The Pattern

A spin on the classic-ish "blood and sand" cocktail, using scotch, orange, red fruit, and vermouth. It's sweet, smoky, bitter, boozy, and herbal all at the same time.

Mixed for Jarvis's Fantasy Mixing Hootenanny. I took "Fantasy" as a bit broader direction .... because miss me with that elf shit. I'd been working on a blood and sand for a minute and wanted to find a good hook related to fiction. I could have went "Dune" but kindground has an Arrakis remix that is pretty good already. Also, I never read the dune books. Star Wars is for dorks, so no Tatooine or whatever. I started drifting more into horror and ended up on "The Voice of the Beach" by Ramsey Campbell. I had originally read it after reading someone complain that "Beachworld" by Stephen King was derivative, it's an older short story about an all-consuming beach and a mysterious pattern. We got blood, we got sand, and we got another non-sequitur of a name. FANTASY!

This recipe is going to look like kind of a lot, and it is. The original cocktail is also kind of a lot. Scotch is such an aggressive flavor, you have to do some really intense things to push it around. So we did some intense things.

The Scotch base here is mostly FA Whisky. It's pretty mild, it's a bit fruity, it has some peat. We crank it up to 4% (fetch the fainting couch) because we want the peat to come through and everything else going on here is going to need some that mildly boozy, fruity base to play off of. EXTRA CREDIT: Vape Train Scotch Whiskey is super, super intense. If you have it, and you enjoy the funkier boozier parts of this, throw in a couple drops. I wouldn't go beyond .25% , but it adds a really aggressive edge to the booze here. Not included in the recipe because not everyone wants to annihilate their sinuses all the way, but it's pretty fun if you're broken like me.

There is a whole lot of FLV Cranberry in here. 2% will dominate most mixes you throw it in, and this isn't really an exception. It's sweet, sticky, and dark. I put some (very weak but at least not plastic) TPA Cherry Extract in there at 5% to kind of bend into a heering profile, but it's still pretty recognizably cranberry. And at 2% of FLV Cranberry you do have to contend with some serious off notes, it gets boozy and warm... It's almost like we planned it.

The INW Shisha Orange is a pretty good cocktail orange that has some nuance depth beyond just the generic acidity that you'd get from real orange juice. It's strong even at .5%, but the rest of this recipe is strong too. You can handle it. It also fades a bit, so you may even bump up to .75% if you want to steep this for a while.

I have no idea why Flavorwest manufactures such a good vermouth flavor, but I'm not arguing. It's called "martini," but I get no gin. Solo, it's more of a dry vermouth than sweet, but we got plenty of sweetness in this mix to compensate. This acts like the vermouth in the cocktail, namely adding some bitter and herbal counterpoints for all that sweetness and alcohol. Is 3.5% A bit much? Probably, but we are fighting that 2% FLV Cranberry and 4% FA Whisky and everything has spun fully out of control at this point.

This sort of ended up being a cocktail vape for people that really like cocktail vapes. I'm not sure I'd try to convince anyone with this one. I've found this can be a bit much at super high wattages, I prefer it more out of a smaller rta at like 12mg.