The 2014 Oktoberfest Is Upon Us!

Yums!

More Yums!

What is Oktoberfest? It's technically a 16-day festival running from end September to early October. Historically, it originated as a celebration of the wedding between King Ludwig 1 and Princess Therese of Saxony back in 1810 in Munich, Bavaria.

Fastforward to today and what does that mean to us?  We're in Malaysia and that's thousands of miles away from Germany! Well, really, it's just an awesome nearly-month-long excuse to drink and party with awesome German beer and food. :)

The IBA Project: Daiquiri

The Daiquiri

The Grandfather Story:
Supposedly created by an American engineer in the late 1800s and named after a beach near Santiago, Cuba. The original recipe specifically calls for BACARDI rum and recipe is as follows (for 6 pax):

juice of 6 lemons

6 teaspoons of sugar

6 Bacardi cups

2 small cups of water

plenty of crushed ice

Yes, those Tex-Mex ice blended, sickly sweet (more like diabetes inducing!), fruity versions which we are all too familiar with are basically bastardisations variations of the original recipe.

This is Hemingway's favourite drink. Legend has it that he goes through 12 glasses in a sitting (citation required). He liked it so much he created his own version aptly named after himself which has added maraschino and grapefruit juice, and even more rum (because he was a known alcoholic), with no sugar (because he was diabetic).

The IBA Project: Quick Intro, Between the Sheets

For a (lengthy) background of this project: check out  this post from back in 2013 <shy>. If you read or watch movies, this is akin to the Julie & Julia project. Except instead of French food, I'm learning to make cocktails, my name is not Julie and and I'm not following recipes created by Julia, and I have no plans to create a book .... or a movie. So .... wait, actually... it's actually.... NOTHING like the Julie & Julia project, hehe.

TLDR:  I'm on a quest to re-create a bunch of cocktail recipes.

I've been wanting to do this for ages but never really gotten around to doing it because of 1) the amount of research I have to do 2) the effort it takes to experiment with the different variations tfor each cocktail and finding one that I personally liked 3) just getting the ingredients for the whole list of 77 cocktails is a huge obstacle in terms of cost and - Eg: recipe calls for rum? what brand? what age? dark or light? where do I buy it? Can die right?

<cue: this is where you, my kind and generous good Samaritans, come in offering to donate me some bottles for a good cause!>

But enough of excuses. I'm gonna embark on this right now. A journey of a thousand steps begins with a single step. So here is the single step:

Between the Sheets