Tag: college football cocktails

Fine, I’ll drink Will Levis’ mayonnaise coffee, but you better believe I’m adding alcohol

Levis likes to take his coffee with mayonnaise and a side of intestinal distress. Fine. Whatever. I’ll drink it, but I’m adding booze.

I don’t know very much about Kentucky quarterback Will Levis. On the field, sure, I fully accept he is a first round talent in a passer-needy NFL. He escaped Sean Clifford’s shadow at Penn State to become the engine behind the Wildcats’ offense and, despite a relative downturn in UK’s fortunes, has been statistically more proficient in 2022 than he was in his breakout 2021.

Off the field, I am assured he is a maniac. Because, trolling or not, Will Levis drinks coffee like a genuine weirdo. Sugar and cream? Nah. Entirely too much mayonnaise, squirted from a squeeze bottle until it leaves frothy ropes of egg residue floating on top of nightmare sauce? Oh, hell yeah.

@will_levis

I have a very sophisticated pallet. @omgiaaa #fyp #TakeTheDayOffChallenge #BenefitOfBrows

♬ original sound – Will Levis

This may have been expert trolling, but goof or not he’s done it *multiple* times over the course of *multiple* years.

This brings me to the final week of college football’s regular season: rivalry week. What was supposed to be a Tennessee-Vanderbilt tribute has been scrapped in superstitious concern about ruining whatever voodoo Clark Lea has going on the city’s western border. Instead, I will make a sacrifice to the football gods and honor another southern football rivalry with SEC ties: Kentucky-Louisville.

The Governor’s Cup is a cool in-state rivalry that’s been absolute garbage to watch recently. The smallest margin of victory since 2016 in these games was a 27-point Louisville win in 2017. In the last three matchups Kentucky is 3-0 with a 153-44 aggregate score. That’s gross. Is it mayonnaise and whiskey in coffee gross?

Friends, let’s find out.

The Will Levis Irish Coffee

  • 9 oz, coffee
  • 1.5 oz, whiskey
  • 1.5 oz, Irish cream
  • Mayonnaise, any amount

(deep exhale) Hoooo boy. Here we go.

Oh no. The mayonnaise, it doesn’t melt. It doesn’t blend into the coffee. It isn’t a pat of butter, glazing the top of your coffee and making every sip an oily mess.

No, friends. It merely breaks into chunks, leaving your mouth to coordinate its way through an arctic sea of tiny, eggy, mushy icebergs. It is unsettling. And, worst of all, it is a beverage that tastes like mayonnaise.

That’s it. It overwhelms everything. Remember those Orbitz drinks from the mid-90s that had the little gelatin balls in them? Picture that, only warm, and every gelatin ball is in fact a tiny land mine attempting to blast your taste buds into thinking you’re eating a ham sandwich.

I mean, look at this cacophony of taste and texture.

It’s impossible to get past the floating bits of mayonnaise. Underneath there’s a nice, tried-and-true cocktail. But on top is sandwich spread. There’s no way Will Levis actually likes this.

But hey, he tricked me into drinking it, so more power to him. In retaliation, I will be sending him to the New York Jets in my next 2023 mock draft.

A boozed-up Roy Rogers is ideal for digesting the current state of Oklahoma football

Oklahoma’s unofficial state drink is a perfect vessel for bourbon and thus, a perfect drink for Oklahoma-Oklahoma State.

The official state drink of Oklahoma is milk, which is boring but fairly standard; it’s the official state drink, in one form or another, of 23 different places. This, somehow is not the lamest choice that could be made; Indiana’s official beverage is water, which is a fitting reminder to never visit Indiana.*

The unofficial state drink of Oklahoma is the Roy Rogers, which is slightly less boring. The plains equivalent of a Shirley Temple is cola and grenadine and … well that’s about it. It’s cherry Coke, named after a famous cowboy/entertainer whose identity, for east coast millennials, is more closely linked to rest stop fast food than the man himself.

Rogers was actually born in Ohio and lived in California, but he made a movie called Home in Oklahoma and … you know what? Too much backstory. Just know Coke and cherries are Oklahoma’s jam and so is college football.

