I wasn’t sure I had a fourth Fun Home cocktail in me. For a while I had been playing with a Paper Plane/Aviation hybrid to riff on the “I wanna play airplane” lyric, but that didn’t pan out (mostly because I’m not that crazy for either of those cocktails anyway). There was nothing else really thematic that was striking me. But it was the last week of the show and I knew I wanted to do something. I was very close to taking one of my pre-existing unnamed drinks and giving it a Fun Home title, something I’ve really tried to avoid here up till now.
In the end, though not directly tied to a strong, unified drinklist theme (which none of these Fun Home cocktails has adhered to anyway — one being a song, another being a twist on a lyric, another being a line from the show), I did hit upon something. There are a few ingredients that are referenced, in one way or another, here and there in the show: cherry (the casket wood), coffee in the diner, chocolate in the NYC scene. I thought these would all fit nicely into one drink. As for the name, our scene breakdown provided such a great offering I had to use it:
My Newfound Queerness
- 1.5 oz. silver tequila (Corzo)
- 0.5 oz. mezcal (El Búho)
- 0.5 oz. Tempus Fugit creme do cacao
- 0.25 oz. St. George coffee liqueur
- 0.25 oz. Leopold Bros. Michigan tart cherry liqueur
- dash of mole bitters (Bittermens)
Stir with ice and strain into a Nick and Nora (why not?).
The St. George offers a nice bitter coffee taste, so that, along with the mole bitters, counters the chocolate nicely. The cherry in Leopold Bros. is especially tart, compared to, say, Cherry Heering, so that adds some needed brightness. And these ingredients just screamed tequila/mezcal to me. It might not fit a theme, and the name might not be evocative of the ingredients, but it’s sure tasty. Sometimes I should just worry about making a good drink.
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