Mythos Absinthe Cocktail: Rats In The Walls

2 1/2 oz Plantation Original Dark Rum
1/4 oz Lucid Absinthe
1/4 oz Galliano 
2 oz Orange Juice
Cola

Pour Rum, Absinthe , and Galliano in an ice-filled highball glass. Add Orange Juice and top with Cola, garnishing with bunch Orange Rat Tails over the sides. Enjoy!

Halloween is here and this is my contribution to Halloween and my own Mythos Absinthe Cocktails. Though, here is a case where my nitpicking could have been a potential detriment. Martinis should be made with Gin, an Old Fashioned shouldn’t be loaded with fruit, and any drink with “Wall” in the name has to have Orange Juice and Galliano based on the Harvey Wallbanger.

I’ve really been wanting to make a drink called “Rats in the Walls” (especially after getting the Dark Adventure Radio Theater version as a Secret Shoggoth gift) but I fucking hate the Harvey Wallbanger. The Harvey Wallbanger is a most wretched drink that was lazily concocted by a marketing agent to sell Galliano to the young, hip drinking surfers of the 50s. It consists of a making a Screwdriver, which already is an alcoholic beverage made for people who don’t like alcoholic beverages, with an added splash of Galliano. By all means drink what you like, no one should ever tell you that you shouldn’t drink what you like, but if person or site ever suggests it should make a comeback as a great, classic cocktail they should be shunned and their reputation for taste called into question. But that’s just my opinion.

Now, the best thing about these naming conventions is the fun involved with, well, naming drinks. As I mentioned before, the Screwdriver is Vodka and Orange Juice. Someone decided that the Screwdriver was boring so they made it with Sloe Gin instead of Vodka and the Sloe Screw was born. Add some Southern Comfort and you get a Sloe Comfortable screw, add light Rum and Cognac and you get the Sloe Comfortable Screw Between the Sheets. So from here, to add to the fun, when you add Galliano to a Sloe Comfortable Screw, you get a Sloe Comfortable Screw Against the Wall. The fun doesn’t end:

Screwdriver = Vodka and Orange Juice
Sloe Screw = Sloe (and Dry) Gin and Orange Juice, some also keep some Vodka
Sloe Comfortable Screw (Comfortable = Southern Comfort)
Sloe Comfortable Screw Between the Sheets (Between the Sheets = White Rum and Cognac from Between the Sheets)
Sloe Comfortable Screw Against the Wall (Wall = Galliano from Harvey WALLbanger)
Sloe Comfortable Screw Against a Cold, Hard Wall (Cold = with ice, Hard = with Overproof Rum – could also be “With a Bang”)
Sloe Comfortable Screw Against a Cold, Hard Wall with a Kiss (Kiss = Amaretto)
Sloe Comfortable Mexican Screw Against the Wall (Mexican = Tequila)
Sloe Comfortable Fuzzy Screw Against the Wall (Fuzzy = Peach Schnapps from the Fuzzy Navel)

So, in following the tradition of combining names, I looked back to Pioneers of Mixing at Elite Bars: 1903-1933 and the drink called The White Rat within. A little while back I made my own “Blackened” version of that drink, aptly called “The Black Rat” which was an easy swap of Averna for the Vermouth. I could have made this a Gin drink and I could have just taken the dashes of Averna and Maraschino from the Black Rat and added them here, though I think they may have been lost in the Orange Juice.

There is, however, another drink called The Black Rat that came before my filch of the White Rat. This has the advantage of already using the Orange Juice I would need for the “In The Walls” part of this drink, though mixing coke and orange juice sounded horrible. Adding the Anise of both Galliano and Absinthe to that just, on paper, seemed wretched. I’d say, “If it’s good enough for the Aussies, it’s good enough for me”, but have you ever had Vegemite? That said, this Black Rat is actually way tastier than it has any right to be. I actually like it.

I was initially tempted to fuck with language a bit and use Jägermeister as an ingredient. Jägermeister’s collective of bartenders is called Hubertus Rat. “Rat”, in this instance meaning “Council” in German.

If I were to have made this a Gin drink, I would have wanted to use Old Tom Gin as I wanted a Gin that wasn’t a Dry, Sloe or overly botanical Gin to mix best with the Orange Juice. I haven’t used it in very much and would have liked to see how its sweetness worked with everything else. My most uncomfortable concern with using Old Tom Gin was that in this particular story, The Rats In The Walls by H.P. Lovecraft, the narrator’s cat is named Black Tom (Old Tom Gin, get it?), which, by itself would be just fine without context. However, knowing the cat’s original name was changed in the 50s to be less racist than the originally named “Nigger Man” makes me not want to make that connection as a naming prompt, vague as it may have been.