That led to a very easy choice for Week 12’s College Football Cocktail, even if this year’s edition of Bedlam doesn’t look nearly as appealing as it did in August. Oklahoma has fallen on hard times following Lincoln Riley’s departure (and the departure of multiple players alongside him). Oklahoma State was 5-0 and a top 10 team for a minute but has gone 2-3 since (though reentered the rankings this week by virtue of a seven-point win over 4-6 Iowa State).

Regardless, in-state rivalries produce bonkers games and Oklahoma-Oklahoma State is no exception. The Cowboys have only won 18 times in 108 tries, but look at some of the scores this game has produced the last decade:

  • 37-33 (2021)
  • 47-48 (2018)
  • 52-62 (2017)
  • 38-35 (2014)
  • 48-51 (2012)

That rules! And while this will only be the second time in eight seasons where one of these teams is unranked, the Sooners, once a top 10 team in their own right, still have the extra gear to turn this into a true shootout.

Or maybe it ends something stupid like 23-14. 2022 is weird in the Sooner State.

Anyway, in honor of that we’re boozing up your Roy Rogers. It’s not very original or complex, but it’s good. And since I drank a damn dog bowl of garbage for UMass-New Mexico State, I’m happy with simple and good right now.

The Bedlam Roy Rogers

  • 6 oz. cola
  • 1.5 oz grenadine (or whatever’s at the bottom of your jar of maraschino cherries)
  • 1.5 oz bourbon

In honor of another Oklahoma rivalry, I’m using Yellow Rose bourbon — a Texas-based distillery — as a nod to the Red River Shootout (and because it was $9.99 a bottle at my local Woodman’s. That bargain cart, man. Wisconsinites know).

It tastes … pretty great actually. As a firm believer of the Badger State’s old fashioneds (brandy or bourbon or rye, all good), I can appreciate a good cherry-adled cocktail. This is the confluence of three sweet things — the Yellow Rose is light and mixes nicely — that work well together. Whiskey and Coke? Great. Cherry Coke? Wonderful. So yeah, this is basically a sweet drink turducken.

I used Faygo diet cola, which is fine because I’m cheap but obviously not as good as Coca-Cola. There’s probably room for this to get better, but since we’re mixing ingredients with bright red sugar water there isn’t really an emphasis in quality. Which, given the state of 2022 Bedlam, seems fair.

It’s very easy to drink, even if the sweetness is probably too much for say, three or four at a time. Of course, you could even that out by upping the bourbon content or maybe using a drier spirit like, say, rye. But I’m not here to tell you how to drink. I’m just here to … OK wait hold on what am I here for again?

*Unless the Indy 500 or Big Ten Basketball Tournament happen to be taking place.

Dr Pepper made a Bourbon Flavored Fansville Reserve. OK, so how does it mix with bourbon?

Dr Pepper made a special bourbon flavored Fansville Reserve. Turns out, it mixes well with … bourbon.

Dr Pepper — its official name has no period, which I assume frees it from having to produce a medical degree upon request — knows it’s not merely a soft drink. It’s a stately mixer.

The fruit-ish, cola-adjacent, difficult-to-describe soda is underappreciated for its ability to make a palatable cocktail with even the harshest of booze (Kamchatka, Fleischmann’s, any of the rubbing alcohol vodkas, really). Dr Pepper and whiskey is an easy, reliable mixed drink. And since bourbon country overlaps nicely with the college football fans Dr Pepper has eagerly courted every fall with a barrage of extended-universe advertisements, the soft drink goliath reached out to meet those fans halfway.

Behold, Dr Pepper Bourbon Flavored Fansville Reserve:

The limited edition brew can only be won via random drawings through Dr Pepper’s Perks website. You sign up and, through next week, get one online scratch-off card per day to try your luck at one of 2,300 cans. I used my media credentials and politeness to ask nicely for a sample to review, but in the spirit of full disclosure I also won one this morning after weeks of trying. Hooray!

I sampled the full sugar beverage — I generally lean toward diet sodas so as to make my caloric intake from beer less devastating — and wrote that up as our Beverage of the Week. But since I’m fighting off a cold and didn’t have the resources to put together a proper College Football Cocktail — Will Levis’ Irish mayonnaise coffee will have to wait until Week 13 — I went real basic with it.

