Forty: White Queen
It's that time of year again, the time when a certain white rum producer starts casting around for recipes to include in its shiny annual cocktail book, which boils down to spending a lot of time thinking about Bacardi. Last year, I broke down the process of creating my entry into a series of posts which is something I may do for the Finlandia Vodka Cup in November, but I'm not feeling a powerful need to repeat the experiment just yet. At any rate, a respected source told me that the Legacy judges were looking for long drinks this year. With that in mind, I created...something. Might even post it, depending on how I progress in the competition.
This drink, on the other hand, was something that I'd come up with pretty early in the process. I have a suspicion that the first Legacy competition saw a lot of daiquiri style recipes, so I was reluctant to submit this as my final entry. The other interesting point is that I settled on the name before I'd finalised the recipe. Most of the time, I work the other way round: forming a name to reflect the ingredients and the overall impression of the drink. This time, the name almost defined the kind of things I would into the recipe. It's refreshing to mix up the workflow a little from time to time.
One final thing, and it's something I've mentioned before (possibly here, possibly in a comp, I forget) - one of the basic ideas in David Embury's The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks is the categorization of cocktails into either the sour type (containing a sour modifying agent such as lemon or lime) or the aromatic type (containing vermouths and the like), but there aren't that many drinks that combine the two. Putting "vermouth" and "lemon juice" into CocktailDB turns up 130 results, the most famous of which is the Journalist. It's not an unheard of combination, but it's a pretty rare one.
