Coke through a Straw 1 & 2

Yesterday was the birthday of Jack Kerouac, and for some perverse reason my drink of the day calendar celebrated it with 2 shots it calls Liquid Cocaine. I made no. 1 yesterday and no. 2 today, since today is another nonalcoholic drink day on my calendar, and that's pretty perverse too.

Both recipes call for dark rum (Myer's, of course), Jaegermeister, Rumple Minze, and for the fourth ingredient, yesterday, root beer schnapps, and today Goldschlaeger. This sentence 10 times fast read.

Wikipedia has a very interesting article on Jaegermeister. It's the market leader in herbal liqueurs in Germany, and they sponsor a lot of sports stuff. Even table tennis. Germans play table tennis? To work off aggression? The Poles introduced it to them. It was used as a field anesthetic in World War II (to dull the pain, if nothing else) and is used as a cure-all in German homes and American frat houses still today. I'm not a big licorice/anise fan, but it's not bad. I wouldn't drink it all the time, by any means, though it wasn't as bad as I'd been warned. My neighbor, early 30s and former party girl, told me she used to slug it though she wouldn't commit to what she thought it tastes like. Uh huh.

Goldschlaeger, on the other hand, is of Swiss origin (thus the gold flakes; why does that not surprise me?) but is actually made in Italy. I tasted a little first and couldn't figure out what the flavor was. Then I looked on the bottle and saw the magic words 'cinnamon schnapps'. Duh. OK, why are the Swiss making cinnamon liqueurs? Besides the fact they needed some flavor, any flavor, for a schnapps to float their Nazi gold in. Do municipal sewage treatment plants get rich on this stuff?

Rumple Minze, on the other hand, I didn't bother to buy. I found it at my friendly neighborhood liquor mart, but I saw on the side of the bottle that it's just another peppermint schnapps, and I already have a bottle of 100 proof. That'll work.

Verdicts: waste of good liqueur in general. Liquor is like chiles: you shouldn't gulp them down just for the heat or the buzz and not for the flavor. I know, I'm un (non-evangelical) American. Certainly non-Lutheran. The root beer schnapps one yesterday didn't do anything for me at all. Just too many flavors and too much alcohol. I'm supposed to gulp down a quarter cup of high-proof alcohol in one gulp? I'm still learning.

Today's, with the Goldschlaeger, I liked better. The cinnamon stands out, though after the 2nd or 3rd gulp the Jaegermeister started to burn the back of my throat a bit. I bought mini-bar size bottles of each of them. Hopefully I'll have another shot recipe or two later this year where I can use them up. Or use it to kill wasps and flies like they do in Germany. Why does that not surprise me?