Road runner, road runner - going hundred mile per hour!

As a child, I was always slightly annoyed by the roadrunner.

It seemed to me that, in a predator/prey relationship, it was only natural for Wile E. Coyote to want a piece of the bird.

But the bird was always a total asshole.

Rude. 

Or Wile E. Coyote was just incompetent.

Nothing about this idea is even remotely smart. 

Pernod is a bit like the roadrunner for me. It's got a vicious streak, and it makes me regret choices I made in the past. When I was in Prague a few summers ago, I decided to try absinthe - prepared the "right" way.

It did not agree with me. Luckily, my father had his camera on hand, and trapped the moment in amber.

Proof positive that I once had hair. 

It's not the anise flavor that gets to me. If anything, I've adjusted to it marvelously. I appreciate the complexity of the flavor and what it adds to a drink. But this is also its cripple, because Pernod + anything still tastes like Pernod. In that sense, it's a bit like Creme Yvette.

As you'll likely recall, one of the reasons I selected Pernod as our May liqueur was that I frequently saw it pop up as an ingredient in one of the cocktail recipe books I have. It was from this book that I selected the Roadrunner - mostly because, despite not having wine as one of its ingredients, it is served in a wine glass. Fancy!

Photoshopped Road Runner on the left. Actual cocktail not as fun.

Ingredients:
2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. Pernod
1/2 oz. dry vermouth
1 tsp grenadine

While pouring the cocktail into the chilled wine glass, the scent of Pernod assaulted my senses. "Really?" I thought. "This is the most insidious liqueur in the world. It makes Creme Yvette look like an amateur."

But the taste of the cocktail tells a different story. The dry vermouth somewhat evens out the Pernod's bouquet. The distinctive licorice notes are still there, but the headiness of the vermouth elevates the experience a little bit. The gin is totally lost in the mix, and the grenadine is just along for the ride.

Side note: I love grenadine. I think it's primarily used for color, and that's a shame.

Maybe the cocktail is served in a wine glass because it looks an awful lot like wine. But drinker beware: this heady combination warrants only a single glass. When Pernod is invited to a party, it stays for the long haul. I think this recipe halved would be totally acceptable.

Coincidentally, about halfway through writing this post, I accidentally knocked over the cocktail. So my experience was halved, and that was sufficient for me.

I did not make another one.

I am dreading our Pernod Death Match. I have no idea what to do with this ingredient.

Love,
Joe

Nerdy Librarian Citations
MIA. "Bamboo Banga" Kala. CD. Interscope, 2007.

Whitaker, Julie and Ian Whitelaw. A Pocket Guide to Cocktails. Bath: Parragon Books, 2006.

May Liquor: Pernod

Pernod was not the first choice for May.

Joe went to the liquor store with the intention of buying Luxardo, a maraschino liqueur. But fate had other plans.

Many cocktail recipes seem to call for Pernod, and maybe it was a good idea to have the spirit on hand for future endeavors. Having no idea what the primary flavor of the spirit would be, the bottle was acquired and hidden from Dave. 

And here we are. 

To learn more about this fine spirit, we, alas, had to turn to the official wesbite of Pernod. 

Fun Fact: Pernod is owned by Pernod Recard, a huge multinational corporation that owns countless brands, including Kahlua, Absolut, (my beloved) Glenlivet, Malibu, Chivas, Seagram's, etc. You name it, they probably own it. I find this obnoxious. Can't we just have nice, small companies instead of enormous conglomerates that own half the market share?

Anyway. 

Pernod was apparently the original absinthe liqueur. I had traditionally-prepared absinthe in the Czech Republic a few years back, and it was not an experience I'd be excited to replicate. I disliked the flavor immensely, and I am now greatly concerned about Pernod. 

Dave and I pretend we are in a turn-of-the-century French Cafe

The bottle we bought is the traditional Pernod, not the absinthe, though star anise is the key ingredient in Pernod. The original recipe was developed by a French doctor and was marketed as a medicinal remedy. Eventually this doctor joined forces with a distiller, the titular Pernod, and a full-on distillery was opened. 

The drink was a hit in France, and soon the product was imported to the United States. When absinthe was banned in 1912, the Pernod company went silent for a few years before reintroducing their spirit without the absinthe. That is the spirit we will try today. 

The Tasting

We opened the bottle, and immediately the entire balcony smelled like licorice.

