Dr.
Bamboo's
Drink of the Week
Text and illustrations copyright Craig
Mrusek Illustration & Design
Zirbenz Kingsley
1.5 oz. gin
.5 oz. Zirbenz
2-3 dashes orange bitters
3 oz. tonic
Build first 3 ingredients in rocks glass
with ice. Top with tonic and stir. Garnish with lime wedge.
I have a strange fascination with drink ingredients
that no one seems to like. I don’t know whether I simply feel sorry for
them in an orphaned-puppy kind of way, or if it’s more of a desire to find
a way to successfully employ something everyone else has deemed unusable.
Probably a bit of both.
One ingredient that appears to have been resoundingly
written off by the cocktail community is Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur. For
those that haven’t sampled it, it’s piney. Extremely piney. Imagine grinding
up a Christmas wreath, adding the floor sweepings from a 7th-grade shop
class and steeping it in a jug of Everclear for a month. Now you’ve got
the picture. But I like it, and I think you will too.
Without going into the boring details of my personal
quest to redeem Zirbenz, I’ll cut to the chase and say that I found gin
to be an excellent base spirit to combine it with.
Yep, it’s a just a Gin & Tonic. With Zirbenz.
And a blip of bitters to wrap it all up. (It also helps the drink immensely
to squeeze the lime wedge into it.)
A simple drink to be sure, but here’s the
trick: The gin makes or breaks it. I won’t reveal how many different ones
I tried, but I found that a lot of straightforward London drys don’t work
well. Plymouth isn’t bad, but the ones I’d put at the top of the heap were
North Shore #6 and Right. They’re both very soft, and I think it’s exactly
this lack of sharpness that makes them match up so well with the Zirbenz,
dulling it’s bite and making it whisper rather than shout.
Bottoms up!
 Who
is Dr. Bamboo? Some say he is a renegade scientist who renounced his original
field of study to dedicate himself to the advancement of cocktail culture.
Others claim he is a powerful shaman who practices the forbidden arts of
a long-forgotten civilization. Still others maintain he is actually a traveler
from a faraway world, sent to our planet as an ambassador of intergalactic
fine living. Whatever the truth may be, one thing is certain: He makes
a mean Martini. Vist Dr. Bamboo's
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