Beware the Big Hair... It's Ice Tea Time!

Booze can sometimes act as a window into the psyche, in both good and bad ways.  I recently had an interesting realization about the similarity between pet peeves and phobias.  Both seem quite concrete to the holder, yet they’re completely irrational.  Like most epiphanies this seems rather obvious once you’ve realized it, but it was still an epiphany and I never take those for granted.

This flash of realization came to me while making a Long Island Ice Tea, a drink that represents both a pet peeve and a phobia of mine.  The phobia is big hair.  Like I said, it’s irrational, but I just can’t get past big hair.  Clowns creep some people out, but how can you not be afraid of someone with overly-teased, artificially-voluminous hair?  Who knows what could be hiding in there—weapons, possums, the missing Watergate tapes, Rupert Murdoch’s soul?  Deep down you know what I’m talking about.

The pet peeve is the use of sweet and sour as a separate ingredient.  Most LIIT recipes call for the use of sweet and sour. I’m not a big fan of stocking sweet and sour because it’s really just one more thing you have to buy and store. It also doesn’t store well, so unless you use a lot of it frequently it has a tendency to go bad. If you’re going to offer a number of drinks that use sweet and sour, like a Whiskey Sour, and you’re sure you’re going to use the stuff then by all means buy it. It’s not very expensive (somewhere around $3-$4, depending on the size and brand) particularly if you buy the house brand of whatever store your using. However, if you look at the ingredients of sweet and sour, it’s pretty much just lemon juice and sugar water. So, I tend to favor recipes that use lemon juice instead of sweet and sour. The taste difference is difficult to perceive, particularly if you’re putting a bunch of different stuff in the drink, like cola and four different kinds of booze.

                                            Long Island Ice Tea

                                                  Ingredients

* 1 oz. Vodka  * 1 oz. Gin  * 1 oz. Rum  * 1 oz. Tequila  * ½ oz. Triple Sec  * 2 Tbs Lemon Juice  * 2 - 4 oz. Cola (to taste)  * 2 Lemon Wedges

                                                  Preparation

Long Island Ice Tea, like every novelty drink, is usually consumed by multiple guests and is most efficiently made in large batches. The list of ingredients above provides measurements for a single serving, but LIIT is one of those drinks that’s easy to do as a batch without all that pesky multiplication. The main ingredients, Vodka, Gin, Rum, and Tequila are all added in equal proportions. So, if you’re making a batch of LIIT you can simply pour unmeasured or half-assed measured, but equal amounts of the Four Amigos into a shaker or pitcher. Shake or stir and you have a large foundation batch of LIITs. You can even set that foundation aside for use throughout the evening as a way to shorten the mix time. When you’re ready to make individual drinks, drop some ice into a Collins, or any 8 oz. glass, and fill halfway with your pre-mixed foundation. There’s no need to measure precisely, so long as you’ve got about half or, with the ice, a little better than half the glass full of foundation you’ll have about an ounce each of the four main ingredients. Add ½ oz. of Triple Sec, two squeezes of lemon juice (roughly 2 Tbls), a couple ounces of cola to your preferred taste and color, and garnish with a lemon wedge. If you use the pre-mix foundation strategy, you can make three or four individual drinks in about 30 seconds. Easy tea!  Don’t forget to give me a “like” on Facebook and check out more recipes at www.30-SecondBartender.com!

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