Slow Comfortable Screw and Sloe Gin Fizz

My most recent trip to the liquor store (the one downtown that is kind of shady but easiest to get to) resulted in the purchase of two new items: Southern Comfort and Sloe Gin. SoCo I've had before, mostly in the form of SoCo and Lime shots over the summer. Is alright. Sloe gin, however, is a completely new experience. Despite the name, it's actually not gin at all but rather a liqueur made from slow berries. It looks all purply in the bottle but makes most drinks look pink. The bottle I have looks something like this:

As for the taste, it wasn't bad when I just had a tiny taste by itself. Pretty sweet and syrupy but I could imagine it tasting good when mixed with other things. Kind of like a naughty Italian Soda.

The first drink I had, the Slow Comfortable Screw, is first of all a ridiculous name for a drink and a member of that completely unhelpful category of drinks in my book: drinks with naughty names. I still don't understand how that is a useful category to a bartender. Anyway, the drink is so named because it is basically a screwdriver with Southern Comfort and sloe gin added. Cute, eh?

1 ounce vodka

3/4 ounce Southern Comfort

3/4 ounce sloe gin

4 ounces fresh orange juice

-Shake with cracked ice and strain into iced highball glass.

I found this similar to a Sex on the Beach - very fruity and girly. However, since the fruity flavor is achieved more through booze than juice in this drink, it doesn't have that freshness and lightness of SotB. It's almost too sweet like strawberry and grape soda.

The sloe gin fizz is basically another version of a collins, and is one of the few that actually tastes substantially different than the original. I found it okay, but again the sloe gin is a little too sweet for me and left me feeling that my drinking palate had developed a bit beyond sweet pink drinks with fizz.

2 ounces sloe gin

1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice

splash of simple syrup

soda water

-shake all ingredients well in cocktail shaker and strain into iced highball glass. Fill with soda water.

Enjoy and bottoms up!