Risky Fuel

A while back, the Risky Fuel household hosted a bit of a party for Sarah’s birthday. Two of the centerpieces of said party were an endless supply of 30 Rock Cheesy Blasters (we dramatically improved on the recipe from our first attempt and will write about that at some other time) and the creation of the very exciting liquor combinations Skittles vodka and Skittles rum.

Here’s what went down:

First, we needed the ingredients and the tools, so we got:

* 2 big bags of Skittles
* 3 500ml bottles of water
* 1 bottle of 375ml Bacardi Superior rum
* 2 bottles of 375ml Absolut vodka
* a box of coffee filters
* a funnel

NOTE: You need to start all this a day before the day you intend to drink these fancy boozes.

Step #1: Separate The Skittles

This job was pretty simple. There are five flavours of Skittles — lime, lemon, strawberry, grape and orange — so we just separated the various candies into their appropriate bowls. What was harder, though, was figuring out which flavours of booze we were going to make. We had two vodka bottles and one rum, which meant two Skittle flavours wouldn’t make the cut.

We figured strawberry would got with the rum because, well, strawberry daiquiris. Lime sucks, so that was easy to cut. So it was down to grape, lemon and orange for the two vodka bottles. We decided to go with grape and lemon because orange just doesn’t go well with stuff. Like chocolate. Those chocolate orange thingees are only exciting to lowers on the evolutionary ladder.

Anyway, we now had our flavours:

* Lemon Skittles vodka
* Grape Skittles vodka
* Strawberry Skittles rum

Step #2: Skittle-fying The Alcohol

First, you drink the water from the water bottles. Then you take your Skittles and put all the lemon in one bottle, all the grape in the second, and all the strawberry in the third. Then you go have a pee break because you just drank three bottles of water. When you come back from peeing you grab your funnel (because it mess-proofs things) and funnel the corresponding booze into the appropriate water bottle.

Then you let your water bottles full of booze and Skittles sit for a day to allow the alcohol to dissolve the candies. They should look something like this if you arrange them neatly for photo taking purposes:

Step #3: Filtering The Skittle-fied Booze Back Into Original Bottles

So the next day while you’re casually cleaning the house for your party it’s time to set up the funnel, with a coffee filter in it, to pour the Skittle-infused from the water bottles back into the original bottles.

We were forewarned this was a snag area — the whole reason why you need to coffee filter things is because the candy doesn’t entirely dissolve — and sure enough, it was a problem. And the specific problem in our case was that the coffee filters made the actual filtering process go reaaaaallllly slowly.

As in agonizing drip, drip drip-type slow. Poking the funnel or tugging at the edges of the filter would temporarily increase flow, but ultimately continuing to do that would cause structural collapse of the filter and the entire contents just ended up pouring straight into the bottles.

We never figured out a better filtering solution so our Skittle booze was filled with candy floaties.

Step #4: Drink It

We were a little bummed about the filtering, but people eat tequila worms and drink Goldschlager, right? So it was, like, whatever and we had our party.

As it turns out, people were actually a little bit scared of rum and vodka infused with Skittles. We managed to finish off the grape vodka by doing shots, but the strawberry rum and lemon vodka are still kicking around our place. As shots the various flavours came across a little harsh — like an angry variety of cough syrup that won’t make you appreciate Houston hip-hop if you drink it. And we’ve yet to experiment with the remaining boozes in mixed drinks.

Conclusion: Unless we come up with a eureka mixed drink combo for our remaining booze and a brainwave on how to filter out the candy pieces more quickly and easily it’s probably going to be a long time until we combine Skittles with alcohol again.