Florentino Liqueur - My Personal Cross To Bear

I think I've cracked the nut of the mysterious Florentino Liqueur, a traditional elixir long savoured by the indigenous people of Cleveland Ohio. Ohioans typically drink it straight, or cut with Mountain Dew, in an effort to as rapidly-as-possible reach the LD50 threshold for FD&C Yellow #5, I believe with the goal of ending their miserable existence. I lack the fiery spirit and Devil-May-Care attitude of the blazing Buckeye, and so find Florentino is best enjoyed sparingly over the course of an entire lifetime, with as much delay between samples as possible. There has been surprisingly limited research into the effects of Florentino on the human endocrine system, but here is a link to a study about feeding food coloring to albino rats because Progress Is Cruel.

On aforementioned nut cracking - lime is the key. Also you want to use a darkly color liqueur to disguise the diabetic urine glow of raw Florentino. I have now ruminated on Florentino longer than any soul not consigned to Purgatory and I still have little positive to say about it. Why do I return so frequently, to a well so dry? Florentino is distressingly the only search term which is driving traffic to my still basically undiscovered blog. And so, thou faceless truth-seekers of the great Network-In-The-Sky,  thy weird, desperate will is my command. 

The Will Of The People Is A Specious Directive
1.5 oz Cranberry Liqueur*
1 oz Florentino Authentic Ohioan Liqueur
1/2 lime
Soda
Sprig of Mint

This drink is good. If you are burdened with a bottle of Florentino this is so far the best option. To make this cocktail, use the ingredients listed about and combine in some fashion. I find that if you pour them into an old paint can (use only oil-based paints, NO LATEX) with some ice and take them to the paints department of your local hardware store, they will often let you use the paint stirring machinery to achieve a sublimely thorough mixing.

*Stonebarn Brandywork's Cranberry liqueur is particularly dry, so an effective replacement would be natural cranberry juice touched up with a bit of vodka to "cure" it

This is an excellent breakfast drink. Some of the more moralistic may look askance at drinking in the morning, but they are chowderheads who have no grasp of how to create Joy in one's own life. They cast a shaming eye towards my post-breakfast Watermelon & Absinthe Blender Potion, yet these same hypocrites can often be found on Sundays bright and early guzzling down wine with their good-time buddies merely because it has been ordained 'The Blood Of Our Saviour'...

In Which No One Appreciate My Struggles

My limited pool of acquaintances (Margarett....my cat....my intense sense of guilt) hound me relentlessly about updating this blog, but I am finding them increasingly easy to ignore. I'm not sure they grasp the strain that it takes to communicate. "Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living" For me, writing is like mining. When considered in its totality, mining takes precisely one eternity. While I'm tending the stills or mopping the floor, any number of brilliant ideas tromp around my brain, like ponderous dinosaurs. Eventually they die off as my mind repopulates with increasingly urgent and desperate thoughts about what I will have for dinner. As layer upon layer of daily silt (blog posts about 'normcore' fashion, trying to remember the difference between Crimea and Cimmeria, joint pain anxiety) accumulates atop these ideas, the intense heat and pressure of my intellect is slowly transforming them from mighty giants into compact nuggets of snarky 'content'. When the time is right, an expedition is mounted to the last known site of these ideas and the heavy digging begins. The coal is always black, the ground is always cold and hard. Once I've extracted what ever slim bucketful of ore I can, usually some form of refining (writing) is needed to transform the damp, polluted lignite ("Florentino is gross") into gleaming anthracite (The Internet Is Terrible And So Is Florentino). 

As you can see from that painfully contorted analogy, it can be a taxing process. When you factor in that there are ZERO returns on any effort invested, every post I make is actually a sparkling miracle of selflessness and near-Divine sacrifice.

In the vein of martyrdom, I am continuing to grapple with drinking the Florentino Liqueur. In an attempt to articulate the aroma of the spirit, I mixed some vanilla extract with cough syrup, anise seeds, and a mushed up banana. Right before Margarett was about to go to sleep I had her don a blindfold and smell the two ramekins I had prepared.

Mar - This one smells like that gross knock-off thing. This one smells like cough syrup with a banana mushed up in it and some anise seeds.

Perhaps a sign that we have been living together a bit too long. The mushed up banana with cough syrup went down alright after topping with a bit of soda water.

