Gorilla Fart: Two Overproof Spirits, No Apology

There is no technique, and that is the technique. You pour two overproof spirits into a shot glass and you drink them. No stirring, no dilution, no ice doing its quiet work of rounding off the edges. That omission is the whole point. The rum runs 75.5 percent alcohol and the bourbon runs 50.5 percent, so you are looking at a shot that lands somewhere north of 60 percent by volume, undiluted, served at room temperature. The heat hits first and hardest. Underneath it, if you slow down long enough to notice, the 151 brings a flat caramel sweetness and the Wild Turkey brings rye spice, vanilla, and a charred-oak bitterness that the rum can't fully bury. Pour them in either order. It will not change your life. The only craft decision worth making is whether to pour them separately and chase, or build them together and commit. Together is the honest way.

Strip a cocktail down to its skeleton and you can always tell where it lives. The Old Fashioned family is the one built on spirit plus a little sweetness and a little bitterness, with no sour citrus, no mixer, no wine, no cream or richness softening the blow. That is the entire architecture of a Benton's Old Fashioned or a Black Manhattan, just dressed up in better clothes. The Gorilla Fart belongs to the same bloodline, and it sits there as the most stripped-down member in the room. The sweetness comes from the molasses-heavy 151. The bitterness comes from the bourbon's heavy char. There is no sugar cube, no orange peel, no dash of Angostura standing between you and the spirit, which means the drink is doing exactly what an Old Fashioned does, with the training wheels ripped off and thrown in the parking lot. Pour the same two bottles over a big rock and add bitters, and you'd have something a craft bar would charge you for. Skip all of that and you have the Gorilla Fart. Same family, meaner cousin.

Nobody invented the Gorilla Fart in a leather-bound notebook. It crawled out of the same dim corners that produced the Alabama Slammer and the Black Russian, those drinks bartenders make for people who already know what they want and don't want to hear about provenance. The name is a joke and also a promise, the kind of bar-back christening that sticks because it's funnier and more accurate than anything a brand would approve. The 151 connection matters here. Bacardi discontinued its 151 in 2016, partly because overproof rum and open flame have a long, litigious history, so the original recipe now requires hunting down a dusty bottle or substituting another overproof rum, which purists will tell you is a crime and which everyone else will tolerate. This is a drink with a body count of dignity, not people. You order it at the end of a shift, or the end of a friendship, or the beginning of a very bad idea. I have a grudging affection for it, the same way I respect a cook who can break down a whole fish with a dull knife. There is no hiding in a Gorilla Fart. It is two loud spirits shouting at each other, and either you can hang or you can't. Most of the so-called craft world could use a little more of that honesty and a little less rosemary smoke.