Post #733974 by Swanky on Tue, Dec 30, 2014 9:08 AM

Ingredients are everything!

I took many of my cocktails for granted. Then I ran out of my preferred falernum and passionfruit syrup. So I made my own falernum to get me through and took my passionfruit juice and converted it to syrup. I made a cocktail or two and they were pretty rough. Well, very rough. If I made you a Zombie Punch with my normal stuff, you'd love it. If I made you a Zombie Punch with these ingredients, you'd hate it!

It took me many bad drinks to dial in the right flavor, but I was only able to figure it out because I had made it pretty perfectly before. If I had never made a Zombie right, I'd have no idea how to make these ingredients work.

So, I can certainly see making a Zombie Punch and not caring for it.

For me, I found my Passionfruit Syrup was so strong I had to use about 1/4 of what the recipe called for, and my falernum was about twice as strong.

This is where regular mixing pays off. You get to know your ingredients and can make the drink work by adjusting on the fly.

And then I mixed a pair of Zombie Punch "Lites" and managed to double the lime juice and killed those.. And I was stone cold sober! Took me till the next day to realize what I had done.

It is easy to take a good cocktail for granted when you have been doing this for a long time. And it is fairly easy to follow a recipe to the T and it turn out awful.