The Bloody Quest: Part I

I woke up the morning after with the worst hang-over I have EVER had in my life. And this includes college, where I—though admittedly, was the nerd who spent Sunday afternoons working on extra-curricular science projects in the lab—also spent a considerable amount of Friday nights in an alcohol induced faze resulting in Saturday morning questionnaires to answer the supremely mysterious question, “What did I do last night?” 

Usually, nothing too brilliant. 

In college, the point of an evening 'out' seemed to be to get as intoxicated as possible, but this is no longer the case. Nowadays, my objective for a night on the town is generally to drink the minimum required to achieve a fun little conversation buzz that dies off by the time I make it safely to bed, water in hand, before the 'crazy' kids come out after ten pm. 

So when my friend, Alise and I thought of the Bloody Quest, I figured, what could be more responsible than an innocent, intellectual, well-planned search for the best Bloody Mary in the town of Vail? It wasn’t like we were going to try them all in one day. No, like responsible ski bum adults, we deemed it necessary to spread the drinking out over several weeks so that we could utilize the full spectrum of our faculties to judge the quality of the cocktails.  

We decided to start the other day at the Ale House. It's close by and on Sundays, Bloodys are only 5 bucks. We ordered our drinks from a friendly server, and settled on the high-top chairs to check out the ambiance. After we waved to some familiar faces, the drinks arrived and we devised our scoring system. Here’s the system along with the results: 

Ambiance Out of 5	Appearance Out of 5	Garnish Out of 5	Flavor Out of 5	Spice Out of 5	Overall Out of 10
4	3	Content:3 Quality: 4	4	2	6
Ale House is a spacious bar, decent music, good service	Very neat, good color but no salt rim, no sidecar	Pickle, olive, celery, peppercino, lemon, lime. Great quality Effing banger little pickle	Subtle, good but lacking a bit on the forward flavors	Not too spicy, good for the light-hearted tongue in search of some adventure	At $5 a pop (at least on Sundays), this baby is totally worth it. Thumbs up!

“This is fun!” Alisa commented after we were done. And that is all it took to convince us that we should definitely take on two Bloody tastings in one day. 

Our next tasting, however, was a disappointment. Sweet Basil, you might have some of the best food in town, but Bloody Marys, you do not. Take a look at this: 

Ambiance Out of 5	Appearance Out of 5	Garnish Out of 5	Flavor Out of 5	Spice Out of 5	Overall Out of 10
1	2	Content: .5 Quality: 1	2	1	2
Sweet Basil lights are nice, but it feels stuffy and formal. Not our scene	It was neat, but small and boring. The points are for the dill salt rim. (Possibly the best part of the drink)	One lonely pickled pepper sitting on top of the ice	Interesting, cocktail sauce beverage, almost sweet. If you don’t like bloodys cuz of the spice, you might like this one	Yeah, no spice to speak of	Lots of work went into this Bloody mix, but it just didn’t tango on our tongues. Not worth $12. Thumbs down

So, at this point we probably should have gone home, or at least eaten some dinner, (I mean, that pickle on the Ale House garnish skewer was great, however...) but, and this was likely the fatal flaw in our plan, it was Super Bowl Sunday and we had to go watch the game. 

Forget the fact that I can't stand watching football (as little as one week prior I had definitely believed the Seahawks to be the name of a hockey team).

We had to watch the game. We had to do it at a bar. 

I did order another Bloody Mary at some point in the evening and because I was tired of not getting side-cars, I ordered a whole beer to go with it. It was great, I think, although no, I do not have a chart to validate it nor any of the other drinks that magically appeared on my tab. 

Sadly, the first Bloody Quest did not go well*, or at least that's what I realized in the morning. I guess I should have seen those odds. 

*I have to wonder, 'would it have gone so poorly if Sweet Basil didn't have such a lame garnish???'