Slarty's World

Café Havana makes a mean mojito, but a few of the bartenders also make a fantastic vodka gimlet. Instead of using the standard Rose’s lime juice, they muddle a lime and sugar together in the glass, add ice and vodka, and a mouth watering beverage is born. Delicious.

I have started to make these at home, they are a lot more work than a regular gimlet and definitely are hard to accomplish on a mass scale, but they are so tasty. The question I have for the drinking public is this, is it tacky to leave all the lime wedges in the drink after they have been muddled? I don’t mind them, but think it might make the drink more aesthetically pleasing if I strained them out and made room for more ice.

A new travel show on the HD channel INHD has really got me excited. The show is called “Three Sheets” and features the host, Zane Lamprey, traveling to distant locals to learn about the drinking culture. What a great job and concept. I have seen the Costa Rica show and the Belgium show.

I think the host does a good job of highlighting the funny and interesting aspects of each drinking culture. The Costa Rica show features many of flaming drinks (which I tried to duplicate last night to limited, but not painful, success). There is also a drinking game that goes along with it, explained in the post from Wikipedia:

A Three Sheets drinking game was introduced in the Costa Rica episode. Whenever the host drinks the viewers must drink, whenever a monkey appears on screen – the first person to spot the monkey may select another viewer who then has to drink, and when the host mentions a friend all viewers must drink from another viewers beverage. The monkey has only appeared in the Costa Rica episode, the other two clauses have been encountered in all episodes.

On a side note, Wikipedia has an interesting history of the phrase “Three Sheets to the Wind:”

Use of the term “three sheets to the wind” referring to a drunken person, is often thought to be a reference to this lines/ropes.

However, some claim the term “Three sheets to the wind” originated with the windmill and not the sailing world. A windmill typically has four arms or frames in which a sheet of canvas or sail could be attached by the miller to harness the wind. When the wind was light a sheet of canvas was attached to each of the four frames. If the wind was heavy only one canvas was used. If the wind was moderate two opposing sheets of canvas were used to keep the torque in balance. The millers never used just three sheets of canvas. They discovered that using three sheets would cause the building to gyrate uncontrollably and topple over, like a drunken sailor.