The Back Nine

An Arnold Palmer spiked with Bourbon.

This is not really my recipe. It was supposed to be a collaboration with me, @AlfredPudding, and Isuamadog. But you know how there’s often that one guy on a group project who does all the work? Yeah, that was not me. This is really AlfredPudding’s recipe. If he tries to protest and declare otherwise, don’t listen to him. He’s only being overly humble and modest.

FLV Lemon Tea is the heart of this thing, the star of the show. “What? But it’s only at 1% and TFA Sweet Tea is at a whopping 14%?!”

Yes. Usually using one flavor to bend another involves adding a small amount of something to pull another flavor in one direction or another or turn it into something it isn’t. But in this case, the relatively strong Lemon Tea is getting pulled slightly by the stupidly weak TFA Sweet Tea. Things taste different when they’re heated and Lemon Tea tastes like hot tea with lemon and no sugar. TFA makes it more of a half-sweet tea with lemon, that tastes more like iced tea. TFA Sweet Tea wouldn’t work for this by itself because it doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to these other flavors, but Lemon Tea does, it just needed to get bent. We don’t just want tea with a lemon wedge, though, we want lemonade. INW Shisha Lemon and CAP Super Sweet does that. The Shisha Lemon sits on the fence between candy and natural lemon juice. Pairing it with some sucralose and preservative magic transforms it into a solid lemonade flavor. The result tastes like lemonade made from a powder mix, but with few lemon slices added for that fresher flavor thanks to Lemon Tea’s more natural lemon flavor.

The Bourbon Trifecta: The triple bourbon flavors were used because they each have their own strengths. VT Bourbon gives us that boozy top note that lets you know right away this is a cocktail. Think about it; if you raise a Back Nine, Dirty Palmer, or whatever you want to call it, to your face, the first thing you’re going to notice is that there’s bourbon in there, along with the lemon if real lemons were involved at all. VT does that. But this drink is shaken or stirred and the Bourbon isn’t just sitting on top. There’s a deeper, sweeter flavor mingled with the lemonade, one where you can almost taste the corn used to make the sour mash that eventually became Bourbon. That’s where the TFA Kentucky Bourbon comes in. Finally, there’s the flavor of the charred oak barrel in which the Bourbon was aged mingled with the more astringent, earthy aspects of tea. Only FLV Bourbon is capable of that delivering that. The Bourbon Trifecta.

FA Polar Blast was a final addition meant to make this refreshment extra refreshing and make the “cold things should be cold” crowd happy. It was chosen over WS-23 because it’s a more of a back-end cooling that doesn’t get weird with the VT Bourbon’s warm booze top note the way WS-23 does. It still had to be used relatively lightly to also avoid interfering too much with the tea at the end, but is present enough to be reminiscent of an ice cube sliding over and touching your lip just before you lower the glass after taking a drink.