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The Snakebite

Lately, I have stumbled across a few more drinks that I like. It's no accident that I just finished writing about how I'm giving gin another chance. I like to try different things, and I am the type of person who will go out of my way to order something I haven't had before at a restaurant. Now, this occasionally means that I have something nasty, but it also means that I stumble across interesting food and drink. In the last few months, that happens to have resulted in new libations I like.

The first one was a red blend that I had while out at dinner with the Mild Ex and another friend. The waitress recommended it, and everyone at the table was agreeable to that option. As it turned out, I ended up really liking it. It was the first time where I tasted a very noticeable difference after letting the wine aerate. Unsurprisingly, this novel discovery made the whole thing even more agreeable to me. I like science, remember?

The second, more interesting one, was a drink called a snakebite. It's actually a combination of beer and cider, and I tried it for the first time on a whim. Sure enough, I enjoyed it. If I go back to that restaurant, there are decent odds that I'm going to get a snakebite. I realize it's not exactly a popular drink (one waitress at that restaurant remarked that she'd never heard anyone order it before), but I like it, so there.

However, the story doesn't end there. A few friends were having a Christmas party, so we were all talking about what to bring. A few of us offered to bring booze, so we figured we'd coordinate. It'd suck just a little bit if we ended up with three cases of the same beer or three of the same bottle of wine, for example. So, we had to call dibs and discuss amongst ourselves to make sure we varied the liquor that we were bringing.

In the course of that discussion, I mentioned that we could bring the ingredients for drinks and let people mix their own. Now, we didn't want to make the process too elaborate, so we figured they'd have to be simple recipes. Enter the snakebite. It really only requires two ingredients as far as I know: beer and cider. The version I've always had involved Guinness, so that's what the person brought.

At some point in the night, she brought it up and decided to mix herself one. We all watched with bated breath as she mixed the drink and tried it. It was ... questionable. I don't know if it was the particular cider or if we did something wrong, but it was not the same drink I've had before. One person described the resulting concoction as, "not as good as Guinness, not as sweet as cider." It was, sadly, a failure.

However, now I've taken it as a bit of an affront. That drink was made at my urging, so I felt somewhat responsible. I have to remedy this, or at least prove that making a good version of this drink is possible. So, I went out and bought both Guinness and some pear cider. I have yet to actually mix the two, since I haven't been home for a meal that warranted this attempt. Still, it's going to happen in the near future. I'm not about to let this drink beat me.

In hindsight, though, the funniest part was that the person who mixed herself the bad snakebite was the same person who made me take shots of moonshine in years past. I suspect there may have been a little bit of karma involved.

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