Greetings, Libation Explorers!

If you love sips and bites, this is your time of year. Every time Disney puts on a major event like the California Food & Wine Festival, it opens its thesaurus to find fresh and fleek ways to describe its smaller dishes and drinks served from kiosks around DCA. But why search, when you already have the hippest terms? Sips and bites are fine. We love our sips and bites.

OK, I know you can’t get to the festival at the moment. This blog is going to focus a bit more on the DIY. Let’s find a few drinks that look pretty great from this year’s Food & Wine and try to recreate a few. Clearly, I will focus on cocktails because you can just buy beer and wine. Well, some of it might not be available in your area, but I trust you to find something similar and pair it with your favorite bites, nibbles, and full-on gobbles.

First up is the Blue Angeleno. This drink was one of the features at the LA Style Marketplace. Angeleno refers to the folk of LA, of course. Far as I can tell, there is no Angeleno cocktail out there of which this is the bluest. The drink features the hallmark of most blue cocktails, blue curaçao. It also contains “white” rum, orgeat syrup, sweetened coconut cream, pineapple juice, and orange juice. This puts it squarely in the Blue Hawaiian realm, but with maybe a bit more sweetness. Try this mix out:

2 ounces white rum (no specification by Disney, so I used some Cruzan aged rum)

1 ounce blue curaçao

¼ ounce orgeat

½ teaspoon coconut cream

2 ounces pineapple juice

1 ounce orange juice

Shake all the ingredients with ice. Get yourself a tall glass or a snifter, fill it with ice, and pour it on in. Grab yourself a Mai Tai glass from Trader Sam’s if you’re feeling frisky.

In the end, I probably didn’t get exactly what Disney’s artisans achieve with their blend. Less sweet for sure. If you want more sweet, feel free to seek some sweetened coconut cream instead of regular. If that doesn’t work, add a bit of simple syrup. I’d probably avoid adding more orgeat. That stuff is potent!

I get it. Your Disney Drought guests are clamoring for something served from a copper mug. It’s mule time, y’all! I am from Chicago and thus, don’t generally use the word “y’all.” Food & Wine had you covered, minus the copper. I’m serious. They don’t trust you to bring a copper mug back to the kiosk, despite what the Disney-derived image here depicts. 

That’s why you will get a better experience at home, Explorers! You have the copper mugs you lifted from that cool bar in town. You have the watermelon juice necessary for this experiment because you also compressed some actual watermelon to make the salads the kiosk provides. Or I guess you could buy a mug and some watermelon juice.

If you want a shot at Berry Mule, go for this mix! Vodka is your core, mixed with strawberry, watermelon juice, rhubarb juice, and ginger beer. All right, I admit it! I don’t have the requisite juices, so I haven’t made one of these. And rhubarb juice sounds like it’s going to be hard to come by until my garden starts growing again. Most mules don’t include very much lime juice, but watermelon and rhubarb aren’t all that strong, compared to lime. How about we try this out?

1 ½ ounces vodka

1 ounce watermelon juice

½ ounce rhubarb juice

Ginger beer

Pour the juices and the vodka into your mug and stir it up a bit. Add ice. Then add the ginger beer and stir to mix. 

There you have it. Two drinks to wow your friends you probably can’t have over for a while. Gives you time to practice! Or show off on the web cam. In the meantime, I’m going to try to work on some of these other drinks from the festival. There’s an amaretto stout-cream cold brew that I need to put some time into.

Until next time, Explorers!