#chilli vodka

http://www.odditycentral.com/news/man-ends-up-in-the-hospital-after-drinking-satans-shot-vodka.html

Soak whole dried chillis in a bottle of vodka. Serve with a sweet juice like fresh orange or passionfruit to counter the chilli hit.

The death water was supposed to just be a chilli vodka. A bit brutal, but nothing too painful. Put some dried chillis in the vodka (I think we used absolut), take them out after a few days, voila chilli vodka. There were just two problems. The first was the very simple one that we used quite a lot of chilli. I think it was somewhere in the region of 50-100g of fairly spicy dried red chillis for a 500ml bottle of vodka. The second was that about a month later we said "Huh. Are there supposed to still be chillis in there?" It's definitely not the spiciest chilli vodka in the world. I've had a drop of a Naga chilli vodka which set my mouth on fire. This is not that. But it's definitely heading quite far in that direction, and 2ml of it is more than enough to give this drink some serious fire. What's the drink like? You know... it's actually kinda good. As I discovered with the FEW rye whiskey, the Cocchi and Campari mix appears to work rather well with spiciness - it provides a nice strong base layer on which you can build spices. Sweet, but very able to stand up to other flavours. The spiciness of the pimento dram adds an interesting level of cinammon and clove (yes I know it's allspice, but allspice tastes like cinammon and clove) to it without quite dominating and the chocolate bitters provide a nice bridge between the two to balance it out. The chilli vodka then adds heat at the end which really nicely finishes the whole thing off. It's definitely a curious drink, and it's not going to be to everyone's taste, but I think it might be a bit of a winner.

Drink created by James Dance of Loading as part of a Capcom Europe endorsed series of SFxT cocktails.  These drinks were served at a launch event in London this past week.