Shake the snow from your boots and warm up by the Generator with a tall, refreshing glass of vodka, maraschino, bitters and cold, cold ice.
You’ll need
- 1 gill (4 oz) vodka
- 1/2 gill (2 oz) maraschino liqueur
- Shaved ice
- Mint sprigs, muddled
- 2 dashes orange bitters
Add the mint leaves and vodka to a mixing glass. Muddle gently until aromatic. Strain the vodka into a separate vessel and discard the mint leaves. Add the maraschino liqueur and bitters to the vodka. Add ice (not the crushed ones). Stir thoroughly. Pack a short glass with shaved ice and add your alcohol mixture. Serve!
“The time has come to build the last city on Earth. But first, a toast to the lost…”
I love stories about alternate histories. What if Germany had won World War 2? What if humanity had never discovered gunpowder? What if the Dark Ages had never happened? What would the world look like?
Sometimes these worlds are naively utopian. Sometimes they are unrealistically dystopian. Sometimes they are just… different. But they are always, always fascinating.
The world that the player steps into—or rather, crunches through—in Frostpunk is one that I’ve never seen or even considered before. Holocausts brought about by sudden, irreversible climate change aren’t a new idea (especially considering our current environmental woes). But combining that apocalypse with steampunk tech and a soul-crushingly nihilistic winter backdrop? That wins points in originality.
To create a drink as original as Frostpunk itself, I decided to return to the time from which its timeline departed from our own: the 19th century.
If you like this frosty cocktail, you’ll love the Galaxy Awaits from No Man’s Sky.
Mixology, perhaps unsurprisingly, has been around for a fairly long time. There are even bartending guides from the 1870s, such as this one called “Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks“, featuring cobblers, smashes, egg nogs and other delights. It’s from here that I drew my inspiration; an original Gin Julep, featuring copious amounts of gin (measured in “gills”), maraschino, mint and plenty of ice.
However, while gin might be appropriate for a game mostly set in the UK, it didn’t feel right for Frostpunk. After all, the moonshine cooked up around sputtering, freezing fires by the few survivors of The Great Frost shouldn’t be so refined as gin. Instead, we substitute vodka for a cleaner, more alternative-historically accurate drink and slap in a couple of dashes of orange bitters—because it tastes better that way.
Pour over cold, cold ice that only accentuates the cooling nature of the mint, you end up with a fresh, bright, cherry-and-orange infused drink that might help keep the cold outside at bay—as long as the steam cores last.
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