[kidney stone]

1/2 oz. Rittenhouse 100 rye
3/4 oz. Caol Ila
1/2 oz. green chartreuse
1 1/4 oz. Cinzano sweet vermouth
2 dashes Fee's orange bitters
1 dash Peychaud's bitters

Stir all of the above together with ice, strain (heh).

To end our weekend, we decided to eschew Sweatband Sunday at Drink (Fred had just been there mid-week) to catch Scott over at Rendezvous. Apparently the place had been a madhouse on Saturday night, so Scott was probably feeling a little bit punchy from sleep deprivation. I chose my drinking strategy to accommodate this, asking for a Family Jewels if he couldn't come up with something more obscure to make using rye. I glanced at the shaker Scott was filling with ingredients, and when he added green chartreuse after the Rittenhouse, I knew he'd decided to serve me the Jewels. After he added a dash of Fee's orange, I became distracted by something Fred said. Then I noticed Scott pondering which scotch to put into Fred's scotch-based Hearst. He chose the Caol Ila I had tried a couple of weeks ago in a toddy, then added the sweet vermouth and Fee's orange. Spotting a bottle of Redbreast Irish whiskey on the shelf, I mused aloud about how I've always wanted to try it, when suddenly Scott's eyes widened and he laughed incredulously. Was it something I said, I thought to myself. No, he'd just realized that he'd mixed the two drinks in the same shaker. He shrugged, strained the drink into 3 small cordial glasses, and offered for us to try it anyway. Even as tired as he was, he wasn't at a loss for a name: "I don't know what it would be, say, a Kidney Stone."

It really wasn't bad at all, and certainly much more pleasant than its namesake. I liked the rye/scotch combo, but a quick internet search yielded no other cocktails that would dare to use such a combination. The scotch was definitely dominant to Fred's palate, but he thought it brought out the flavor of the chartreuse. Apparently, that combination isn't so bizarre. "Recipes for Mixed Drinks," (1916) written by Hugo R. Ensslin contains a recipe for equal parts Irish whiskey, sweet vermouth, and green chartreuse; it's called a Tipperary. The Tipperary makes an appearance frequently on cocktail blogs right around St. Patrick's Day, so perhaps Scott's subconscious was playing tricks on his fatigued brain.