"This is not something you drink by itself," Dave proclaimed before drinking it by itself. 

The color is a beautiful yellowish-green that looks a bit like olive oil. 

We weren't pleased to learn that, according to the back label, it is artificially colored.

Once poured into the glass, Pernod takes on a new scent profile. You can smell the liquor, but the licorice is subdued and accompanied by floral and herbal notes. 

Here we go!

WHOA.

Dave: It's great to drink if you're having sinus problems. 

Joe: Whoa-hoah. This could burn a hole through your tongue. This is definitely something you mix with another liquor. I am not a fan. At all. 

At this point, Dave has elected to remain silent, claiming that I surely have enough thoughts for both of us. And he's right. I do. 

I can't even begin to tell you how alarming the taste of this is. It is extremely licorice forward. It might as well have a warning label on it. Something like: DO NOT DRINK IF YOU HAVE NO TASTE FOR LICORICE. And then when you purchase the bottle, the clerk at the liquor store should be required to ask, "Are you sure?" And if you say, "Yes", you should have to sign a waiver that you will not complain when it hits your tongue.

Dave is now reading to me several cocktails that have Pernod in it, and I'm starting to worry about the month of May. 

Although... he just "oohed" contentedly. 

But he might be looking at kitty cat videos. 

Submarine kiss

Dear Dave,

I poked around looking for a Créme Yvette recipe and couldn't find anything that felt truly compelling. Or anything that I could stomach.

I returned to the Créme Yvette website, which now just seems like a collection of carefully-curated lies by some hipster in Brooklyn who thought bringing back a long-dormant liqueur would score him some Kewl Points™ with the members of some starving artisenal booze collective.

One cocktail on the website continued to intrigue me: the Submarine Kiss.

On our walk earlier today, I kept calling it the Stratosphere. And I was going to draw a humorous parallel to my experience riding the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. Alas, I had the names confused and my Humor Bucket is devoid of anything clever regarding the Submarine Kiss.

Because god is this a dumb name for a cocktail.

I'd deconstruct its meaning if the drink made me feel anything more robust than pure apathy.

What intrigued me about this drink was that it required two preparation steps: the creation of the "silver fizz" and the layering of Créme Yvette.

The layering didn't work, maybe because I don't have a champagne flute. But even if I did, I don't think it would have made that much of a difference. 

Silver Fizz:

• 2 oz. gin (the website recommended Plymouth Gin, but I used London Dry Gin after confirming through a couple half-assed Google searches about the difference between the two)
• 3/4 oz. simple syrup
• 3/4 oz. lemon juice
• one egg white

This combination receives two different shakes in the cocktail shaker: a dry shake (one without ice) and then one with ice. I guess the one with ice is called a wet shake? That sounds so disgusting. 

Once the silver fizz has been prepared, you pour it over one ounce of Créme Yvette. The photo on the website makes it look like the Yvette magically sits on the bottom and the fizz floats on top of it. Maybe the champagne flute allows this to happen, but my result looked markedly different.  

Hide & go Créme Yvette: the Pepto Bismol Years

You know how whenever we made cocktails with Créme de Cassis we couldn't taste it no matter what? The opposite is true with Créme Yvette. 

I was positive it would be lost in the gin. After all, there are two parts gin to the Créme Yvette. 

I put my nose to the cocktail before drinking it, and there it was: the smell of moldy, flowery sadness.

And I took a sip. 

There was a banging at my palate's door.

Créme Yvette didn't wait for me to answer. She barged right on in and drunkenly accused me of not loving her. 

Before I could stammer an explanation, she punched me in the gullet and demanded an explanation. 

I tried to calm her down. 

But Créme Yvette isn't a lady, David. She is a boozy virago, all vitriol and pugnacious fire. 

Gin is no match for her. Lemon is no match for her. Sugar and egg and groveling is no match for her. 

She will find you and she will pummel you into submission. 

And if there is an explanation for this cocktail's lousy name, it is that Créme Yvette kisses like a submarine: a demanding, metallic, bulldozer liplock that tastes of flowery defeat. 

May you have more luck with her.

Love,

Joe

April Liquor: Créme Yvette

Hello, beautiful.

The story of Créme Yvette is, in a nutshell, the story of the last 100 years of American cocktail culture. The purple-hued liqueur was listed as an ingredient in published cocktails dating back to the late 1880s and until the 1930s and 40s, according to the company's website.

