“Now, me and you, we are dancing on the edge of life and death. Four items each. You know the drill.”

~ The Dealer

Inspiration

Buckshot Roulette is a fool’s game. Think Russian roulette but with a shotgun. Some shells are blank, and some shells live. You versus the dealer. What do you do in the face of certain death? Pour yourself a drink, of course—a stiff drink to take the edge off.

This drink started as a conceptual love child between the Revolver cocktail (bourbon, coffee, orange) and a Black Russian (vodka, coffee). Why these two drinks? Well, think of the parallel structure here: Buckshot Roulette, Russian roulette. In the usual implementation of Russian roulette, a revolver is loaded with bullets while leaving some chambers empty. Combine a black Russian cocktail and a revolver cocktail because Russian roulette is played with a revolver. I know, I know! Sometimes cocktail mixology is a glorified game of beverage genetics. Bev-netics? Ah, whatever!

Game Items

In Buckshot Roulette several items can affect the way the game is played. Drinking a beer racks the current round (ejects it from the chamber without firing), using handcuffs skips the next participant’s turn, and smoking a cigarette restores a life. At this point, I had mixed a drink with a split base of vodka and bourbon with a smidge of coffee liqueur. I took a shot at adding some Turkish tobacco bitters to the mix, reminiscent of the cigarettes that would give you one extra chance at survival. This could be your last game, remember? I’ll acknowledge that you could just dump the drink into a beer, throwing all caution to the wind. But from my mixological perspective, you’re better off downing a Buckshot Roulette cocktail and sipping on the beer as a sort of prolonged chaser.

To really round things out,  I wanted to add some aspect of this drink that paid homage to the shotgun, or just firearms in general. An article I read a while back described using dehydrated whiskey as a means to force-age whiskey. The idea? Dehydrate some whiskey, and add the soluble powder to another bottle. To garnish Buckshot Roulette, I took the oakiest bourbon in my collection, a bottle of Jim Beam Devil’s Cut, dehydrated it until it was a fine powder, and sprinkled it over the ice cube in the final mix. A quick bit of trivia here, the “devil’s cut” is the part of the liquor that gets absorbed by the barrel it ages in (whereas the “angel’s cut” is what evaporates into the air). This bourbon is notably drier than most, and when dehydrated, reminds me of gunpowder.

Flavor Analysis

This is a spirit-forward and dry drink. Flavors of bitter oak and coffee go down bracingly leaving a residual flavor of smoked tobacco on the palette.