Crafts Gone Wrong - The Bay Rum Experiment

The Tower of BoOze

A few years ago I decided that I was going to make the men in the family some cologne for Christmas. I had previously made some using essential oils and vodka and that came out pretty well. (In case you're wondering alcohol is the standard base for perfumes and colognes so vodka works well for the homemade variety.) I searched the web and found a recipe for bay rum aftershave. It seemed pretty straightforward - take some rum, put in some bay leaves, some lemon and lime rind, and a few cloves and let it all sit for a few weeks. I let it sit for a few weeks and promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward to some time in the future. Peter calls me at work. He's arrived home and has had a bad day at work and is looking for something to drink. I had some frozen fruit in the freezer and recommended he make up some sort of blender concoction to ease his pain. He likes that idea and had thought he'd seen some dark rum in our liquor cabinet, or as we call it, "the tower of booze". A few minutes later he calls me back, very upset. Somehow the bay rum experiment had found its way into the tower of booze. To this day I don't know how it got there. Really, I don't.

He'd put all the fruit into the blender and put in a healthy dose of the 'dark rum', apparently paying no attention to the odd bits of stuff floating in it. Suffice to say Peter got quite a shock on his first sip. He described it as medicinal, horrid, and gag-worthy. Oh it was bad. And that was the end of my experiments with homemade cologne. And Peter switched to drinking whiskey and keeps his bottle separate.