I added bourbon to the bourbon Dr Pepper.

The Fansville Deliverance

  • 6 oz. Dr Pepper Fansville Reserve
  • 1.5 oz bourbon (Central Standard)

This was the logical progression after lucking into a can of bourbon-flavored soda. I was happy to sauce up Utah’s internet-famous dirty sodas a few months back, so of course I was going to see how bourbon pairs with, uh, bourbon-flavored soda.

For my booze I opted for Wisconsin’s Central Standard Craft Distillery’s cabernet-barreled bourbon. Bit of a weird choice, I know, but I didn’t want to mix Old Forester and I’ve been leaning pretty hard on Brother’s Bond lately. Plus, wine and Dr Pepper seem like a fit, right? My wine expertise ends at hastily-finished bottles of banana red MD 20/20 so it’s possible I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Turns out I might! The bourbon — poured probably too stiffly — blends nicely with the Dr Pepper to create a pleasant overall experience that ups the malt and fruit and hell maybe a little bit of chocolate? into a solid two-step cocktail.

It’s easy and, importantly, tasty. Dr Pepper knew what it was doing when it made a bourbon-flavored reserve. Adding booze to it doesn’t really change much, but it will help you accept the outcome of Texas A&M’s season more easily.

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2022 Notre Dame deserves a cocktail that’s ice cream, Pop Rocks and booze

It’s a Dippin’ Dots Irish coffee affogato. Why did I need Clemson-Notre Dame to figure this out?

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go for Marcus Freeman. He was the common-sense choice to lead post-Brian Kelly Notre Dame; a successful coordinator and rising prospect whose players loved him. He was supposed to carry on the features of Kelly’s success without any of the bugs that came with Kelly’s interactions with other human beings.

Instead, a team that started the season ranked fifth in the nation is 5-3. Freeman has lost at home to both Marshall and Stanford, neither of whom currently has a winning record and each of whom were at least 16-point underdogs. While that ship has righted itself slightly thanks to a 41-24 win over a ranked Syracuse team, stormy waters remain with a looming home date against No. 4 Clemson.

And also that game will be broadcast head-to-head against Alabama-LSU, Texas-Kansas State and even a Wake Forest-NC State game that’s more compelling on paper. So let’s drink about it.

This week’s cocktail was originally penciled in as a Irish Trash Can — a greenish beverage with caffeine and something like three shots per 12 ounces and something potent and weird enough to get us through the inherent insufferability of a prime time Notre Dame broadcast. But then the Irish started losing and the prospect of them being shot into orbit by a good, not great Clemson team had to be factored into the equation.

In honor of that, I pivoted. With the help of Tyler Nettuno I identified Dippin’ Dots as the proper tribute to a possible space-racing, seeing as they are the ice cream of the future and all. And since Notre Dame meshes easily with Irish coffee — and because I have all those ingredients at hand compared to the blue curacao and Red Bull necessary for the Trash Can — we’re gonna make this thing an affogato.

The Fighting Irish Launchpad Affogato

  • 6 oz. warm coffee
  • 1 oz Keeper’s Heart Irish + American whiskey
  • 1 oz. Irish cream
  • one pack, Dippin’ Dots (dealer’s choice on the flavor, since finding these things isn’t exactly easy to begin with)

An affogato is generally a scoop of plain ice cream topped with a shot of espresso. That doesn’t necessarily make it a drink, but dousing it with a full Irish coffee? Yeah, that’s a better fit.

The Dippin’ Dots work better in that regard, turning this from a float to a boozy, cold boba tea, in a way. Only I wasn’t able to find Dippin’ Dots because I don’t live at a baseball stadium or amusement park. The closest I could find was “Ittibitz,” which exist in unexplainably large quantities at my local Woodman’s but only in a what’s clearly a leftover pallet of Fourth of July “Red, White & Pop!” flavor.

It’s currently November 3 as of writing, which does leave lingering concerns about their freshness. Then again, every single Dippin’ Dot was originally manufactured in 1976 and we’re still chugging through those, so it’s probably a moot point.

