Super Bowl LVIII: 2024
The Red Era & The Run CMC
The Red Era (Kansas City Chiefs)
1 1/2 oz sake
3/4 oz chambourd
3/4 oz anisette
4 raspberries
Are you ready for it?
Muddle 4 raspberries in a shaker
Add 1 1/2 oz dry sake, 3/4 oz Chambourd, & 3/4 oz anisette
Shake (it off) vigorously over ice
Strain into a rocks glass—ideally over crushed ice, but it won’t be sad beautiful tragic if you just use regular cubed ice, either.
After quite a number of Chiefs cocktails, I was frankly starting to run low on inspiration (see: The Jazz Bath), so I for one was delighted when Taylor Swift entered the Chiefs orbit, because it teed up this cocktail name perfectly. That defaulted the color to red (which was just as well, since I did a yellow KC cocktail last year. A friend also requested a tribute to Patrick Mahomes’ helmet getting cracked during the Wild Card round, which led me down the path to the smash as a drink style. As I learned during my research, “a smash is a julep, but a julep is not always a smash. The difference between the two, primarily, is the muddled fruit…a julep doesn’t require muddled fruit, and a smash does.” I also hit on the idea of using sake, since Taylor Swift was flying in from a tour stop in Japan to attend the Super Bowl. I took all of that and played around with some flavor references from a few different smash recipes I found online, which eventually led me to this quite delightful creation.
The Run CMC (San Francisco 49ers)
1/2 oz white rum
1/2 oz dark rum
1/2 oz spiced rum
1/4 oz dry curaçao or triple sec
1/4 oz lemon juice
1/4 oz oregat
Measure all ingredients carefully into a mixing glass filled with ice. Stir and strain into a rocks glass over ice.
This cocktail ended up surprising me. I named it after running back Christian McCaffery, obviously riffing on the hip hop band Run DMC, and then I spent a lot of time trying to connect it in some way to one or the other or both of them, without much success. Inspiration finally took me in a totally different direction, toward the infinitely variable rum runner (get it, runner?), which I sort of combined with the classic Cable Car cocktail (because San Francisco), and this is where we ended up. It’s a little finicky, with a lot of ingredients, but that also somehow seemed to fit this particular 49ers team, with its many weapons, and also McCaffery himself and his many talents.
