at home—combining disparate ingredients into something tasty is a lot of fun, and the possibilities are nigh-endless.

I’ve done this for more than 160 weeks in a row. That’s a lot of cocktails!

Because of that, I’m constantly on the lookout for new and interesting ingredients that might find their way into one of my drinks down the line. I don’t always have a plan when I buy things, but figure inspiration may strike me months later.

Of course, I don’t always make good decisions.

Recently, I was looking for something in the basement cabinet that’s come to serve as my auxiliary ingredient storage, and found myself face-to-face with a shelf full of ill-considered ingredients I’d failed to find a use for, and with good reason: they’re bad! These things were never going to go into a cocktail. What had I been thinking in buying them in the first place?

I considered just throwing them all out, but then thought better of it.

It’s Halloween, and I’m bringing out my dead. Welcome to Dante’s Cocktail Bar, friends. Let’s start climbing down those circles.

Circle #1: Nitro Pepsi

I decided to start with an easy one. I’m not a big fan of Pepsi, but I’d been intrigued by the promise of a nitrogen-infused cola. The can opened with a pleasing whoosh, like the sound of bay doors opening on Star Trek. I poured a little into a glass, and it foamed up like a glass of Guinness. Neat! The taste was vanilla-heavy, but in a pleasant way. It was pretty good!

Nitro Pepsi: it’s like if Pepsi *were* okay!

This one was simple—I’d pair it with a blended scotch and a squeeze of lime.

Not bad! Not bad at all!

Maybe this venture wouldn’t be so painful after all.

Circle #2: Moxie

The New Englanders just sat up in their seats. It’s Moxie!

One of the oldest mass-produced soft drinks, this Massachusetts-born soda dates back to 1876, and retains a nostalgic popularity in places like Maine, where it’s the official state soft drink.

Like many drinks of its era, it has a complex, bitter, herbal flavor profile, not unlike root beer, but distinct from that beverage.

I decided to mix old and new, using the Moxie in a spin on the oh-so-trendy-right-now Negroni Sbagliato—a drink made with Campari, sweet vermouth and sparkling wine.

This wasn’t bad, but was only after the fact that I realized I’d replaced the wrong ingredient—I’d employed the Moxie in lieu of the sparkling wine, on account of the carbonation, but that meant I was doubling down on bitterness. Really, I should have used Moxie, sweet vermouth and prosecco.

My wife: “Are you going to make it again now that you realize that?”

Me: “No!”

Circle #3: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Mountain Dew

Okay, now we’re really getting into the weeds.

I frankly appreciate the fact that Mountain Dew has steered all the way in to Prank Soda in the past couple of years, with new seasonal flavors with names like MAJOR MELON and THRASHED APPLE and PURPLE THUNDER. Perhaps the most off-putting thing they’ve put out is this variant, a limited edition briefly available earlier this year that supposedly mimics the flavor of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Who doesn’t love a spicy cheese soda, folks?

I’ll be honest: I expected this to taste worse than it did. The “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos” flavor manifested mostly an overly-sweet orange soda with a slight hint of heat on the back end. I’ve had “spicy margaritas” at restaurants that didn’t mean them as a joke that weren’t far off from this. It wasn’t pleasant or good, mind you, but it wasn’t the travesty the label suggested it might be.

Anyways, I made a mimosa with it.

I do not recommend making a mimosa with this.

Circle #4: Duff A L’Orange Sparkling Beverage

Now, listen.

I am an Elder Millennial and thus have an intense residual fondness for The Simpsons, having watched the first ten seasons on repeat in syndication countless times after school in the late ‘90s. So, I can be excused for having bought this novelty drink when I saw it at a candy store in Panama City Beach, Florida.

(I cannot be excused for having been in a candy store Panama City Beach in the first place.)

But what does it taste like?

Well… honestly, it’s just a regular flavored seltzer. It’s not great, but almost no flavored seltzers are. It’s playing firmly at replacement level, with a subtle-enough orange taste and a moderate level of fizz.

I figured a Ranch Water of sorts might work?

It didn’t work, but it didn’t not work, is the thing. I’ve drank worse on vacation.

Circle #5: Bob Ross “The Joy of Calm” Peaceful Passion Fruit Calming Sparkling Beverage

Why was this made?

What was the purpose of producing this?

Did they predict a fertile market of part-time cocktail bloggers buying this on a lark while bored on vacation? If so, well, they made one sale.

The drink itself isn’t bad. Like the Duff above, it’s a flavored sparkling water, but the artificial passion fruit flavor it subtler and more pleasant. I could work with this.

I just needed to get in the right mindset. First, I thought about a landscape. I thought about happy little trees. I thought about happy bushes, and—oh! happy little lilies, popping up in the foreground.

I thought about The Surprise Lily, an actually-good cocktail I offered up here in August. That drink combined gin, St-Germain, lime juice and sparkling water. It wouldn’t be a big stretch to modify it with our painter friend’s beverage.

Yep! It’s fine. I wouldn’t recommend you run out and buy Bob Ross-branded water just to make it, but if you happen to have Bob Ross-branded water on hand, you can go right ahead and make this in confidence.

Circle #6: Chocolate Soda

Chocolate soda! It’s a childhood dream. It’s soda, but it’s chocolate!

Well, just like “staying up as late as I want”, “eating as many cookies as I want” or “having a job”, this childhood dream isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Yes, it tastes exactly like promised: fizzy chocolate. That’s just not all that satisfying a thing.

Anyways, here’s an espresso martini.

Is it bad? Yes, of course it is. It’s an espresso martini.