After prohibition, though, the way Americans drank changed. Many kids and teenagers who grew up during prohibition had little to no experience with drinking and went straight for drinks that could get them buzzed, and could get them buzzed quickly. This is part of the reason that vodka became an important and ubiquitous ingredient in drinks like the Bloody Mary, Screwdriver, and Moscow Mule, which helped its popularity soar.

Sad little digestifs like Créme Yvette were no match for this sea change in American drinking culture. It didn't help matters that one of Yvette's major ingredients was violet petals, as well as a masceration of berries, which I'm sure made it feel even more like something your grandma would drink, not a keen liquor you and your nifty friends would drink. Dig it, daddy-o?

Créme Yvette ceased production in 1969, but was resurrected in 2009 just as the classic cocktail craze was warming up in major American cities. There's a lovely interview with Robert Cooper, the head of the liquor company that owned the rights to the liquor's formula and decided to reintroduce it in Elements Magazine.

Bottoms up!

Cooper says that Yvette doesn't have the same broad appeal as the company's other famous liqueur, St. Germain, citing Yvette's lack of versatility and user-friendliness.

All the same, we're testing its boundaries this month with classic cocktails, new (and often frightening) creations, and, as always, a bit of murder thrown in at the end of the month.

Tasting notes: 

Dave:

When I took the cap off the bottle and sniffed, I was a bit shocked at how alcohol-forward it smelled. And when I poured it into the glass, I was really glad we hadn't decided to do Creme Violette this month instead, which is entirely violets, while Yvette is violets mixed with blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, and cassis, with honey, vanilla, orange peel and spices added.  It still smells ridiculously like flowers, which is not a smell I'm used to in things I drink.

I think Joe may have a difficult time with this one. It tastes much like it smells. Like flowers. We're drinking fucking flowers. I can't imagine drinking this after dinner as a digestif - it might make me want to retch up everything I'd just eaten. Not that it tastes bad exactly... just very, very strong. It's the strength of the floral taste that's off-putting. It's also a thick, heavy liquid - much like Bénédictine from last month - and that just enhances the almost syrupy sweetness in a way that's, well, gross to a modern cocktail drinker. We like our alcohol to taste like alcohol and this tastes like perfume.

It's going to be an interesting month. If anyone wants to try Créme Yvette, come by our place. I'm sure we'll have some of this left, even if you can't make it by our place until the year 2062.

Joe:

I was really quite excited about this liqueur when Dave told me it was his choice for April. I had never even heard of Créme Yvette, and I am always up for an adventure. Plus the information Dave had found about the drink was just so darn fascinating! A resurrected liqueur of yore!

But.

This smells like my grandmother. Her house, more accurately. I should probably clarify that I don't really like the smell of my grandmother's house. Most people probably associate grandmothers with baked apple pies or rose perfume or something. But this is not the case with mine. This is going to come across as incredibly cruel, but I'm being honest: her house smells a bit like mildew. Mildewed flowers. It's a scent that embeds itself in everything: furniture, food, you name it. Dave is getting a hit of all these wonderful fruity notes, and I'm just getting a big hit of mold.

And then we tasted it.

Picture a ninety year old woman. Maybe she has that bluish-tinted hair because of a rinse she uses. Maybe she smells like baby powder with a hint of mothballs. Maybe she spends her days in the garden, tending to gardenias and gladiola, jacaranda and hyacinth, hyssop and violets. She's been out in the sun for a long time. She returns inside and draws a bath, adding Epsom salts and lavender bubble bath. And she bathes. For a couple hours. Once her wrinkly skin is even wrinklier, she emerges from the tub.

And that's when the makers of Créme Yvette swoop in and bottle the bath water.

Dave took two candid photos when I tasted Créme Yvette for the first time. I had no idea he was snapping shots, but I think they tell the full story.

Oh, Sweet Jesus

Sweet baby Jesus.

This is going to be a rough month, folks.

Nerdy Librarian Citations:
Dewing, Neal. "How Vodka Conquered America" The Federalist. The Federalist, 15 July 2014. Web. 27 March 2016. <http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/25/how-vodka-conquered-america>.

Simonson, Robert. "Creme Yvette" Elements Magazine. Imbibe Media, 14 August 2009. Web. 27 March 2016. <http://imbibemagazine.com/elements-creme-yvette>.