Rum

Rum and Root Beer was an accidental creation of BayCon. I was invited in for a mandatory drink by and old acquaintance. He had Meyers Rum but no Coke. So I grabbed the closed thing I could find -- Henry Weinhard's Root Beer.

This proved to be the most fortuitous accident of my drinking life. Root Beer complements rum much more cleanly than Coke. It also works well with spiced rum.

Mike has been present for many expirements with the Rum and Root Beer. We've varied both ingredients up and down the scale. Rums include Captain Morgan, Captain Morgan Tatoo, Captain Morgan Silver, Whalers, and Sailor Jerry. Root beers have included Weinhard's, IBC, Jones, Hansen's, Mug, A&W, and the favorite, Virgil's.

Virgil's and Captain Morgan Tattoo has been cited as the best combination.

Ratios vary, but with a sweet rum 2 parts Root Beer to 1 part rum works. Add more root beer as your taste suits.

Once again into the breech of Rum based cocktails! Whiskey is the drink of choice here, but we're gearing up for Baycon '08 and having some fun with Captain Morgan Tattoo and Bulleit Bourbon.

So here is another pirate creation for use with dark rum and extreme caution. We were going to call this the "Will Turner" but that innuendo is too direct. My will was turned and we changed the name to Bootstrap.

Good sweet rums are wonderful for mixing with sodas. The right spiced rum brings a whole new lampshade to any soda party. With Bootstrap it is Cream Soda. This is one of the more successful experiments in the vein of the Black Pearl.

Feel free to push the boundaries with the ingredients, I don't think you can go wrong.

• 1oz (3cl) Captain Morgan Tattoo
• 5oz (15cl) IBC Cream Soda

Serve chilled over ice in an 8oz highball glass and garnish with a straw.

John Hansell had an interesting opportunity to taste some of the 1500 experiments happening at Buffalo Trace. Some wild and exciting ideas are flowing over there.

In the comments on his blog, someone has come up with a similar idea to one of my favorite thought experiments; smoke from non-peat sources. This came to me while I was grilling whiskey chicken with apple chips. The flavor combination was wonderful and got me thinking about how other smoke sources would work when halting malt.

Mike and I have talked about our future in this business, and we keep coming back to the desire to create our own whiskey. I think about maturation in the micro-climate of the Half Moon Bay coast which should give the slow temperature transitions more like Scotland than Tennesee. Many distilleries are using different wine casks, we're right next to Napa and have a wealth of varieties to use for maturation.