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Sunshine | Dwarf Fortress

Square

A drink that pours like liquid gold through dwarven halls—wait, that’s magma.

You’ll need

Add all ingredients to a shaker filled with ice. Shake thoroughly to chill. Discard the ice. Shake again, hard. Strain into your chosen vessel. Serve!

This Elf stuff isn’t half bad once you’ve sent it through the still.

– Urist McBrewer, on the recent crop of sunberries

Sunshine is the most expensive alcohol you can make in Dwarf Fortress: quite the achievement for a game where the creation and consumption of booze can be even more important than actual food. The secret of its fermentation lies in its equally rare and expensive core ingredient: sunberries, an Elven (yuck) fruit that some dwarfs prize for its “inner light”.

You might be surprised to learn that they exist in real life too. But you won’t find them in any grocery stores or fruit stalls—because they’re toxic.

Sunberries, or ‘wonderberries’, are the black, juicy, round and plump fruit of nightshade plants. Eat the wrong one, and you can end up very, very sick. Eat the right one and you’re treated to a fruit that tastes, apparently, like a combination of blackberries mixed with tart green tomatoes.

So, rather than rely on my botany knowledge (and possibly poisoning myself), I decided to base my real life recipe for Sunshine instead on the more easily obtainable and similarly flavoured blackberry—specifically with a blackberry jam syrup. I’m just hoping the discerning dwarfs won’t spot the difference.

If you like this, you might also like the Strawberry Surprise from another of my favourite rogue-likes; Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

Once you’ve crafted your ‘Sunberry Syrup’ from the blackberry jam, all that’s left to do is add some additional ingredients to enhance that fruity flavour.

Brandy boosts the alcohol content and revs up the fruity side, the chocolate bitters eases back the sweetness of the syrup and adds some bass notes, and the egg yolk turns it all into a delicious custard-y treat.

Luxurious, thick, creamy and utterly decadent, it’s precisely what I imagine an expensive alcohol to look and taste like—and to be the exact opposite of the thin, astringent, often disgusting moonshine we get in the real world.

Hope you enjoy; cheers!

If you want to keep seeing video-game-inspired cocktails and get a hold of some exclusive recipes, head on over to Experience Bar’s Patreon page and consider slinging me a credit or two. You help keep this blog going!