Today's drink: Blue Motorcycle

Today's ingredients: blanco tequila, gin, vodka, light rum, Blue Curacao, sour mix, lemon-lime soda

I'm fortunate to be able to ride my motorcycle for most of the year, but it's been a tad too wet and cold even for me the last few days, and this is coming from a guy who rode a no-fairing bike in Connecticut during winter. Granted, I rode exactly twice... the two warmest days of the winter... it was 32F not counting the wind. I am not a smart man sometimes.

I've never really been a car guy. My father grew up working in a service station and so had early and frequent exposure to all things internal combustion (I'll just leave a Taco Bell joke unsaid here). This aptitude served him well as my parents' marriage eroded, letting him spend most of his time in the garage maintaining the family vehicles and otherwise tinkering. Had we gotten along better, I'm sure I would've gleaned more than a passing familiarity and interest in cars, but we didn't, so I didn't. Most of what I know about vehicle work comes from service manuals, YouTube, and trial-and-error.

For some reason, I grew up thinking that a red 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible was my bucket list car. I think it had to do with either a cartoon or other TV show I would watch that featured this vehicle, and to be fair, it's not a bad-looking piece of machinery when all cleaned up (you remember how well I handle keeping my bike clean, so that would be a semi-significant challenge with a '57 Chevy).

Over the past several years, my if-I-had-too-much-money car has been a black 1970 Pontiac GTO hard-top, which was the final year of production with outsized compression ratios in advance of unleaded gasoline becoming the only offering. It had an option for an automatic transmission, but c'mon, if you're going to have a car with that kind of performance, you want ALL the control, so manual is the only way to go. It didn't hurt that it got some screen time in the mindless fun flick XXX, a movie I watch for the cars and explosions and the wife watches for Vin Diesel. It's a fair trade.

Neither of these cars is terribly common or affordable, to say nothing of being practical, so in terms of pining after something readily available and serviceable (though certainly not practical), I like the latest iterations of the Dodge Challenger, namely the 2013 SRT8 392. It's too bad that Dodge turned the original bad-ass Charger into a four-door sedan for the middle-aged family man trying to recapture some semblance of long-ago-now-wasted youth, but the Challenger is a worthy successor.

Of course, none of these is a priority for me. I have one of the motorcycles I've long wanted in a 2009 Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Ultra Classic with more bells and whistles than a junior high basketball game. It is, quite simply, my recliner on wheels. I rode a 2005 Dyna Low Rider for the first seven-plus years of my biking life, and it was a great middle-of-the-road (heh) option for a first bike; however, I will one day need to add a "play toy" bike to the garage. I'm leaning toward a blacked-out H-D Sportster Forty-Eight.

This is easily the most awesome post I've written yet. I'll be right back...

Blue Motorcycle

I ride a blue motorcycle not because of the drink but because it was either that or a (really nice) purple one when I bought my Dyna off the now-defunct Carolina Harley Davidson showroom floor. I went with blue. My current bike is also blue because it had all the features I wanted (originally went to look at a sea foam green model and didn't like the condition). So there's that.

As far as the Blue Motorcycle cocktail is concerned, it's not nearly as refined as any of the machinery above, but it's certainly powerful enough if you're wanting to get plastered in a hurry:

• 1 part blanco tequila
• 1 part gin
• 1 part vodka
• 1 part gin
• 1 part Blue Curacao
• Splash of lemon-lime soda
• Build ingredients over ice in a Collins glass, fill with sour mix, and stir

This is pretty much the antithesis of this site's purpose, having many ingredients, little nuance, and quick intoxication. Literally the only reason I tried this was the tie-in to my motorcycle. That said, it's an easy party drink to make, assuming you have all the ingredients, and should be agreeable to a wider audience.

There is no official recipe for this cocktail, and variations abound online. For my part, I used ginger beer in place of lemon-lime soda because I (a) had it on-hand and (b) like more tang and less sweet in my drinks. The ginger beer really brought out the tequila flavor, which I also liked. If you're looking for some quasi-hydration excuse, you could double the vodka and substitute blue Gatorade for the Blue Curacao (probably want to keep the tart ingredients for, ya know, tart).

Basically, this is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drink, which gives me an idea for my next post. In the meantime, bottoms up.