A drink a day: The Rock and Rye
"Bar Month" at OnMilwaukee.com is back for another round! The whole month of February, we're serving up intoxicatingly fun bars and club articles -- including guides, unique features, drink recipes and more. Grab a designated driver and dive in!
In celebration of Bar Month, each member of the editorial staff was charged with coming up with a "Drink of the Day." You've been reading them the past few weeks and some of the submissions have been quite creative. Some of the recommendations have been mouthwateringly delicious.
Let's just say that I can't vouch for this one.
I've never had a Rock and Rye.
Until I looked it up via Google, I didn't even know what it was, other than that it was a liqueur made famous in one of my all-time favorite comedies.
If you've seen "Animal House," the 1978 comedy classic in which OnMilwaukee.com film expert Mark Metcalf plays a major role, you have to remember the scene when the Deltas pick up some girls from Dickinson College and head to the Dexter Lake Club to catch up with their "friends" Otis Day and the Knights.
Once inside, Donald "Boone" Schoenstein, played with aplomb by Peter Riegert, bellies up to the bar and asks for "a double Rock and Rye and seven Carlings."
Carling, as any fan of the Premier League knows, is a brand of lager that dates to the early 1800s in the United Kingdom and the 1840s in Canada.
The Rock and Rye, according to extensive Google research, is a whiskey-based liqueur made from American Rye whiskey with citrus fruit flavoring and a bit of crystallized sugar -- the "rock" in "rock candy" -- in the bottle.
I've never sampled one. But, I intend to try one some day, maybe while listening to "Shama Lama Ding Dong" to celebrate a great scene in one of my favorite comedies.
Talkbacks
brunocarlson | Feb. 24, 2009 at 9:29 a.m. (report)
Interesting. I always assumed it was a different way of saying rye whiskey on the rocks.
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collagio | Feb. 23, 2009 at 10:47 a.m. (report)
Interesting; having a rock candy similarity within. Rye whiskey is supposed to be lower in sugar. Then again, fruit does have natural sugars in it. This whole Rock 'n Rye thing deserves more research. Or, maybe just ask the barkeep @ At Random or Angelo @ his piano bar perhaps.
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