Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Smut, don't drink it!
It is a general rule that no pissant Northern European country is truly independent until it has its own heinous liqueur, for the olds to sip as an indigestif so that local cuisine tastes better in comparison, and for the younglings to drink aggressively to show their unconcern and immunity to flavour.
Vana Tallinn is built on base notes of bay rum aftershave, accented by subtle harmonics of gentian, eucalyptus, cubeb and Purple Drank. It triggered reminded the sister-in-law of growing up in her father's apothecary pharmacy when every winter he would brew up 44-galloon drums of cough syrup -- each of the neighbourhood doctors favouring a slightly different recipe, a slightly different melange of herbs and spices to mask the underlying laudanum and coca extract. Of course this was before antibiotics, roughly contemporaneous with Paracelsus.
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13 comments:
I'm betting he did.
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How long do they have to steep the Estonians to get the flavo(u)r?
Tigris: these days HPLC extracts the relevant bitterness, but solubilising them is a bugger.
Smut: I think it's the long cold winters that does it.
No caraway seed? I am disappoint!
I just strained and bottled my nocino... an initial sip reveals an overabundance of clove flavor. It's supposed to mellow for another month or so before it's actually good.
extracts the relevant bitterness
Yep, Estonians got plenty of that.
I DID NOT SAY THAT.
Useful advice. Thanks.
I used to be married to a Latvian - they had a similar ghastly undrinkable liquid. Must go with the neighbourhood.
I thought about trying the Riga Black Balsam but there is the lingering suspicion that it exists purely for foisting on tourists and laughing at the ensuing facial expressions.
It was an interesting flight from Tallinn to Bremen the other morning. My neighbour in the window seat was a Russian-Estonian woman, although she felt emphatically and undividedly and unhyphenatedly Russian, as she informed the other passengers from time to time (also 'Estonian is a shit fuck language'). Her identification with her linguistic / cultural identity did not stop her from opening a flask of Vana Tallinn as soon as the plane was off the ground, from which to seek solace for the duration of the flight. Perhaps she was nervous about flying. I should note that she generously offered me a sip, but it is not the way of my people to drink spirits before breakfast.
Anyway, about an hour into the flight she needed a nap, and tried to make herself comfortable across the whole row of seats, her knees across mine... but the stolid Estonian in the aisle seat refused to let her place her feet in his lap, which led to another display of nationalism and the direction of choice epithets po-Russkij towards him, with me in the middle feeling like a UN peacekeeper.
This was preceded and followed by sessions of inconsolable sobbing. About 10 minutes before landing, the woman was seized by an urgent and understandable need for the toilet, and it was difficult to convince her that the cabin crew had locked the lavatories some 15 minutes earlier. I do not envy whomever had the job of helping her down the disembarking steps.
So far the Vana Tallinn has not had that effect on me, but perhaps I have not got the dosage right.
It was after breakfast time in NZland, no?
Helpful Bastard helping Smut
Aside from that, how was the flight?
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It is a general rule that no pissant Northern European country is truly independent until it has its own heinous liqueur
As goes Europe, so goes the Americas. A popular drink in Chile is the piscola (pisco and coke). Yes they drink piss cola...
Aside from that, how was the flight?
Friends don't let friends fly RyanAir.
Interesting similarity in colour schemes between their swill & Yankee swill. An international code?
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