The South may rise again, but not in a toast I make

Sometimes high concept theme ideas are brilliant, other times all the king's horses and all the king's men can't make heads or tails of them. "The South Will Rise Again," while it sounded good at first, was definitely one that fell off a wall.

Of course, this could be my fault. Everything I know about the south is some combination of mint juleps, seersucker suits on derby day, they were on the Bad side of the Civil War, New Orleans as presented in Preacher, and a vague notion that Georgia grows peaches. Turning any of these into cocktails was a conceptual doozy. What am I going to do, make some crawdad-infused gin to mix with cajun spice liqueur?

I'm guessing that there were some interesting things to do with rum, but none of those I thought of beforehand. Thankfully, we had agreed to do only one original cocktail, to be joined by a classic. The classic was easy, because one of the first and best cocktails ever is from New Orleans, the Sazerac. My standby recipe:

• 1 cube's worth of sugar
• 1 1/2 ounces rye or American whiskey (Sazerac makes an excellent one)
• 2 dashes of Peychaud’s Bitters
• Dash of absinthe
• Twist of lemon

Put ice and absinthe in the glass, swirl until it gets everywhere. Then toss everything else in, stir about twenty times in either direction, and enjoy. Easy peasy.

My original cocktail was high-concept fail on the smaller level. I wanted to play with the idea of sweet tea — not that I've ever actually had it — and do a whiskey-tea drink. There is a good drink to be made with this, but that drink should probably not be made on short notice by someone who only has nice Chinese black teas to use. I doubt sweet tea is traditionally made using organic black tea from Yunan.

I shall call it a Five O'Clock Tea

• 2 oz relatively strong brewed black tea
• 1 oz whiskey, preferably a rye
• 1 oz lemon liqueur
• A dash Fee Brothers Whiskey Aged Bitters

I used a Corsican cedrat liqueur for the lemon, but a limoncello would be far easier to obtain and probably better. A stronger tea than I used would work better, as would more tartness. It wasn't bad, but came off as mushy more than anything else. South, you may not have won the civil war, but you bested my cocktail-mixing efforts.