It’s time for another Mixology Monday, and this time, thanks to Kevin at Save the Drinkers, it’s all about the local.

If you’ve read Marshall’s post already you know why we picked the rickey. According the info we’ve been given at the rickey competition the recipe was first published in the Washington Post in 1889; according to Harry Johnson’s bar guide, a copy of which I got for my birthday from Mr. Fawley, he has a gin and a whiskey rickey in the 1888 edition (theoretically – that’s also based off a cocktail program that Marshall has, while the book we both own a reprint of was reprinted in 1888, 1900, and a few other years). (Admittedly, also, Mr. Johnson was prone to embellishment as much as he was to run-on sentences.)

As is my usual, I wanted to do two rickeys. I started off by making a batch of honey syrup (1 part honey, 2 parts water, bring to a boil, drop to low and cook for 5 minutes) and buying a few ingredients to replicate Kevin Rogers’ recipe from Urbana in the rickey competition.

His recipe, which I got from here, is as follows:
Dupont “gin” Rickey
2-3 quarter-sized slices of fresh ginger root
Juice of 1/2 a medium lime
1 1/2 ounces bourbon
1 ounce honey syrup
club soda to top
mint sprig (garnish)
Muddle the ginger slices with the lime juice. Add the bourbon and honey syrup then shake with ice. Strain into a highball glass filled with ice, top with club soda, and a slapped mint sprig for garnish.

This is a great drink. I only had one of them at the rickey competition but it was one of my complete favorites – I’ve saved the recipe so that I can make it more often, and hey – it was a DC derivative of a DC original, and I think THAT counts as local.

But this is, after all, the Scofflaw’s Den, so that’s not at all.

Marshall is better than I am at coming up with new drinks but I’m getting better at it all the time. Saturday morning I walked down to the Falls Church Farmer’s Market, hoping for fresh honey and mint, and while I was deprived of that I found something completely different when picking up some sunflowers for my sister-out-law. (In approximately 6 months or so she’ll be my sister-in-law, but until then, she’s my roommate-cum-brother’s fiancee.)

The random ingredient were black currants. I have a few drinks – Absolut Kurrant, creme de cassis – flavored with currant but I’d never seen the actual berries before. For $4, I picked up a fresh batch – the last week they’d have them – from Dragonfly Farms in Maryland.

Coming home, I first tried out a rickey using a local whiskey called Wasmund’s Single Malt. I couldn’t get the flavor I really wanted out of that, so I switched to Bulleit Bourbon, for something that had a bit of the sweet with a punch of the complexity I wanted.

A caveat: Bulleit was the company that sent me a bottle of bourbon for Mixology Monday back in June (the Bourbon theme one). What I’d found was that it’s a good mixing bourbon, of a different sort than, say, Maker’s Mark – Maker’s is more subtle and sweet while the rye punch of Bulleit is a bit more aggressive. Like with any ingredient, you need to tailor your specific drink to the ingredients you have.

That being said, I already had a batch of the honey syrup made up, so I used it, and came up with what I call a Falls Station Rickey – called that because I live in the Falls Station condo complex. (Please do not stalk me unless you are a hot chick.)

Falls Station Rickey
12 black currants
1 oz. honey syrup
1.5 oz. Bulleit bourbon
.5 oz lime juice
club soda
2 mint leaves
Muddle the currants with the honey syrup. Add the bourbon and lime juice and shake with ice. Double strain into an ice filled collins glass. Take two mint leaves, smack ‘em, then top with club soda and give it a bit of a stir before serving.

Tart, but a bit of mint, and yummy, I liked it. I think I could play around with this recipe a ton – I have thought and thought and thought about adding a dash of Fee’s Mint Bitters to it, and honestly, you could definitely use a sweeter bourbon, but I’d highly suggest an aggressive one like Buffalo Trace, and if you use simple syrup, depending on how sweet you make your syrup and like your drinks, you’ll probably have to tweak it.

Me, I love me some sweet, so next time I might try with Eagle Rare 10 year old and my demerara sugar simple syrup.

Kevin, thanks again for hosting, and the rest of y’all, I can’t wait to see what y’all did. Me, I’m going to finish off the Stella Artois I’m drinking right now (having had some Glenfiddich 15 year old with my La Gloria Cubana Serie R #5, a Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, and two hefeweizens while enjoying this incredibly great weather and reading a Warhammer 40K novel), play some Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 on my 360, and hopefully avoid the urge to do too much Google-ing of the USA’s women’s beach volleyball team…