The Bloody Larry

along the lines the of aforementioned manmosa, another drink you might want to sip with your omlette the morning after the june 13 brooklyn high life bar crawl: the bloody beer. the perfect brunch-time marriage of high life and your favorite bloody mary mix recipe. in honor of my gracious host, lfab, i call it the bloody larry.

i was first introduced to this drink while on a high life bar crawl with my friend jon along venice blvd in los angeles. wandering, mistakenly and ultimately without incident, into a crowded mexican bar one friday night, my friend and i looked around, noted the scratching off of the record and tried to figure out how to say high life en espanol. (its high life.) as jon bravely tried to find a restroom, i stayed at the bar and gulped down my beer as women in lingerie girated on laps, the owners of the laps glaring at me.

el amigo a mi izquierda pointed to my beverage. i repeated high life several times. he kept repeating, "[lost to posterity]" and pointed at his deep red pint of liquid. he picked up a bottle of tapatio hot sauce and pretended to pour it into my beer. after he did this several times (i had been bowling earlier, buckets of high life) in my stubborn mind arose a revelation. he motioned for me to try his beverage, and several strands of hepatitis be damned, i sipped the blood-red frothiness. interesting.

aside from the tecate base, i knew el jefe was on to something. i motioned for another high life, a glass and then pointed at jefe. the lovely bartender brought me a plastic jug of bloody mary mix and a bottle of tapatio. i drank the high life until the glass was 3/4s full, filled it close to the rim with mix (easy, it fizzes up pretty good) and added a few dashes of tapatio. pausing first to cheers el jefe, i took my first gulp... d-licious.

jefe bought me another high life, i insisted on buying him one, the bloody mix flowed, and... i drank the two of them down as fast as possible and got the hell out of there.

change and innovation can be scary at first, but so is getting searched and sent through a metal detector before you enter a bar. the important thing was what i had learned... not to let jon pick bars anymore, but most of all, the morning after beauty of what i call, the bloody larry...