Sometimes coming up with a name for an original cocktail is a challenge, and other times it just comes to you when you’re watching a YouTube clip from the multiplayer game Team Fortress 2 and you encounter the character Tavish “The Demoman” Degroot, who calls himself “a black Scottish cyclops.” That’s what happened to my bartending friend Rocky Yeh. Amused, Rocky thought that this character deserved a drink. Rocky describes the Black Scottish Cyclops thus: “The Ramazzotti and bitters add contrasting notes to the peat and roundness without really making it any less of an in-your-face sort of thing, like the character that it’s named for.
Reprinted with permission from Bitters by Brad Thomas Parsons, copyright © 2011. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Random House, Inc.