Despoil the enemy and disappoint your friends and family with a tropical cocktail based around a jar of piss: Jar-ate from Team Fortress 2.
You’ll need:
- 3/4 oz elderflower liqueur
- 1 oz gin
- 1/2 oz lemon juice
- 1/2 oz pineapple juice
Add all ingredients to a shaker filled with ice. Shake vigorously until chilled. Strain into a mason jar. Serve (by throwing at your closest Spy).
“Crikey. Guess all that coffee ain’t doing much for my hydration levels…” – Sniper, upon inspecting his freshly-brewed Jar-ate.
First things first: Jar-ate, a secondary weapon for the Sniper in Team Fortress 2, is piss. I know it’s piss. You know it’s piss. So let’s just get the whole “why did you make a cocktail named after a mason jar of piss” thing out of the way:
I did it for the same reason I make any of these cocktails—because I’m a little odd and I felt like it.
It’s also an iconic item from Team Fortress, and I feel like it represents the game’s core gameplay traits: cartoonishly silly, but also violently abhorrent. I mean, this is a game that has rocketjump as a legitimate ability, but where those same rockets will gib an enemy into little bloody bits. Silly. But still pretty gross.
That weird dichotomy is where I drew my inspiration from with this drink. After you make this, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised by the fact that yes, it does look a little like effluent; a fact that the mandatory use of a mason jar for serving does nothing to help.
But once you get over that and give it a sip, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the bright tropical flavours of the pineapple, subtly undercut by the floral notes of the gin and the elderflower.
I don’t really have any other drinks based on piss, unsurprisingly, but you could check out this other gin/elderflower drink inspired by Clementine from Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Not-So-Sweetpea.
Yeah, it looks gross, but it tastes good, and that’s kind of the point: Team Fortress 2, despite being more than decade old now (God I feel old) and showing its age, still holds a great deal of popularity. It’s gross and weird and cartoonish and silly, but it’s also funny and well-designed and thoroughly, thoroughly fun—that last bit potentially because of the gross weird silliness.
And so it is with this cocktail. It’s based on a weapon made from an Australian Sniper’s piss—but damn if it doesn’t taste pretty good.
TIP: Like most of my gin cocktails, I used a London Dry gin for this—don’t use anything too fancy, Gordon’s will do, as the gin isn’t a predominant flavour. St Germain is great for the elderflower, and just storebought pineapple juice: just make sure it isn’t too pulpy.
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