The Guinness Shandy and the Half and Half

It's inevitable--Margaret will be drinking to excess tomorrow.  As will several others of you.

Can you drink to excess and still stay on the safe side of life? Of course you can.

To satisfy the insatiable Margaret et al., here’s not a bad way to start off your day tomorrow.  Try a Guinness Shandy, or a Half and Half.  Or should I say an 'arf-'n'-'arf?

Mostly a Shandy is an ale with ginger ale or lemon-lime soda. But there’s no special reason to restrict it to ale, as the folks at Guinness will be glad to testify.

Guinness Shandy

• .75 pint Guinness
• .25 pint lemon-lime soda

If you want to stick to your basic Shandy, and feel bound to Eire tomorrow or even tonight, mix half and half Harp and ginger ale.

°   °   °   °   °

A black and tan also goes by the name Half and Half, especially when the components are all Irish.

Half & Half

• .5 pint Harp
• .5 pint Guinness
~~~
Add Harp to pint glass
Add Guinness by pouring it over the back of a spoon

We find that you can now make great ones at home, thanks to the widget. We’d add: a big spoon, maybe a wooden spoon, one that best fits to the contours of your glass.

Please call a cab at some point, Margaret.

My Broker

My local purveyor stocks Broker's Gin, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.  The marketing tag "World's best gin" raised my antennae so I thought I'd take the 94 proof stripe--there's no sense in buying a less-fortified bottle of prospective exaggeration...

But when I teased some ounces into my shaker and made my first martini, I realized we indeed had a superior gin on our hands!

On the key juniper-sugar axis that defines nine-tenths of the gin experience, Broker's is low both.  Its juniper is faint and its sugar is nonexistent.  It may have a dozen botanicals but none are especially noteworthy.  In short, this is very fresh, very pure gin, a kind of gin-maker's gin, in which flavor doesn't beat you over the head but nonetheless announces itself as gin, very definitely so.

So I like Broker's.  It is flavored well by whatever you flavor it with--tonic, or bitters (I like pink gins) and it's the perfect weapons-grade base for a French 75.  I haven't been as pleased by a new gin since my first Junipero.  I look forward to a lifelong relationship, in which it joins the shelf with Junipero, Beefeater, and Plymouth.  Good on ye, lads!

Drink one day, or drink 364...

Noted: Herradura is once again trying to push something for St. Patrick's Day to blogosphere. Bushmills--not so much in the blogosphere, but all over billboards and radio for St. Patrick's Day. Which is the sexier brand? Be honest.

Also, a pleasant oddity has been spotted, local to me: our dearly beloved San Antonio Winery has released its own tequila--Angeles de Oro.  I haven't tried it yet but I am just about to pull the trigger.