low_delta

Like a man courting at a bucolic woman’s club of yore, or a denizen of the demi-monde; I have a revelation of uncommonly sagacious penetration: we need to drink more Juleps.

Mint Juleps that is, the Derby J, the cocktail of the Greatest Two Minutes in Sports, a timeframe which perfectly matches another lascivious activity that I do not enjoy enough of. Let’s face the facts: life is just a little touch sweeter if the clapper-clawing of the workday is softened by a cocktail, and if diversity is the spice of life, why not this one?

Allow me to present my latest ratiocination: The Julep.

Yes, it’s true: those Derby hats are a touch blue, making me yearn like a street boy engorged with raucous crudity. And a Julep should first and foremost amplify this condition. Some may say Genever, but in fact Bourbon is the key to a Julep. Rowan’s Creek Bourbon. Cut to 101 Rowan’s lays down a foundation of sweet and salty caramel; like a Schweddy’s gourmand popcorn ball, intermixing flavors of chocolate nibs, Madagascar vanilla bean, savory pretzels, sweet home-spun butter and toasted marshmallows. This dramatic complexity is to be exploited with adroit fidelity, and here is how:

But first, for all my buncombe dithyrambs I must say: Senator Henry Clay, the supposed inventor of the Julep, was wrong. His elephantine loutish thrusting cannot put one over on me – a janissary of taste and character would never offer a lady a smash. Truculent “mulling” – I speak of Mint – is louche and should be cast off like a cross eyed south-Georgia tramp.

Juleps are neither smashes nor slings, flips or coolers; they derive from the ancient Persian Golâb, a love-potion of flowering rose-hips. Juleps are delectably sensual, smooth as a lover’s caress up the spine, lips resting on the nape of the neck, mutual body heat warming the core like a shot of fine Bourbon.

Comparatively a mulled drink is a freakish discharge, brought about by the accidental application of a garbage truck to the wrong end of a slaughter-house; whose putrid, nebulous vaporings can only be concealed with the gooey ferment to which all newbie bartenders retreat: simple syrup.

Lo and behold! This honest bard’s tale is made plain: discard the mint, discard the syrup, and remember Scheherazade! It was she that made our bullish ukases clear: a liqueur from the flowering rose hip, whose sensuous aromas beguile as well as stimulate – rose petals and brandy wine tomatoes, lutists and fantees; grabbling, groping, grasping and groaning, all on top of the Bourbon for a thousand and one nights or more; nicely solving the aforementioned two minute problem as well as making a good cocktail! (Oddly enough, such a liqueur is made in Chicago. I’ll take a good tool wherever I can find it.)

And finally, to climax: a squirt of allspice, ginger and black pepper: a bitters from Jamaica – the Bittercube Jamaican #1 bitters! The palate needs refocillation as much as the body needs stimulation and I shall not be the one to disappoint. Like music in syncopated time our Julep is completed by juxtapositions, neither conquest nor conquistador: pepper punctuating vanilla, allspice playing with rose, ginger mounting caramel; a morning in dishevelment, pure bliss whose titillating whiskers greet the fallow dawn – this is the experience of a great Julep. And you deserve it all: 400 thread count sheets, satin nighties, down blankets; only the best, and the Waterford Julep.

It is a bitter and sad Ginsberg howl that claims this drink arrives late, be it may that the Derby was two weeks ago, your pleasure knows no season: the Waterford Julep.