I’m drawing my drink recipes from a variety of sources, including cocktail books, suggestions from readers, and other blogs that have gone down this Halloween cocktail road before. In the latter category is a website by an “Icelandic Girl” named Helga Dis, who lives in Reykjavik. The blog is dedicated to trying out new drinks. As she’s trapped on a God-forsaken island in the North Atlantic, she has to make many of her ingredients from scratch, which causes one to appreciate BevMo.
Anyway, Helga’s got four drinks from 2020, and the “Haunted Graveyard” is one of them. Let’s try it!
The Recipe: Add 2 oz of bourbon, 1 oz of maple syrup, a couple of orange slices, and ice to a cocktail shaker. Shake and pour into a glass with fresh ice. Add a few drops of orange cocktail bitters, and add a garnish of torched rosemary. This last ingredient is created by simply holding a lighter under a small spring of rosemary until it gets a little charred. Helga’s instructions include this embarrassingly nervous warning about the process:
“Now for the mandatory fire warning. Burning the rosemary garnish is optional, and we do not recommend doing this unless you have a fire extinguisher close by. You should preferably have another person on standby in case anything goes wrong. Having a bowl with water close by might also be a good idea as the sprig can simply be dropped into the water in emergencies….Be careful not to burn your fingers or anything other than the sprig.” Thanks, Firepup.
Anyway, I somehow managed to mix this cocktail without immolating myself:
The Ratings:
The taste is rich and flavorful. It’s very drinkable indeed. The maple and orange flavors really come through, though you hardly even notice the bourbon. The rosemary is a ghostly presence, but it’s definitely there. And I love rosemary. So this gets a solid 3 points out of four.
(Here I should admit that we didn’t have any oranges in the house, so I substituted segments of mandarin oranges for proper orange slices. Afterwards, my wife suggested that I should have substituted pineapple for the [nonexistent] orange slices. So I tried this on a second attempt:
Holy Hawaiian Pizza! This was a huge improvement. The pineapple has a bit more sharpness than the (mandarin) orange, and thus weaves its way between the bourbon and syrup quite nicely. If the recipe had called for pineapple instead of orange, I would have given the taste 4 points.
The appearance isn’t that remarkable, with the usual bourbon hue. But the spring of torched rosemary is distinctive. Perhaps just knowing that it’s been torched adds some Halloween vibe. I’ll give it 2 points.
The name gets the full 2 points. Not just a graveyard but a haunted graveyard. That’s pretty phantasmic. Way to go, Icelandic Girl!
Grand Total: 7 points (8 points for the pineapple version).
Chasing Phantoms 