The drink itself looks like someone dumped a bunch of patriotic confetti into a puddle. Some of the bits float and some of them sink but they all retain their aquarium gravel artificial color so … that’s fun.

Fortunately the drink tastes pretty good — possibly because it’s cream liqueur and ice cream(-adjacent balls of dubious origin) and coffee and whiskey, four things that all work exceptionally well on their own. It’s sweet but not overpoweringly so and while I don’t think it stands up on its own it holds up as a dessert cocktail.

Dippin’ Dots and booze work pretty nicely together, adding a little unique texture to a creamy drink. All the not-Pop Rocks of the ice cream linger until the last sip, too — I assumed they would have been washed out in the coffee/booze — so you get a nice fizzy finish. All in all the stupidity-to-quality ratio of this drink makes it a net win.

Damn. Now I’ve gotta find real Dippin’ Dots for the next Notre Dame game.

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Let’s drink a big dumb stupid Bayou mess in honor of Brian Kelly and LSU-Ole Miss

A Brian Kelly iced tea is booze and embarrassment, topped with cola, served over ice.

In my quest to create a special cocktail for every week of the 2022 college football season, I expected to make some pretty good drinks. I also expected to make some terrible ones.

I haven’t tried this week’s recipe before writing this introduction, but I am expecting it to fall firmly into the latter. But for good reason. It’s a Brian Kelly cocktail, so in its essence, it needs to be firmly unlikable, moderately embarrassing and ultimately look better on paper than in execution. And if I die in service of it, well …

Anywhoodles, Kelly’s LSU team is playing Ole Miss in Kelly’s latest opportunity to ruin football for someone else. These are two schools with a wonderful and, frankly, beautiful tailgating tradition, and I am going to try to capture parts of it while mostly ruining things as a whole.

Let’s see what we’ve got in store:

The Brian Kelly Sweet Tea:

  • 0.75 oz honeysuckle vodka
  • 0.75 oz Bayou satsuma (orange) rum
  • 0.75 oz Irish cream
  • 0.75 oz gin
  • 0.75 oz tequila
  • topped with cola

You know what no one says? “This Long Island iced tea could be creamier.” And yet, here we are, because jumping headfirst into a bad idea is endemic to both Kelly and Ole Miss’s football program as a whole (if you have facts otherwise, email compliance@olemiss.edu. If not, please don’t slander the young men).

The Bayou satsuma orange rum is for, obviously, LSU. The vodka — it was supposed to be Cathead or at least a honeysuckle vodka, but neither are readily available in the great state of Wisconsin — is the Mississippi end. The Irish cream is for Kelly. The gin and tequila are because, ostensibly, this is a LIIT and that’s what goes in there. Since I have no interest in this curdling before it can even get to my stomach, we’re gonna pass on the lemon juice and, huh, turns out I’m out of triple sec, so that’s out too.

How’s it taste? Like alcohol. I usually make all my home cocktail doubles because I’m a lazy man and don’t want to walk to the kitchen twice. But since that would be a five-shot beverage and I value my kidneys (sort of, shoot me an offer), no, we’ll stick with the single.

The cream, as expected, curdles even without fresh citrus. It settles grimly throughout the glass, but after multiple rounds with Coffee-mate/soda cocktails this is no longer a deterrent. What *is* is the sheer amount of alcoholic burn that chases away a drink that, somehow, hangs on to the creamsicle foundation of its ingredients. Had I made this with just the satsuma rum, Irish cream and cola I think it’d be pretty good. But it also wouldn’t get me to punch a cardboard cutout of the Golden Girls after one, so if you’re watching LSU-Ole Miss there’s value on going whole hog here.

Unsurprisingly, it gets better as you drink more, again alluding to the fact this is roughly six ounces of booze topped with cola. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t particularly like it. Maybe you’ll have better luck.

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The Nebraska Red Beer Bloody Mary: a drink no one asked for for a rivalry no one asked for

I tried to turn Nebraska’s Red Beer into a bloody Mary-like boilermaker. I urge you not to make the same mistake I did.

Nebraska and Rutgers play Friday. For two more years, this will be the furthest-flung conference game in the Big Ten.

