Orange Bowl, Orange Drink

The Orange Bowl is less than 10 days away, and while I've broken down and previewed the upcoming on-the-field action, the Cardinal's best and worst games along with statistics of note, I've neglected the social aspect of the game. That stops now.

Like many of you, I traveled home for Christmas. Every Christmas Eve my Mom welcomes our friends and family over her house to enjoy hors d'oeuvre, fried fish and pasta (this year we had lasagna OM NOM NOM). In the spirit of the Orange Bowl, I decided to create an orange drink bar for our guests to enjoy. This would serve a few purposes:

1. Make family time more passable.
2. Provide a conversation starter to educate my family and friends on the trials and tribulations of Virginia Tech football.
3. Determine a suitable, officially unofficial, drink for my upcoming trip to Miami.

The orange drink bar consisted of six mixers: premium Simply Orange, Simply Grapefruit, Dole Orange Strawberry Banana, SunnyD orange drank, standard Tropicana Orange, and store brand Orange Plunge soda. The goal was to provide a range of delicious off the shelf orange flavored drinks that could be mixed together with Korbel Brut, the poor man's champagne, Stolichnaya the working man's vodka and in one case, Yuengling. The latter, Orangebrau, was only made once, and like a celebrity showing up to the club at one in the morning stole the show and was never pictured. The following were our favorite concoctions.

Together in the glass Korbel and SunnyD were like long lost lovers reconnecting for the first time making sweet romance. Sunny Delight can hold its own, but when injected with a bevy of bubbles it just seemed to jump across the tongue and rub all the taste buds in the right way.

Although, my mom didn't find it to be pleasing and called it, "The most disgusting thing I've ever drank."

Fact, vodka is the most personable of the hard liquors and blends well with any crowd. So it's no surprise that when mixed with moderate amounts of highly sugary "100% fruit juice" it goes down smooth and tastes delicious. Although Korbel mixed with the same strawberry, banana and orange was described by a family friend as, "blowing the big one."

The clear winner was a "suicide" of sorts.

Like any spur the moment cocktail it was simple to make. Combine equal parts vodka, champagne, 39¢ orange soda and SunnyD over a generous amount of ice and stir with an index finger. The high amount sugar covered up any trace of alcohol and the high amount of carbonation put the alcohol to work faster, and really when you're trying to please a crowd looking for a nice drink that's unsuspectingly getting them toasty, that's a good thing.

So this drink so desperately in need of a name will be served in my hotel on the morning on January 3rd, please stop by if you'd like.