Adventures in gookum liquor (Part the First)

I have made Swedish Punsch.

... he declares in the same voice a primitive Neanderthal once used to announce he'd just inadvertently lit grass on fire with two dry sticks. Imagine tones of excitement and elation, inflected by uncomprehending shock, and tempered by agitation at the thought of having just lit one's own loin cloth on fire. The poor, laborious hominid... what else could he have accomplished in the same time if he'd had just one Djeep lighter? He might have discovered trigonometry a few millenia early. By the same logic, what, I wonder, could I have got done in the afternoons I've spent sniffing around the bottom shelves of the back aisles of dim liquor stores around town, looking for alcoholic oddities with names I have to spell for the staff. To keep the implications of that question from hounding me,  I have to keep telling myself that if the same caveman had had a bunch of random spices, citrus fruit, and, oh, say, a bottle of historical Indonesian booze lying around, he'd have used it all to make an obscure cocktail ingredient too. Naturally!

Swedish Punsch is a sort of pine smoke-flavored, quasi-rum-based concoction. It's based on some stuff called Batavia Arrack, which is more or less a rum spliced with a sake. From what I read, a lot of Dutch sailors used to call it breakfast; four centuries later, I call it a rough remedy for sinus infections. Not to be imbibed straight, for fear of needing a new hard palate - but like so many orphan elements that are awkward and off-putting in isolation, it has great potential in combinations!

To whit, the aforementioned SP. To make it, you get arrack, nutmeg, cardamom, a shitload of sugar, lapsang souchong tea, and lemon zest together in a bowl, mix it all up, and let it steep for a while. After a day or so, you strain it and - if you're me - you dump it into a leftover Vitamin Water 0 bottle. No matter how you present it, though, you wind up with something that looks like a rain puddle in baseball dirt and smells like a burning Christmas wreath that someone put out with Five-Alive.

But lo - though so humble and contorted, yet so divine. Mine eyes have seen the glory - and mine tongue has savored it too. Don't be deceived by the incongruous makeup: it's like kisses from a lusty tropical Valkyrie. Stay tuned for lo-down on our first vigorous make-out session.