Soon, USC and UCLA will arrive, making a trip merely halfway across the country seem quaint. They’ll also bring a couple of rising programs with them, which Nebraska and Rutgers most certainly are not.

The last time either was *actually* bowl eligible was 2016 (Rutgers, a 5-7 team, played in last year’s Gator Bowl due to Covid. Of course they lost by four touchdowns). The Cornhuskers’ attempt to bring back a homegrown hero from their glory days flamed out when Scott Frost went 16-31 and was fired in September. The Scarlet Knights’ attempt to bring back a homegrown hero from their glory days has currently resulted in an 11-16 record for Greg Schiano, which is worth a shrug and a “good enough,” if nothing else.

Fortunately, Lincoln has just the thing to carry it through the early kickoffs endemic to a bad team. Red beer is a cheap lager — generally Busch or Busch Light — mixed with tomato juice or bloody Mary mix. And in honor of a conference game no one asked for, we’re gonna make some booze adjustments no one asked for.

And yes, it’s gonna suck.

The Nebraska Red Beer Bloody Mary

  • 1 can, Miller High Life
  • 1.5 oz., Community Spirits Co. vodka (in a shot glass
  • 3 oz., Zing Zang bloody Mary mix
  • one dash celery salt

In theory, this should be taken like a Boilermaker. You get your beer, add the red Mary mix, then toss a little celery salt on top because that makes anything bloody Mary related taste better. Then you drop your shot of vodka in and, bing bong, delicious early morning tailgating drink.

Only, no.

My first impression was … it’s not bad? The sweetness of the Zing Zang covered up the sting of the vodka or the grain of the High Life.

This did not last. Friends, this drink kicked my ass the moment it slipped past my esophagus. My stomach immediately shot up the blinking orange “PROBLEM” light in my brain, as though I’d just mistaken a bag of moth balls for marshmallows. I can only describe the feeling — which, I must note, came after three gulps and just SECONDS into the drink — as a full body cramp. My skeleton, enraged, was trying to separate itself from my nervous system. My brain, fully aware of its culpability in this crime, shut down and feigned innocence. Drinking this knocked a full year of algebra out of my consciousness.

I needed a five minute break after my first chug. When I came back I had a drink that looked like someone had indiscriminately fired a shotgun into a small, muddy puddle filled with fish. The smell reflected this. Holy geez, it smells like death.

My head did not like this one bit. It felt like my brain was yelling at me and, I swear to god, I could hear this drink whispering things about my family. My stomach, seething in the role it has been forced to play, was simply biding its time until it could turn this concoction into a scalding cauldron of regret.

“Heh,” I thought to myself. “Too late.”

A second sip produced more of the same. First sweet, then tolerable, then poison. Another regrettable decision, only this time I’ve broken out in a sweat. It was 55 degrees in my basement. I was wearing a t-shirt.

For the first time in this series, I tapped out without finishing a drink. I was going to make this a double session and replace the vodka with whiskey to give it a Purdue theme, but no. I wanted to wake up Friday morning. I have too much to live for.

Still, if you’re looking for a faithful reproduction of the Nebraska-Rutgers rivalry, here you go. 10/10, no notes.

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In honor of the Brown-Rhode Island game, let’s drink two beautiful Ocean State messes

Brown plays Rhode Island this weekend. Let’s celebrate the greatest local cuisine in America with coffee milk-based booze.

For decades, Brown versus Rhode Island was the only game in town. The smallest state in the nation only had two Division I schools with football programs. Both competed at the I-AA/FCS level. Neither was especially competitive.

Still, these games, forgive the parlance, slapped. Right around the start of the millennium the Ivy League Bears, under the guidance of Phil Estes (who succeeded a Mark Whipple-Don Brown combination, somehow) developed into one of the most exciting teams in the country. Not AA football; anywhere.

In 1998, Brown out-slugged Penn 58-51 in a game that featured 58 (fifty-eight!) fourth-quarter points. The 1999 team won the Ivy League title behind current head coach James Perry, Mike Malan and Steven Campbell. The 2000 team scored at least 28 points in every game.

