The Sazerac

Ingredients

1.   

                      .75 oz. simple syrup (or 1 sugar cube)

2         1/2 oz. rye whisky

           3 dashes Peychaud's Bitters

           Absinthe

           Lemon peel

           Low ball or Sazerac glass

Directions

1. Fill the low ball glass with ice and cold water, set aside
2. In a regular pint glass or shaker put three or four ice cubes, pour rye whiskey, simple syrup and bitters into glass
3. Stir well, one to two minutes, let sit and, for god’s sake, DO NOT shake.
4. Peel a strip of lemon peel, use a good, beautiful lemon, nobody likes an ugly lemon.
5. Empty low ball glass of the water and ice.
6. Rinse low ball glass with absinthe.  That means, a few drops in the glass, swirl around to coat the inside of the glass and dump out the rest.
7. Strain contents of the pint glass into the low ball.
8. Rim low ball with the lemon peel, twist over then, hang peel on side of low ball glass.
9. Drink the oldest cocktail in America.  It’s the best drink you will ever have.

Use a good and powerful rye whiskey.  Sazerac, Old Overholt or Rittenhouse brands do well as they stand up to the sweetness of the simple syrup.  A variation and traditional way to get the sweetness is to muddle a sugar cube with a few drops of water in the low ball glass. 

Let's Be Adventurers

Let’s talk about ADVENTURES!  The future adventures.  So here is our plan.  We have a few years left to work, about 10 (fingers crossed) but when that’s done, we will be setting sail.  That’s right, we will be selling, giving away or tucking away all of our stuff and moving onto a sailboat.  The two hulled kind, known as a catamaran.  

We will be sailing the coasts of the Americas, and all the wonderful islands and countries between Maine and Washington.  Our summers will be spent somewhere in the States but never again will we suffer with the cold.  Instead, nine months or so of the year, we will be under sail.

Along the way we invite you to follow our adventures here at TheVikingandtheCelt.com.  Who knows what awesome future technology will exist to help us share our adventures but we will be sharing all we can. 

In the nicest part of the summer, we will most likely be landlubbers spending time with family and friends and catching up with those of you who couldn’t join us on the water.

In the meantime, we plan to continue to help others in our work and travel for fun when we are not traveling for work.  Some of you have had adventures with us already and we have to say that we have loved every minute we get to spend with you from a cruise to California and Canada to our favorite city of New Orleans, we love to be with each other and we love having you along for our adventures and our love of a great Sazerac.

How did we get here?

In case you haven’t had the opportunity to hear us tell it, here is a little ditty about who we are.  We joke that we are always in search of a more impossible job. The Celt, a firefighter and the Viking, a Sheriff’s Deputy both decided to leave those professions in search of something harder and more impossible. We decided to ramp it up a notch and join the federal response to disasters.  So, here goes the story.

First, we met by chance in 2014 in a godforsaken place called Anniston, Alabama, locked up behind a fence with only a prison bus as a mode of escape.  Ok, ok, it wasn’t that bad but sure seemed like it some days.  

So why would we subject ourselves to this kind of treatment you ask?  Well, we had both signed up to serve on impossible teams with impossible tasks, also known as Disaster Response.  The mission, help people recover after disasters.  Later that summer we parted ways as co-workers and we all thought we would see each other in the field. 

As circumstances would have it, a year later, the Viking was scheduled for some exciting and ground breaking training in Seattle.  Seriously…no, not seriously, it was training but it lacked the exciting and groundbreaking aspects.  Knowing he had co-workers (that he actually liked and respected) there, he met with several of the people from the Seattle team.  A brave Viking then asked an even braver Celt out for dinner, then drinks, then that became a deep friendship which turned into a love affair.  And, here we are, looking forward to many more adventures.

Oh, and we will be regaling our adventure to find the perfect Sazerac.  Our love of this classic drink has provided us with many great stories and we will be sharing them here so you can also find the places with the greatest Sazerac made around the world.  

The Viking and the Celt

In-case you hadn’t noticed by our names, one of us has a “bit” of Norwegian in our name and the other, an astounding amount of Irish.  Erickson and O’Leary kind of have a ring to them but, as we move on to our next phases of life we thought we would need pen names so was born the Viking and the Celt. One of our future goals is to write here about our adventures and since the Viking and the Celt was way catchier than Tom and Marybeth, we decided that going forward, we would be known in the literary world (or just this blog) as “The Viking and the Celt.” 

Please join us as we document our adventures and hopefully, if your heart desires, you can join us along the way.  Now....Let's be Adventurers and drink some Sazeracs!