Circle #7: Peanut Butter Soda

Do you ever get 70% of the way through doing something and realize you regret starting it, but you’re too far along to stop now? It’s like being 18 miles into a marathon and knowing you’ve still got eight miles left to go but you’re eight miles away from your car so you might as well finish.

Anyways, Peanut Butter Soda.

It tastes like peanut butter, but bad. I have no further tasting notes.

I’ve had success using Kraken Rum and chocolate bitters together, such as in The Sea Serpent punch, and thought maybe they’d be strong enough to steamroll over the mildly unpleasant peanut butter flavor of this soda. Y’know, like a rum ball candy?

It works, but only if you get the proportions right: 1 part rum, 1 dash bitters, and absolutely none of this awful soda.

[sighs, leans hands on knees, stares at floor for a while]

[still staring at floor] what’s next

Circle #8: Red Velvet Cupcake Cookie Dough Bites Soda

I’m not sure what I expected this to taste like.

Aren’t red velvet cupcakes and cookie dough bites two different things? And would a red velvet cupcake soda taste different from a red velvet cake soda? Similarly, how do you capture “bites” in a drink? There is far too much going on here.

There’s no way it can taste like all of these things.

And yet… it kinda does?

I mean, it doesn’t, but it does. It’s the uncanny valley of sodas. It tastes like red velvet cupcakes and cookie dough bites in the same way that the people in The Polar Express looks like people, which is to say: in a way that scares small children.

I put it in a Wisconsin Old-Fashioned, swapping it in for the Sprite.

This is the most elaborate drink on the menu at a bar where you finish your drink no matter how terrible it tastes, because you’re scared the bartender might stab you. You’re scared of this specifically because she’s just spent the last 20 minutes telling another patron about the time she stabbed someone.

You want another one, hon?

I’m… ah, I’m still working on this one, thank you!

Circle #9: Pickle Flavored Soda

Okay, now, listen.

This is a terrible, terrible soda.

It smells exactly like a jar of pickles, and not in a pleasant way.

I like pickles! I do not like this.

BUT

This is at least a flavor I can work with.

It’s one flavor, for starters—I’m looking at you, red velvet cupcake cookie dough bites—and it’s one that sometimes ends up in drinks. It might work just fine mixed into a Bloody Mary? At this point, I’d already dirtied almost all of my glassware and wrecked the kitchen, so I was not about to find out.

I made some excellent Bloody Marys (Caesars, to be more precise) a while back, and I still had some of the jalapeno-and-dill-infused vodka I’d made for that effort.

I mixed it in equal parts with this soda, and called it a day.

This would work perfectly fine as the gag shot that bartenders give patrons who ask for “something different”, because it will stop them from doing that again. In that sense, it’s like Malört, but without the unnecessary Chicago pride.

Okay, that’s everything, right?

[opens cabinet one more time]

[sighs deeply]

right, that

Circle #10: Mustard-flavored soda

Hey, it’s 100% natural! You know what else is 100% natural? Anthrax.

I don’t think a photo can convey just how unsettling the color of this soda was in person. Like, yes, it’s bright yellow, as you might expect mustard to be, but I swear it had a subtle luminescence? That is to say, I think if you took this into a windowless room and turned off the lights, it would glow slightly. I did not test this theory, because I was afraid to be alone in a room with this soda.

I did drink it, though, because I started this bit, dammit, and I was going to finish it.

[opens bottle]

[sniffs, recoils]

[sips]

[sighs again, very deeply]

This tastes like a middle school lunchroom dare. It tastes like we mixed eight things together in this cup and if you can drink it you Glen’s gonna give you his Charizard. It is awful and unpleasant and I feel like I might’ve lowered the resale value of my house by having it in the cabinet for a year.

I could not go out on a bad note, however.

I could not end this journey in defeat.

I was going to make a cocktail out of this soda even if it killed me, and I feared that that might be a legitimate possibility and not just a rhetorical device.

First, bourbon.

It’s my preferred liquor, and I had held it back for when I truly needed it today.

I was going to need reinforcements, though, and so I pulled out one of my most trusted culinary textbooks, The Flavor Bible, which cross-indexes hundreds of ingredients with their flavor affinities.

Perhaps it would suggest something that complemented the flavor of mustard.

Cabbage? No.

Cured meats? Love them, but not in a cocktail. (Not today, at least.)

Fish? I have my limits.

Honey. Oh, right. Honey mustard. That’s a thing. Okay, I’ll put some honey in here.

Onions? No.

Scandinavian cuisine? Hm. If I had a bottle of aquavit, that might help, but I don’t.

Vinegar? I have made good cocktails with vinegar in them before, but that feels like going in the wrong direction here. I’m trying to dig up.

Walnuts? Wait, there’s the ticket! I have a bottle of Nocino—an Italian walnut-based liqueur—that I haven’t used much of yet. That might help here.

First, I heated the mustard soda in a saucepan, reducing it down to a thin syrup. I then mixed in an equal amount of honey.

Honey-mustard cocktail syrup. Sure. I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

Nevertheless, I persist. It’s cocktail time.

Honey-Mustard Cocktail

• 1-1/2 ounces bourbon

• 1/2 ounce Nocino

• 3/4 ounce honey-mustard syrup

• squeeze lemon juice

Place all ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake vigorously for 20 seconds. Pause, and stare blankly out the window, considering all the decisions you’ve made in life to bring you to this moment. Open the shaker, and strain into the only glass in the house that’s left, the Passion of the Christ highball glass your friend got you as a gag after they found it in a secondhand store. Garnish with a strip of lemon zest, and think about how you still have to write all this up later tonight.

It’s fine.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the backyard crying.

Happy Halloween, friends, and enjoy responsibly.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)