The 10 List Results
You were asked a simple, yet unwaveringly difficult, question. If you could only have 10 bottles of spirit for the rest of your life, what would they be? 29 of you submitted your lists and they included over 121 different spirits. After some grueling compilation, I’ve come up with the official Top 10 list.
The Top 10 List
- Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur
- Plymouth gin
- Chartreuse Green or VEP
- Carpano Antica
- Cointreau
- Sazerac 6 rye whiskey
- Noilly Prat dry vermouth
- Havana Club Blanco
- Bombay Sapphire
- Lemon Hart 151 rum
Other Interesting Results
- Of the 222 submissions, only 4 were vodka (one was watermelon flavored).
- 22% were various lusty brand of rums.
- No one listed Cachaca.
- Tequila might as well have taken a nap.
- Benedictine sadly only got one vote.
- Nearly no one favors the same single malt.
I was originally going to list a bunch of recipes for cocktails you could make with The 10 List (Last Word, Hell in the Pacific, etc.) but instead, I decided to go with an original created by Darcy and myself.
Indie Monk Swizzle
- 1oz Lemon Hart 151
- 1/4oz Chartreuse
- 1/4oz Cointreau
- 1/2oz lime juice
- splash simple syrup
Add the melange of ingredients to an appropriately sized glass. Fill with enough crushed ice that it lovingly spills out over the top. Swizzle until frosted.
Darcy from Art of Drink and I developed this magical potion in about 3 minutes while chatting in the Mixoloseum Lobby. Join us there for crazy cocktail conversation at all hours of the day.
I asked Darcy for a 25 second history of the cocktail, and this is what I got: “Rick posed question, Darcy fired up the “brain,” neurons collided, sparks flew and a piece of ticker tape popped out of Darcy’s mouth with the recipe.”
I was thinking of something a little more like this: “Frère Jerome Maubec was more than just the apothecary for the La Grande Chartreuse monastery, he was also an avid explorer and often set sail under the flag of Pâté and butter in search of new lands. One of his first expeditions led him to the uninhabited island of Guyana where he immediately fell in love with the sugar cane that grew there. Having already established his favorite herbal potion, he chose to try his hand at distilling rums. And one day, while examining his work, he accidentally dropped the glass of Chartreuse he was sipping, VEP of course, into the pot. And at that, a new cocktail was born!”
Note: This history is pretty much 100% lies, kind of like when Blair tells me his method of blanching almonds for orgeat syrup is “easy.”
Cocktails You Can’t Make With The 10 List
- Sazerac
- Zombie
- Absinthe Suissesse
- Negroni
- Margarita
- Steve Crane’s Scorpion Bowl
KP Questions
- What surprises you about this list?
- What other cocktails would you make?
9 Responses to “The 10 List Results”
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The Indie Monk Swizzle definitely reminded me of the importance of proper dilution and chilling in a drink. Being too lazy to drag out a tea towel and crush some ice, i went with barely cracked ice, didn’t go a good job of swizzling, and got something way too strong to drink. After forcing myself to wait for additional melt…wow. Nice.
I can make a Last Word and a Last Ward with the list, as well as a really nice El Presidente. Hooray!
Cointreau OVER Rhum Clement Creole Shrubb? REALLY?
I’m with Marleigh…priorities have definitely been set out-of-whack.
Dammed Rick – I don’t know why I missed several posts of you – my newsreader really didn’t showed those…
Anyway – absolutely great topic! However I wouldn’t see the top 10 list like that! Especially Bombay Sapphire and Plymouth: would anyone have two gins in his top 10s? I doubt that – its a flaw of statistics!
Well the list is definitely really surprising; the popularity just helped several products to show up. The real surprise is Chartreuse and Maraschino for me! Maraschino is fascinating, but do I really want to have it in my top 10 list? Not me – neither Chartreuse…
And do you know what? I am definitely a vodka-hater… but for the top 10 I would choose one [a high proof one] – of course as base as several self made concoctions [is that allowed: to make several variants yourself out of one spirit?]. And what is about bitters???
Hm I would drink first of all a Martini cocktail [to come into the right mood] to curse then that I still have to prepare a bitters [why not using the Lemon Hart as base] to do a Manhattan!
Ahem a White Lady would abridge the time till the bitters are right…
Interesting drink invented in 3 minutes in the Mixoloseum bar! creative.
This is what amazed me: Cointreau OVER Rhum Clement Creole Shrubb..
I can make a Hemingway Daiquiri yay!
Let’s see, I had three on the top ten. Does that make me hip and cool, or a sheep?
And a question for you Rick: Did you not include Angustora Bitters? I thought there were a ton of us with that one.
Oops! Hit Submiit Comment too soon.
I just wanted to congratulate you on this topic. So many of us posted on this on our own blogs, the 10 Bottles list is practically an Internet Meme already!
The green Chartreuse really surprises me. It’s a nifty ingredient to be sure, but I wouldn’t have imagined it on anyone’s desert island list.
I’m also surprised the Sapphire made it. I like it, but thought everyone else sneered at the stuff.
we often play this desert island game at work, as well as “ultimate speedrail.” Glad to see the chartruse up there, but no Fernet… would probably ditch the cointreau for Gran Marnier, and axe the bombay (unless its the export strength, which makes tanq 10 and millers westbourne look weak) for Talisker 18.