Go Fish Galvez

Tropical refreshment!

Two, actually.

Not to load up, you understand. Just to find the exact ingredients for a very special drink to properly commemorate this very special day.

And what was so special about today, you ask?

Well, today was none other than that magical, long-awaited day when one enormous, filthy, flea-bitten, nasty, and utterly dead and awful albatross was finally cut, and cleanly so, from around the neck of a certain semi-ancient mariner.

Which would be me, of course. Your humble author.

Hallelujah, let there be dancing in the streets!

Okay, so this celebratory theme isn’t actually about a rotting bird and I’m not really all that ancient either nor do I ply the seas. Still, I love the poem and the metaphor fits, except for the part about shooting that gigantic waterfowl in the first place. Anyway, let’s just leave it at that.

So, back to those ingredients:

1 oz. gin (and make that Bombay Sapphire, please)
1/2 oz. cherry brandy (couldn’t find Heering on the island so I had to settle)
4 oz. pineapple juice
1/2 oz. lime juice (not fresh but Nellie & Joe’s Famous Key West lime juice, in a festive bottle at least)
1/4 oz. Cointreau® orange liqueur
1/4 oz. D.O.M. Benedictine herbal liqueur
1/3 oz. grenadine (Rose’s, of course)
1 dash Angostura® bitters

And what does all of that spell? Why, Singapore Sling, of course!

And hopefully as close a variant as possible to the original circa 1910-1915 recipe from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.

(Clearly, authenticity is important to me, in libations as well as people and houses!)

Not only is the Singapore Sling the quintessentially exotic and tropical drink befitting any celebration island-style, it also has more than a little historical significance for me personally, on this particular island.

And the final why of that is because this was the drink that my old buddy Crump and I ordered at dinner one fabulous surfside night at Galveston’s famous Balinese Room, at the end of a wild and spontaneous drive down to the island from Dallas, tripped off solely on a whim for some fresh seafood fixin’s, back when we were ridiculously young, so many moons, and now decades, ago.

Cheers to then, and now!