The problem with finding a Florentino cocktail, is that it is difficult to find a Galliano cocktail that I would entertain the thought of drinking. Most appear to be a random assemblage of of the sweetest liqueurs from an 80s Sorority party (http://www.webtender.com/db/drink/4752). There are a handful of more modern Galliano cocktails, but they use the reformulated 'Galliano L’Autentico' rather than the ghastly sweet version that Florentino is modeled after. I'd hoped by the time I got to the end of this post, my frantic clawing of the internet would have yielded a suitable recipe, but alas. Below is a not very inventive reformulation of the weissbanger, with the addition of some lime juice to decrease the sweetness, gin to decrease the banality, and egg white to decrease the chance that you won't get salmonella. If you've noticed that just about every drink I make is some combination of gin, egg whites, and unpalatable liqueur, perhaps you've also noticed that this photo is lit by the rising sun, a phenomena which occurs roughly between 7 and 9 am...

Redundancy As The Foundation Of Tradition
1.5 oz Aviation American Gin
1.5 oz Orange Juice
.5 oz Florentino Liqueur
1/3 oz Lime Juice
1 Egg White
3 oz dry wheat beer

Mix together all ingredients except beer and dry shake. Add ice, shake, strain into glass with 3 oz beer. Relish your morning and the temporary assuagement of your guilt about not updating your blog enough.

In Which The Scheme, Having Yielded Dubious Profits, Is Revealed

As you might have derived from the title, this blog was founded with the idea of each post reviewing one of the many strange and relatively undocumented spirits the adventurous might encounter.  I hoped to parlay these reviews into internet notoriety, which could then be leveraged to extract free liquor from the many desperate PR reps and Brand Ambassadors of the liquor world. These free samples would fuel more deranged reviews, and voila! we have what my Big 10 college degree in business called a ‘Virtuous Circle’.

If you have been following along for a while, you are undoubtedly aware that I somehow lost sight of my grand stratagem and have primarily busied myself posting cocktail recipes that no one would possibly ever make because they either sound bad or contain ingredients that exist solely in my refrigerator.

All of this occurred to me because I recently reviewed the Search Keywords which have brought you meager handful of wretched souls here. Margarett has several times declared my blog to be ‘advanced’ by which she codedly but hurtfully means useless to everyone. WRONG.

Searchers I’ve Helped

‘Torani Amer Review’ – I crushed this one. It was like I wrote the exact thing you were searching for. I hope you really enjoyed it. If you did, you should write Torani and tell them to blast some product my way. This was from back in the salad days of my blogging career, when I had a purpose and vigor and was also only working like 20 hours a week and had plenty of time to make amusing charts.

‘Maraska Wishniak cherry liqueur blog’ – I have to imagine you were overjoyed at finding my post. An excellent cocktail recipe, a rib-tickling anecdote about how much I really dislike everyone, and a useful comparison description of a product you’ve never heard of! In doing a recent similar search the only other close to helpful link was on Drink-think.net, a spirits consultancy, which prompted a revelation.  Dear Lady From Drink Think I met one time, I now realize that when you said you hated Fernet Branca and much preferred the markedly obscure Croatian wormwood digestive Pelinkovac made by Maraska it was exactly because you are their Oregon distributor. I love Pelinkovac too and will say nice things about it, if only I had some samples to utilize in innovative cocktails. If not, I am happy to post my upcoming companion piece about how Maraska stole Luxardo’s Zara distillery after communist partisans murderously forced the Italian population into exile.  

Searchers I Didn’t Help

‘handsome geniuses’ – I wrote a clickbait title and you clicked it. “Though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence”.

‘poison pear liqueur’ – Would that I could have helped you, but alas I believe you were actually searching for how to make something out of this. But I salute you for expanding my own pool of trivia, for in trying to determine what the hell you were actually looking for, I learned that this tree is “is known for its distinctive smell which is similar to a cross between rotting fish and semen.”

Well, to close this distasteful session of SEO analytics, a distateful cocktail. This is the otherwise tasty Harvey Weissbanger created by Jacob Grier, but given a Reasonable Poisons twist where I used a mysterious, abominable, bottom-shelf Galliano knock-off called Florentino, straight from the homeland of fine herbal liqueurs Cleveland Ohio. The below is actually the ONLY image of Florentino that I think you can find on the internet, so consider yourself privileged in a modest fashion. 

The Sunshine, The Beauty, The Romance, The Glamour

2 oz Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice
1 oz Florentino Liqueur
6 oz Wheat Beer (I used a very dry wheat saison)

Mix orange juice and florentino with ice, strain into chilled glass while simultaneously pouring in beer. Ruminate on whether you should be more concerned about diabetes or Yellow #5.