The Bad Idea: My favourite cocktail

This is a cocktail I make for my friends. It combines my love of Long Island Iced Tea with my love of spicy ginger ale. Enjoy! I call it "The Bad Idea" because it just doesn't taste alcoholic at all, but it packs quite a punch. Day drinking these is certainly a bad idea!

The recipe below is enough to make just over 1 litre of the base alcohol blend. If you store it in a glass bottle, you can keep it around forever!

Ingredients needed:

• Vodka (I use Smirnoff Blue or Skyy)
• Gin (I use Suntory Sui Gin)
• White Rum (I use Bacardi)
• Silver Tequila (I use Sauza Tequila Plata)
• Triple Sec (I use Cointreau)
• Bitters (I use standard Angostura Bitters)
• Ginger Ale (I use Wilkinson Spicy Ginger Ale, or Fentiman's)

Other items needed:

• Tall glasses for serving
• Ice
• Measuring jug if you don't want to eyeball ratios
• Cocktail Shaker (optional)
• Lime for garnish (optional)
• A spare glass spirit bottle or PET soft drink bottle (optional)

Method

The main thing to keep in mind is the ratio for the booze. For the vodka you want to use two measures, and for all the other spirits (except the bitters), you want to use one measure.

Using standard 25ml measures, that means 1 drink will contain:

• 50 ml Vodka
• 25 ml Gin
• 25 ml White Rum
• 25 ml Silver Tequila
• 25 ml Triple Sec

When I am making this to share with a group, I use the bottle of vodka as the base, and work the rest of the measurements out around it.

It's pretty straightforward though:

1 bottle of vodka is 750ml. Half of that is 375ml, to make it easier to work with, just round that up to 400ml. Then just divide that by 4 to get to the amount you need for the other spirits.

Here's a tip: if you don't have a measuring jug / spirit jigger, but do have kitchen scales, you can use them to measure the quantity. 1 gram of spirit will be close enough to 1 ml of spirit for this recipe.

This isn't the exact ratio you would use when making it one by one, but it is close enough for a big batch, and it won't taste all that different.

That leaves us with:

• 750 ml Vodka
• 100 ml Gin
• 100 ml White Rum
• 100 ml Silver Tequila
• 100 ml Triple Sec

When preparing the drinks one by one:

1. Fill your cocktail shaker with ice and add the spirits and close
2. Shake the cocktail shaker until it is too cold to hold
3. Put some ice in a tall serving glass
4. Add 3 - 5 drops of bitters to the ice
5. Pour over the shaken spirits
6. Top up the glass with ginger ale
7. Stir to combine
8. Serve with a garnish of lime

If your cocktail shaker is big enough, you can shake two drinks at once!

When preparing for a group of people

You're going to want to use either a spare spirit bottle, or (in the worst case) a spare PET bottle.

When I make this for a group, it's usually because we're going out to a picnic or having a karaoke trip, where it's not practical to make the cocktails one-by-one, but since Bitters are small enough to carry anywhere, you can still bring them.

In this case, the method is a lot easier:

1. Combine the spirits in the bottle.

Then when you are at the location:

1. Put ice in the cup if you have it
2. Add 3-5 drops of the bitters
3. Put about 3 fingers of the combined spirits next
4. Top up with ginger ale
5. Stir to combine

It won't be exactly the same as making them one by one, but it still tastes delicious.