Run for the Rose-Colored Spectacles: Mint Julep
Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 4:00PM | by Otter One of the great ironies is that the fastest two minutes in sports, the Kentucky Derby, leaves the least time to drink, and has the best of sports-related drinks.
The last two minutes of an average football game leaves you enough time to drink a keg all by yourself, probably of some swill from St. Louis that tastes like water with hops sprinkled on top.
Run and get some mint from your garden, make some simple syrup (2-1 mixture of sugar and water, melt it together).
You want a dash of bitters in a tall glass. (You're supposed to use a silver cup. I actually have one. But not on my person.)
Put six leaves of mint in the glass with two or three tablespoons of simple syrup. Lightly bruise the mint leaves with the back of a spoon. Some people say to muddle it. To hell with that. Lightly bruise it.
Add a few ounces of good bourbon: I'm using Early Times. Turn some ice into snow with a blender or something and push it down on the whole mixture.
Grip it by the bottom or the top: it makes a nice frost.
Pick your horse before drinking.
Otter
My pre-post-parade picks:
Shackleford
Master of Hounds
Derby Kitten (this in honor of my daughter's cat, Tammy)
Kentucky Derby, Mint Julep, Sports in Recipe 
Reader Comments (5)
Sounds good, but I like the slowly fusing mixture of sugar, ice, mint, bourbon and nutmeg in the Walker Percy recipe that Izzy makes each year.
http://stizzyocayce.blogspot.com/2007/05/derby-day-already.html
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A snippet from Signposts in a Strange Land for your readers:
POSTSCRIPT: Reader, just in case you don’t want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here’s my favorite recipe, “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.”
You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly—and here is the trick in the procedure—crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss.
For readers new to life on planet earth, Lizzie is married to Izzy (their patron saints are Elizabeth and Isidore), the world's foremost beverage Nazi and food snob.
Their judgment can be trusted entirely.
(I was going to send you this over facebook, but apparently you've deleted your fb or me or something:) Archaeologists in Armenia recently found the oldest known wine-making facility in the same cave complex that held the world's oldest shoe. Biochemical analysis shows that they made red wine there.
Not on FB anymore, Victoria...
I figured as much.