Dark And Stormy

Southern Illinois: where you learn that the sun was really
just the dark lord Sauron after all. 

I'm not an expert in irony, but when a fairly rare celestial event comes knocking on your door and invites you to get excited about it, only to have it be cloudy and rainy, well it's clear that we're being messed with. Not me, mind you. I was in southern Illinois for the total eclipse, and the sky was clear. It was awesome. But it seems statistically likely that you experienced nature trolling you. So your desire to drink your troubles away is understandable. And, if you're gonna drink until you can't feel feelings anymore, you may as well drink something good, and preferably a punny reference to all of the disappointment you experienced because you probably couldn't see the ridiculously cool thing that I totally saw, or at least couldn't get a very good view of it.

Ingredients:

Dark Rum (According to the people at Gosling's Rum, Gosling's is the only acceptable rum to make an authentic Dark 'n' Stormy. They seem objective.)
Ginger Beer
Limes
Ice

So, as you probably already know if you're from Bermuda, know literally anybody from Bermuda, or know any hipster snobs who only drink things out of mason jars, the Dark 'n' Stormy is kind of the national drink of Bermuda. Go figure. Lots of people claim it was invented there, but none of that has much to do with how to make it, so who really cares (historians, probably)? The first thing you're gonna need to do is learn the fine differences between ginger beer and ginger ale. Because one is a spicy, occasionally alcoholic, drink with a light and complex flavor. The other is a sweet fizzy drink with a hint of ginger flavor. Which is fine, but they aren't the same thing. Once you've learned about the fine distinctions between things, take your ginger beer and pour it over ice, preferably into a glass of some sort, until it's about 3/4 of the way filled. Then gently top it off with your dark rum. Add in a squeeze of lime juice, and garnish it with a lime if you're feeling fancy (I, apparently, was feeling fancy. A fact which flies in the face of my carefully crafted reputation as basically a hobo), and you're done! You should have a glass of dark liquid kind of swirling majestically on top of a sea of lightness and carbonation that it's slowly devouring. Which looks awesome, but if you drink it will just taste like one ingredient and then the other. So mix that sucker up if you know what's good for you.

So this, my 4th attempt, was more "dark" than "stormy."
But in my defense...sue me.

You can adjust the amounts of everything here to your personal taste, but I like it with this distribution (that's 3/4 ginger beer, 1/4 dark rum, and a squeeze of lime juice, for the slow class). The spiciness and crispness of the ginger beer lightens up the kind of burnt molasses flavors in the dark rum, and the lime juice kind of brings it all together. It tastes vaguely tropical, and kind of pirate-ey. Which technically isn't a word, but it's a pretty accurate description of the emotional response to drinking these, and I've already had a couple of them so it's a word now. Make sure to tune in next week, when I continue to make the written and spoken word my unwitting servant.