Apparently Spambots Like Booze, Too

Just found the following comment attached to my post about drinking port:

Good article! We are linking to this particularly great article on
our site. Keep up the great writing.

Oh, I will. I’ll even throw in keeping up the great drinking for ya. For FREE.

No, no, it’s research!

I finally broke down and tried port. I was buying wine for dinner the other night and happened to stumble into the port section, and I just thought…why not? I’m curious what the gentlemen are always drinking after dinner in the novels I read (and write!). Any proper historical fiction writer would know.

This…is so much more like alcoholic grape juice than actual wine is! Wow. Port is super-sweet. I did not expect that. (Also way more alcoholic than regular red wine. Did not expect that, either.) I kind of like it, though.

I started with the very cheapest bottle, since the bottles were all smaller than regular wine and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a style of beverage I wasn’t sure I liked. Now I feel much more confident trying some of the more expensive and, it is to be presumed, better quality ports available to me. We’ll see if I continue to like them as I climb the scale of nicety. 🙂

In the meantime…here muse-y, muse-y, muse-y. I have your favorite 19th century gentleman’s drink….

Stumbled Onto a Sexy Southern Ginge

Or, The Sexy Southern Ginge: A LeFevre Original Cocktail

Tried a new drink last night.

A recipe of necessity because after a really terrible day, for a lot of different reasons, I needed a good stiff drink when I got home and found myself limited only by the contents of my kitchen and the bounds of my creativity.

For some reason…it occurred to me that my good-for-settling-the-stomach ginger ale might actually be a fine mixer with my Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka.

I think I went roughly 1 part to 2, vodka to ginger ale.

Ladies and gentlemen…a success! Verily a success! And there was much rejoicing.

The combination makes a light, refreshing sweet cocktail. The dryness of the ginger ale cuts down on the cloying sweetness of the tea-flavored vodka, and the flavors mixed really well together. Firefly is often served with a lemon in it, which would probably still make a good garnish with this combination, though I cannot verify as I did not have any fresh lemon on hand. I can’t speak as to whether the ginger ale mitigates the hangover Firefly can cause because I only had one (granted it had like three ounces of the vodka, but…).

I coined the name Southern Ginge for it just because…Firefly is made in the South, and the South is home to sweet tea, and I was mixing it with GINGER ale…and who doesn’t love a good Southern gentleman or a sexy ginge?

Exactly.