But the best game in that stretch may have been a 2001 showdown with then-No. 9 Rhode Island where Bears wideout Chas Gessner had 269 receiving yards and three touchdowns and still lost. Rhody ran for 309 yards. Brown passed for 492. It was like watching Ron Dayne’s Wisconsin play Michael Crabtree’s Texas Tech, only everyone kinda sucked at football. It was glorious.

In honor of the quaintest in-state rivalry in college football — Brown season tickets cost $40 for five games in 2001 and came with $20 in concessions vouchers and a long-sleeved tee! — we’re going to drink one of Rhode Island’s proudest traditions.

If you know someone from Rhode Island — or, most likely, are from Rhode Island, since we tend not to leave our motherland; maybe we’ll get to Connecticut or even New Hampshire, but roughly 95 percent of us remain tethered to New England in order to preserve our superiority complex over the rest of the nation — you’re familiar with our extremely localized cuisine.

It’s mostly, for lack of a better word, garbage. Hot weiners. Pizza strips. Clam cakes. Frozen lemonade. Subsisting on any of it for more than a few days at a time should make you ineligible for health insurance.

It is also incredible. Calvitto’s strips, a couple of weiners from Olneyville’s New York System and a Del’s is capable of powering you through any test the world can drop at your feet. So in honor of that cuisine, we’re gonna booze up the official state drink of Rhode Island: coffee milk.

The key ingredient in coffee milk is a syrup endemic to the Ocean State, typically made by either Autocrat (great) or Eclipse (… fine). If you can’t buy it, you can make it — here’s a good-enough looking recipe. Fortunately, I have a backlog of Autocrat that made the trip to the Midwest alongside me, just waiting for a moment like this.

Today we’re making two drinks. Let’s keep it simple for the first. Coffee milk in a white Russian is a no-brainer — it’s basically got all the ingredients anyway. Let’s see if a little taste of Rhody kicks it up a notch.

In honor of Karl Dorrell, I made a proud Colorado tradition worse

I took a classic Colorado tradition and made it worse. Just like Karl Dorrell.

It was a very strange choice when Colorado football hired Karl Dorrell as head coach in 2020. Sure, he’d taken UCLA to 10 wins 15 years earlier, but his lone college experience since being dismissed in Los Angeles was as the architect of a thoroughly unwatchable 2014 Vanderbilt offense. That group scored fewer points than all but eight other FBS schools that year.

It kinda worked out! The Buffaloes won four games in a COVID-19 shortened 2020 season and cracked the top 25. However, he’s 4-13 since that 4-0 start, hasn’t won a game in 2022 and currently boasts a recruiting class sandwiched between Rutgers and coach-less Nebraska at the tail end of the composite top 50.

This, understandably, has led to discussions about his job security. This week, athletic director Rick George effectively threw water on any kindling underneath Dorrell’s seat.

It’s rare for an official team statement to simply say, “Yes, we know we suck, but we don’t plan to do anything about it,” but it makes sense. There’s little value to firing a coach in September unless you really, truly cannot stand them any longer (shoutout to Scott Frost and Herm Edwards!). Dorrell’s gonna have at least until the end of the season to figure this out, which history suggests he probably will not.

So, bad news, Colorado fans: Your team isn’t going to get much better. But at least we can mix you up something nice to help you cope with a sixth straight season with five wins or fewer.

The regular Colorado Bulldog looks a lot like a white Russian, only with Coke mixed in:

  • 1.5 oz vodka
  • 1.5 oz coffee liqueur
  • 1.5 oz cream or milk
  • 3 oz Coke

I made one, and it’s great. It tastes a little lighter than a white Russian and with distinct “coffee ice cream Coke float” vibes.

But you can find that anywhere, so let’s mess it up a bit. I’m gonna keep the vodka, cola and milk intact. I’m also gonna make a few additions:

  • 1.5 oz Javelin vodka — Javelin is a pretty good vodka that donates 100 percent of proceeds to Razom, a non-profit humanitarian charity in Ukraine.
  • 3 oz Pabst hard coffee
  • 3 oz Diet Coke
  • 1 splash, cream
  • 1 maraschino cherry, for fanciness

In theory this will give the drink a little more cherry vanilla vibe. That has nothing to do with Colorado or UCLA. But I’m the one drinking it, and I have the palate of a toddler, so there you go.

