Bitter Lemon Soda, Rum, and Blueberries
Ever since Great Jamaican Spicy Ginger Beer – a very spicy (non-alcoholic) ginger beer – had been donated to the snack room for the Vancouver Fringe Festival (2018, I think?), I’ve been really into it. It’s a really good example of how providing free stuff to people can get them to choose to pay for the product when it’s no longer free. It is so spicy that you have to drink it slowly.
This is all well and good; I am to the point that I will buy it by the case when it’s on sale (and even when it’s not on sale). But then they came out with a bunch of new flavours: watermelon, spicy pineapple, and bitter lemon.
The bitter lemon was good, but perhaps not ideal on its own, and so I used it to mix into drinks, where it was perfect. I added rum for sweetness, and blueberries because they taste good and look cool. But now I have a real drink – a cocktail, even. And the best thing about cocktails is naming them.
I’ve never been a big drinker, and I don’t know a lot about cocktails or their names, but it really seems that for the most part the names are arbitrary (or are they? A cool book might concern the etymology of cocktail names… I’m sure it already exists). Anyway, the pleasure of naming this drink was now upon me; rum for pirates, yellow soda and blue berries for blonde-blue-eyed aryans. Perhaps to simple, but I like the sound of it. While you could of course have an Aryan pirate with a twist, it probably isn’t necessary…