This seems like as good a place as any to post a new invention I came up with for reddit's Are You Afraid of the Dark cocktail challenge. The idea is to get as black a result as you can imagine (without resorting to coloring tricks like charcoal).
I surveyed the dark stuff in my bar and came up with:
- 1 1/2 oz Cruzan blackstrap rum
- 1 oz Amer Boudreau
- 1/2 oz balsamic vinegar
- 1/4 oz syrup from brandied cherries
Stir; strain; one big rock.
As I mentioned on reddit, this is kind of a bizarro-world daiquiri. I quite like the prominent balsamic flavor: it occurs to me that balsamic's darker acidity bears an analogous relationship to lime juice that blackstrap rum does to a white rum.
I take it as a proud measure of my growing mixology skills that the proportions I tried out first seemed spot-on—a first!
The complaints upthread about Cruzan Blackstrap's unsubtle tendency to take over drinks are true to my experience too, but here I thought the other ingredients hold their own against it.
