Bar Eastern implementation part 3: Reimu Hakurei

Once again, this recipe is pretty straightforward to make, though we're shaking rather than stirring this time. Put all the ingredients together, move it about, then drop it in a glass and drop the cherry in afterwards. 1/5 difficulty, the worst part is not using too much lychee liqueur. Which is even not all that difficult to do, since the orange bitters is similar in quantity and potency so it all works out.

The only problematic ingredient here is likely to be the lychee liqueur. You'll be able to find at least some sake in most liquor stores, or if not any asian market that sells liquor. But if you can't at least find sake, likely you'll not be able to find most of the other unusual ingredients in Bar Eastern. Lychee liqueur is not very common. I've seen it in a couple of places, Binny's had exactly one variety, and it was also at the Japanese and Chinese liquor stores near me. Not impossible to find, but you may have to look further than your everyday corner liquor store. The rest is pretty doable - orange bitters is one of the most common bitters, white grapefruit juice (the white part is important, so that does make it a bit more difficult) is pretty findable and maraschino cherries are in just about any liquor store. Actually, I think my main issue here was the grapefruit juice - it claims to be white, but it's actually a little more yellow than I'd like. More on that later. Similarly to Mokou's "Beer", you get a pretty good amount of wiggle room with the "Sake" ingredient here. I'm not sure if you're supposed to use nigori or filtered sake, so I went the thematic route again - Demon Slayer sake, perfect for the incident-resolving shrine maiden. Difficulty sourcing: 3/5

My sweet battery-powered cocktail mixer doesn't do very well with shaking, since the top isn't really watertight (whose bright idea was that?) but it does mean I got to get a super slick new cocktail shaker. Man, this thing looks cool. Anyways, as for the actual drink - this is an intermediate step where everything except the grapefruit juice has been added. It's a neat little orange-tint color, and since it's as-yet unshaken it's got cool distribution effects. I guess I can still rate it on how cool it looks in the mixer, even if it's not being tornadoswirled around - 3/5, not bad.

It's an interesting taste, sort of a balance of bitter and sweet and a fruity mix. The sake is greatest in quantity, but its taste is taken over by the stronger lychee and orange bitters, with the grapefruit adding yet another fruit dimension, and the cherry at the end to finish things off with fruit version 4. Quite drinkable. Like I said, it kinda looks like my grapefruit juice tints things unsatisfactorily off-white, oh well. The lychee liqueur floating at the top does look pretty neat, and it's got some good thematic red-white going on (or, red-offwhite, I guess... ;_;) Their lighting conditions were way better, though. Gotta work on that... 2/5 in accuracy. Also, that guy on the bitters bottle totally wants to try this thing. I'd make one for him just because of his sweet beard, but alas, he is 2d.