Just like last episode I wanted to create a cocktail for our other lead character, this time Optimus Primal. Kit came up with the idea for this one – Kit from More Than Meets the Pod, who we recorded with along with Harper for episode 182. We’re calling this one:
THE PRIMAL BRASS MONKEY
Okay, Brass Monkey. There’s a bit to unpack here. You’ve probably heard of it mostly from the Beasty Boys song. There are several different booze-related drinks using the name “Brass Monkey.” There was a malt beverage, but the main one, and the version that has been confirmed to be about in the song, is a now discontinued brand of premixed cocktail made by the Heublein Company during the 70s through the 90s. They were some of the first in the game of premixed cocktails, pretty much beer, wine, and hard liquor were your choices at the time. The blend of ingredients was proprietary, but the prevailing wisdom seems to be that it was dark rum, vodka, and orange juice, primarily. THEREFORE! For this cocktail you will need:
· 1 oz. (30 ml) white rum
o Dealer’s choice, this is an unassuming drink, so I just used Bacardi
· 2 oz. Bermuda black rum – I used Gosling’s Black Seal
· 1 oz. vodka – this is basically just adding ethanol
· 3 oz. (60 ml) fresh OJ
· 1 oz. lime juice
· ¾ oz. (22 ml) simple sugar
· 2 dashes Angostura bitters
· Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a tall Collins glass over fresh ice
· Fill with club soda
· Garnish with a maraschino cherry
o I did do a bit of an extra garnish with this just to be fun. I sliced super thin cuts of the orange with the peel intact and folded them into a large cube silicon tray and filled it with orange juice and froze it.
This is a pretty light drink, both in sippablility and ABV, it’s only about 12% alcohol by volume. I feel like we could up the complexity and flavor of this if I included some overproof rum like Rum Fire or Lemon Hart, but the former is for some reason suddenly hard to find, and I used the latter in the last cocktail. Plus, the funkiness of them might blow the drink out entirely, given the fairly delicate flavors here. I tried it with ginger beer instead of club soda, but, again, it dominated and the ginger was pretty much all I got.