Acetio | Blogma

Magic Hat is one of my preferred breweries (others are Victory, Stone and of course, Dogfish Head) partly because they're in one of my favorite small cities (Burlington, Vermont) but also because they experiment so much with different recipes.

Their new winter seasonal is called Howl and is a "black lager". If you drink craft beer, you'll know how rare lagers are, since it's a lot easier for beginners to make ales. One exception is Victory's Prima Pils, which is my favorite pilsner-style.

Howl is not very high in alcohol, but has a heavier taste than, for example, Guiness, but without the shapness that stouts can have.

It's good.

I don't have a name for this (I think you need to do something twice before it's worthy of a name).

What I like about this drink is that the spiced rum and orange juice work together in such a way that the resultant flavors are not identifiable. You would not say it's a fruity drink or a creamy drink. You just can't put your finger on it.

1pt Orange Juice
2pt Spiced Rum
3pt SOUR MIX:

• 1pt lemon juice
• 1pt SIMPLE SYRUP:
  • 1pt sugar
  • 1pt water

Mix the above in a cocktail shaker with ice. This froths the juices slightly giving a fuller texture in the mouth.
Pour into 2 glasses (or one big one) and add seltzer/club soda to taste. Using about twice as much seltzer as everything else (so about 12 parts in this case) seemed to work well.

Orange Juice: The juice here is a flavor, not a base, similar to how you would use something like Grand Marnier, or vermouth in an American-style martini - The martinis I had in France had more vermouth than vodka

Rum: I used Captain Morgan-brand spiced rum - the spices complimented the orange juice very well

Sour Mix: Sour mix is really just equal parts simple syrup and lemon juice (or other acidic flavor). You will have lots of sour mix left over. Just keep it in the fridge. It tastes better than what you buy in the store and has no HFCS.

Simple syrup is just equal parts sugar and water. You may want to heat it in order to guarantee that the sugar dissolves, but that isn't necessary.

Sugar: I used less-refined cane sugar from a co-op food store, which gave the resultant syrup a light brown color. Brown sugar could be interesting

Another way to make it, without making the sour mix separately is:
1 jigger sugar (use agave syrup or confectioner's sugar, otherwise it may not dissolve entirely)
1 jigger lemon juice
1 jigger orange juice
2 jiggers rum
(the water was omitted, but we can make up for that by using a little more seltzer)
One 12oz can of club soda

When we were in Iowa we heard stories of Templeton Rye, a whiskey made in illegal stills during Prohibition that was supposedly one of Al Capone's favorites. It was kept in 1-gallon metal cans and smuggled 400+ miles due east to Chicago. The bootleggers sometimes buried the cans at drop points along the way, and my grandfather, as a little boy, would dig up the cans and sell them for 50¢

We visited the distillery, but on July 3^rd and 4^th pretty much everything in the state was closed. We looked around for where we might buy some, but it seemed to be sold out everywhere.

So we were happy when we were visiting Chicago and discovered that Lush West Lakeview Liquors, a local liquor store (with a very good selection of beer, even some of the more obscure Dogfish Head ones) had several bottles. We got two.

My Uncle Tom said that back in the day the stills were actually in Dedham, Iowa - one town over. The moonshiners called it Templeton Rye to confuse the federals.

Wikipedia entry

Templetone Rye site