Unfortunately, this variant is too true to the Karl Dorrell formula. My tweaking has made a good thing worse. Not significantly so, but the creamy, float-y goodness of the original disappears thanks to the thinner hard coffee. The salted caramel flavor of the hard coffee, surprisingly, gives the whole thing a bit of a peanut butter taste. Should’ve gone with unflavored!

It’s not bad, though; in fact, it’s a perfectly passable cocktail. It feels like some kind of sponsored drink Jon Taffer shoehorns into a bar rescue while star struck doofuses grit their teeth and tell Spike TV how much they like it. It’s certainly not as good as the original formula, which if nothing else is authentic to Buffalo football.

So there you have it. Either the Karl Dorrell or Colorado Failure Juice. I haven’t decided on a name yet. Give it a try if you want something that sounds good on paper but fails to execute despite your high hopes.

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Washington State-Wisconsin deserves proper tribute to the gameday drinking gods

A proper cocktail for the drunkest possible Rose Bowl matchup. The best of Pullman and Madison in one drink.

Washington State vs. Wisconsin isn’t just an early season Power 5 matchup. It’s a preview of the drunkest possible Rose Bowl.

The Cougars travel to Madison in Week 2, where they’ll be greeted by a city eager to offer Bloody Marys at 6 a.m. on a weekday, even if they’re wearing business attire. There is no state in the union that drinks quite like Wisconsin, where bars outnumber supermarkets on roughly a 3:1 basis (you can also buy both liquor and beer at these supermarkets. I personally recommend Woodman’s, whose alcohol selection is roughly the size of the local grocer I grew up with back in Rhode Island).

The eastern side of Washington isn’t known for its dry counties though. Through a similar combination of bitter winters and few pro sports alternatives nearby, Pullman can at least suggest it’s in the same league as Wisconsin’s state capital. After all, it’s the city that gave us this glorious GIF:

This was not an isolated incident. I asked our resident Washington State expert Brian Floyd what percentage of the Cougars’ tailgating fanbase incorporates Fireball in some capacity to their gameday drinking and he clocked it at “7 in 10.” Based on his further estimate of “20 percent” of the folks at Martin Stadium sneaking to-go drinks into the venue, there’s roughly a one-in-seven chance that the fan next to you at a Wazzu game has Fireball on their person at kickoff.

Wonderful.

In honor of two college towns that take full advantage of bulky coats and disinterested stadium security guards, I’ve decided to combine the best of both worlds. Behold, the Wazzu-Wisco Fireball Old Fashioned.

The Fireball is because, well, see above. You’ve gotta stay warm on gameday, and few things put on your inside coat like cinnamon whiskey (blackberry brandy, of course, is a wonderful alternative). The old fashioned is a Wisconsin specialty, made sweet and with brandy — typically Korbel, the brand Badger fans apocryphally drank Los Angeles dry of at the 1994 Rose Bowl — in place of whiskey.

Here’s how you can marry Pullman and Madison and give yourself a sweet but spiced beverage that’ll go down easy before a 2:30 or 12:30 local time kickoff.

This recipe makes a double. It’s an involved drink. It requires multiple steps. It’s economical to make this a double. Don’t judge me just because I value your time.

  • two orange slices
  • two or three maraschino cherries
  • two or three packets of Splenda (or sugar, or stevia, whatever)
  • four dashes, Angostura bitters
  • 3 oz. Fireball flavored whisky
  • 9 oz., 7up or Sprite or soda water
  • ice

Put the oranges, cherries, sugar/sugar-adjacent materials and bitters in one big glass. Add a little bit of the soda, then muddle it. I use a big spoon because buying a muddler would put me among a weird group of cocktail dads and I’m not ready to say that about myself yet. I remain, for most intents and purposes, a two-step drink guy, dammit. I’m not fancy.

Once you’ve got a delicious sweet mashed syrup at the bottom of your glass, add your ice, then Fireball, then soda. Give it a big stir. Add a couple cherries and an orange slice on a tiny pirate sword for a garnish if you’re feeling fancy or just want the extra sugar.

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