Super Bowl LVIII: 2024
The Central Florida Retirement Community & The Oh Yeah!
The Central Florida Retirement Community (Tampa Bay Buccaneers)
2oz coke (diet and/or caffeine-free recommended)
1oz dark rum
1oz jägermeister
Strawberry for garnish (optional)
Stir all ingredients over ice & garnish rim of glass with a strawberry
Obviously, I probably should have taken advantage of the wide world of pirate-related cocktail name possibilities for this cocktail, but because my snark towards Tom Brady knows no bounds, I couldn’t resist calling it the Central Florida Retirement Community. After entirely too many Patriots cocktails over the years, I was less than enthused about having to make this one, but fortunately had no shortage of inspiration from which to draw. It could have been either red or black, and there are loads of good bitter herbal liquors in both colors: Aperol or Campari for red, various amaros or even Jägermeister for black. Rum was another easy option because, you know, they're pirates and stuff. (Though I ended up not using any of them, there is also a wide variety of liquors with "Old" in their brand names: Old Eagle (vodka), Old Overholt (rye), and perhaps most delightfully for these purposes, Old Grand Dad (bourbon.) And I confess that I also considered using some stereotypical gross old-person drink, like prune juice, but at the end of the day it still needed to be a palatable cocktail.) We landed at essentially a rum and Coke with a dash of jagermeister as a bitter twist, and the optional strawberry garnish was a late-breaking addition when I somehow learned that Brady has such a strawberry aversion that he’s never even eaten one!
The Oh Yeah! (Kansas City Chiefs)
2oz gin
1oz mezcal
1/2oz grenadine
Floater of Hennessy (optional)
Plenty of ice
Stir gin, mezcal, and grenadine together. Add ice, then gently top with a floater of Hennessy from a spoon. Oh yeah! Go Chiefs (There’s an option to use actual KoolAid instead of grenadine if desired. Be sure to use a clear mezcal for color purposes; most are. The ice is actually fairly essential in this cocktail, aside from aesthetics, as it cuts the sweetness of the grenadine nicely as it melts.)
The name for this cocktail was inspired by the team’s coach, Andy Reid, who’s frankly a rather large, round man, and who is often wearing bright red, by virtue of it being one of the Chiefs’ colors. The likeness to the Kool-Aid man cannot be denied. However, I had no interest in using actual Kool-Aid, both because it felt like a cop-out and also because the drink needed to be something that I was willing to both drink myself and serve to other (if there hadn’t been a pandemic going on in 2021 and we could have had people over, that is.) But it definitely wanted to be red, especially since the 2020 Chiefs cocktail was yellow, and while that provides a number of possibilities, my initial leaning was either some kind of red fruit juice or else grenadine. I was also interested in a smoky element that would connect to KC barbecue, especially since it would complement one of those slightly sweeter notes: scotch, mezcal, or even a lapsang souchong tea infusion were all on my short list. My experiments in the cocktail lab eventually led me to a combination of mezcal (for the smoke), grenadine (for the red), gin (which helped to tie it all together)—and then as a nod to the heroics of Chad Henne sweeping in to relieve Patrick Mahomes in the Divisional Round, I added a floater of Hennessy to round it out.
