In my quest to create a special cocktail for every week of the 2022 college football season, I expected to make some pretty good drinks. I also expected to make some terrible ones.
I haven’t tried this week’s recipe before writing this introduction, but I am expecting it to fall firmly into the latter. But for good reason. It’s a Brian Kelly cocktail, so in its essence, it needs to be firmly unlikable, moderately embarrassing and ultimately look better on paper than in execution. And if I die in service of it, well …
Anywhoodles, Kelly’s LSU team is playing Ole Miss in Kelly’s latest opportunity to ruin football for someone else. These are two schools with a wonderful and, frankly, beautiful tailgating tradition, and I am going to try to capture parts of it while mostly ruining things as a whole.
Let’s see what we’ve got in store:
The Brian Kelly Sweet Tea:
- 0.75 oz honeysuckle vodka
- 0.75 oz Bayou satsuma (orange) rum
- 0.75 oz Irish cream
- 0.75 oz gin
- 0.75 oz tequila
- topped with cola
You know what no one says? “This Long Island iced tea could be creamier.” And yet, here we are, because jumping headfirst into a bad idea is endemic to both Kelly and Ole Miss’s football program as a whole (if you have facts otherwise, email compliance@olemiss.edu. If not, please don’t slander the young men).
The Bayou satsuma orange rum is for, obviously, LSU. The vodka — it was supposed to be Cathead or at least a honeysuckle vodka, but neither are readily available in the great state of Wisconsin — is the Mississippi end. The Irish cream is for Kelly. The gin and tequila are because, ostensibly, this is a LIIT and that’s what goes in there. Since I have no interest in this curdling before it can even get to my stomach, we’re gonna pass on the lemon juice and, huh, turns out I’m out of triple sec, so that’s out too.
How’s it taste? Like alcohol. I usually make all my home cocktail doubles because I’m a lazy man and don’t want to walk to the kitchen twice. But since that would be a five-shot beverage and I value my kidneys (sort of, shoot me an offer), no, we’ll stick with the single.
The cream, as expected, curdles even without fresh citrus. It settles grimly throughout the glass, but after multiple rounds with Coffee-mate/soda cocktails this is no longer a deterrent. What *is* is the sheer amount of alcoholic burn that chases away a drink that, somehow, hangs on to the creamsicle foundation of its ingredients. Had I made this with just the satsuma rum, Irish cream and cola I think it’d be pretty good. But it also wouldn’t get me to punch a cardboard cutout of the Golden Girls after one, so if you’re watching LSU-Ole Miss there’s value on going whole hog here.
Unsurprisingly, it gets better as you drink more, again alluding to the fact this is roughly six ounces of booze topped with cola. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t particularly like it. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
