This edition of Drinks That Aren’t Drinks is slightly different than usual. It’s slightly more expensive, but I decided to include it because it is made out of things I had in the cupboard and wanted to use up and therefore still carries the spirit of Booze Review. This drink started off as a Bermuda Rum Swizzle, but I’ve bastardized it so much that it is now a completely different drink
The unassembled Rusty Bishop
Ingredients:
Vodka
Club Orange or any kind of fizzy orange drink (I have also used Sprite with good results)
Grenadine
Angostura Bitters
Lemon (optional)
Lime (optional)
Crushed ice (optional)
Not all screwdrivers are racist
Start by mixing vodka, orange and ice. You’re pretty much making a screwdriver here, except the orange is carbonated. I guess you could call it a power screwdriver or maybe a sonic screwdriver but that isn’t really important. This drink doesn’t taste too strongly of alcohol so don’t skimp out on the vodka. I’ve made a few of these using Sprite instead of orange and it also tasted pretty good so it’s entirely up to your personal preference. The orange looks better when the grenadine is added but if you’re reading Booze Review then you probably don’t care how beautiful your drink is. I guess I could add umbrellas and coat the rim of the glass in coloured sugar, but for now I’m going to keep it simple and only include 7 ingredients.
Kind of like a Tequila Sunrise without the tequila
Next add a splash of grenadine. I’m fairly shitty at pouring grenadine and always end up pouring far too much into the glass but this time it went pretty well. Adding too much leaves a really sweet syrup at the bottom of the glass so try to avoid fucking it up if you can. I’ve been trying to use up my bottle of grenadine for quite some time but unfortunately a little goes a long way and you can’t just add lots of it like you can with vodka. I’m hoping that at this rate it might be finished by Christmas but I’m worried that by then I’ll have developed a taste for it and the whole cycle will start over again.
Almost finished!
Now you add bitters. I’m not really sure how to use bitters so I probably use too much. I usually add about 6 dashes which was originally enough to make an entire pitcher of Bermuda Rum Swizzles, but as long as it tastes fine I don’t really care. The bitters will float at the top, so give it a quick stir. You can just give the top a quick stir if you want to keep the Tequila Sunrise appearance or you can stir the whole thing if you don’t give a shit. I once sniffed a bottle of Angostura Bitters and felt extremely light headed, so you might want to try that while you’re at it.
The Rusty Bishop in its native habitat
The drink is pretty much finished now, but I’ve been adding slices of lemon and lime recently because if I’m going to all the effort of making this drink then I might as well go all the way and have plants floating in it. When I was buying the lemon and lime, the woman behind the counter looked at them both and said “A lemon and a lime” in a really disappointed tone as if she knew damn well they were going into some poorly thought out drink. I guess I had the last laugh since I’m drunk and she isn’t.
Overall the Rusty Bishop is a surprisingly good drink for something thrown together from unwanted ingredients. It takes most of its flavour from the orange and grenadine. It tastes slightly of those orange flavour vitamin tablets which dissolve in water, but it’s best if you try not to think about that while drinking it. The end can get pretty sickening from the grenadine which sinks to the bottom, but I suspect this is because of my shitty pouring. If you begin to get sick of drinking Rusty Bishops, you can start dropping a few of the ingredients, probably the grenadine, and have a normal drink. The Rusty Bishop is kind of time consuming, but it’s good for cleaning out the cupboard. It probably isn’t a great thing to order at a bar, but for drinking alone where you can hide your shame, it’s quite tasty.
Booze Review rating: 8/10 deliciouses
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