Boozehound - Jason Wilson [22]
It was Tyler, though, who appeared to be the clear victor when he turned up something called, rather disturbingly, Peanut Lolita: a thick, peanut-flavored liqueur that once was produced by Continental Distilling in Linfield, Pennsylvania. The logo and fonts on the label suggest the early 1960s, but according to what little information we could unearth, Peanut Lolita was still around in the mid-1970s, when infamous presidential brother Billy Carter “often made drunken appearances” with the liqueur’s spokesmodel (this according to an essay by Christopher S. Kelley in Life in the White House: A Social History of the First Family and the President’s House). Due to the liqueur’s overwhelming whiskey-and-peanut taste and grainy texture—not to mention its unfortunate name—it is unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon. We may now own the only two bottles of Peanut Lolita left in existence. Tyler tried his best to create a semirespectable drink with the stuff: he layered ice-cold Peanut Lolita and raspberry-flavored Chambord in a shot glass and called it a PB&J. Tyler’s bottle is three-quarters full, and probably will remain so for some time. After tasting his, I’ve never opened my own.
The unique frustration of Liquor Store Archaeology (though I guess this was also part of its appeal) lay in its zenlike experience. What we found was never what we were looking for. The harder we looked for something, the more likely it was that we’d never find it. This became especially frustrating as I began to hear tales of more and more lost spirits being revived. Other than in boutique bottle shops in big cities, it was nearly impossible for several years to find all the rediscovered gins and rye whiskeys and vermouths and bitters that cocktail world insiders were buzzing about. With liquor store shelves taken over by the booze equivalent of suburban McMansions, there seemed even less room left for these idiosyncratic tastes. Though we’d been using the word archaeology facetiously, at a certain point it really did feel like we were trying to recover fragments of an ancient Rome or Athens from beneath the layers of newer, shinier cities.
We also had to be on the lookout for frauds during our archaeological digs. I became excited one day when I found a bottle of sloe gin, which I hadn’t seen in many years. For me, sloe gin evokes a youthful summer night long ago at a particular watering hole on the Jersey Shore that served pitchers of sloe gin fizzes and Alabama Slammers (that frightening mix of sloe gin, amaretto, and Southern Comfort), leading to a make-out session with a hair-sprayed Jersey girl in a Camaro in the Wawa parking lot. Ah, sloe gin, like Proust’s madeleine for a once-mulleted boy like me.
It was only later, when I was speaking with an affable British chap named Simon Ford, the so-called “brand ambassador” for Plymouth gin, that I learned my sloe gin of memory—as well as the dusty bottle I’d found—was not the real thing, but a poor imitation. “Full of artificial flavoring and artificial coloring,” he told me, with disapproval. “The kind that gathers dust in dive bars.” The syrupy facsimile sloe gin was the kind of thing you’d find in embarrassing drinks such as the Sloe Comfortable Screw (sloe gin, Southern Comfort, and orange juice), or the Sloe Comfortable Screw Against the Wall (which adds Galliano), or the Panty Dropper (a horrifying concoction of sloe gin, Kahlua, and half-and-half).
Real sloe gin comes not from some factory in the Garden State, but