Need a brain boost? This is the drink to make.
You’ll need
For the cocktail:
- 1 oz (30ml) Famous Grouse scotch
- 0.5 (15ml) elderflower liqueur
- Sparkling wine
For the Mentat:
- 1 – 2 altoid-style mints
- Peychaud’s Bitters
- Red food dye
- Baking soda
Add the mints to a small glass and cover with bitters and red food dye. Leave for 10 minutes. Strain and dip into baking soda, leave for another 10 minutes. Shake off excess baking soda and place into a champagne flute.
Add the sparkling white wine, leaving some room at the top. Enjoy the fizz! Add the Famous Grouse and elderflower liqueur. Garnish with a lemon peel. Serve!
“A pillbox of mind-altering chems. Increases memory related functions, and speeds other mental processes. Highly addictive.”
– In-game Mentats description
The Wasteland would be a much dumber place if not for Mentats. The atompunk answer to “what if drug made you smart, not dumb?”, these little red altoids have helped many pre-war students and post-war mutants rev up the brainbox—at least, for a little while.
These little mint-things were so popular in the pre-War that stocks of them have lasted hundreds of years later, just waiting around to be snaffled up by an intrepid Survivor, Courier, Wanderer or other moniker. Of course, if you’re truly smart, you can make them yourself using fungus, lead and the Fallout equivalent of baking soda (Abraxo Cleaner).
So why not turn this brain-building drug into a real-life, drinkable science experiment? Why not indeed.
Looking for other Fallout drinks? Try the Sierra Madre Martini from Fallout: New Vegas.
By reflavouring and recolouring a common crunchy mint, then covering it with our ‘Abraxo Cleaner’, we’ve forged a real-life Mentat that has a particularly fun reaction when introduced to a carbonated acidic drink. Ever seen Mentos thrown into Dr Pepper? It’s less volatile, but quite similar; less messy, but still fun to watch.
It’s not just about the show, though, as we throw in some whisky and elderflower (inspired by whisky and hubflower being a component of certain kinds of Mentats). This provides the drink with malt and florality to build on top of the mint, bitters and sparkling wine.
As our Mentat dissolves, it continues to fizz, releasing more and more flavour as time goes on—and turning the drink from it’s original yellow to a bright pinkish red.
Fun to build, even more fun to drink, but a word of caution: only use a thin layer of baking soda, and only use one Mentat to begin with. Otherwise you may end up with a drink that tastes more like Abraxo than you’d like. You’d feel like a real dumbass then.
Hope you enjoy. Cheers!
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