My first guess would be that it’s something weird like a date. Ok, let’s see what the Googs says: Rosacea family. Ok, well, not even close. Oh, and dates fall out of palm trees pretty much the way you see them at the store. Yeah, date palms, dummy. Anyway, rosacea encompasses a lot of stuff like stonefruit, blackberries, strawberries. Yeah, what the hell? That sure makes almost no sense, but goddammit I’m a bartender, Jim, not a botanist.

They’re also known as a Japanese plum. Unlike their other stone fruit brethren, then don’t really have a hard pit but rather two shiny black seeds inside a weird, viscous casing. Very alien. Also unlike other stone fruits they grow in clusters like grapes. I see them all over LA in trees on the side of the road. Don’t worry, those aren’t going to end up in your drink.

Since the loquat is uncommon, we can only compare its flavor to other fruits with flavors more familiar with, like apricots and citrus fruits. When ripe it’s very sweet, jammy, and also a little tart. When unripe it can be tannic. To me the flesh is a bit gelatinous, and is obviously tropical with a lingering grape taste.

Still not sure how these will go into a cocktail. I went to the farmer’s market yesterday. There’s some peaches coming around but no apricots yet. Odd. I usually bought them from See Canyon Ranch, this awesome dry farm, but they haven’t been around for months since the torrential rains. I hope they’re ok.

Anyway, the social media team decided to post my ugly mug right up there on the grams. Oh lord. I’m stirring something up but looking down. Camera shy. For whatever reason I’ve never really enjoyed having my picture taken. Maybe because I feel it’ll “steal my soul.” I don’t know. My old man was always sticking a camera in our faces growing up. The old days when you had to take film to have it developed. You’d have to wait to see how your pictures came out and they usually weren’t so great if you used a crappy camera. Nowadays it’s so common to have an insane amount of pictures and videos. My own phone has thousands of pictures and videos on it from years past. Why do I bring this up? No idea. Well, ok, I’ll confess I started thinking about bigfoot again. You know, sasquatch, the wild man, the yeti. An old friend of mine from Vermont is trying to convince me it’s all real and not a hoax but once again I’ve got to be skeptical and ask why the hell we haven’t gotten some decent footage or even a physical capture. Sort of ridiculous.

The real crazy ones say the sasquatch is a primate, like us, the now extinct gigantopithecus. A massive ape that could grow up to ten feet tall. There’s ancient bones to prove it’s existence but no one has uncovered any from the present. Just saying. I find this shit fascinating because so many want to believe and there’s plenty of sightings to back it all up but there’s little evidence. Jo’s take: “Honey, there’s people out that think Trump is still president. There’s all kinds of stupid things people think to be true. Hey! What are you doing? Don’t type what I’m saying!”

There’s even sasquatch fetishists. This was big news a few years back during a political campaign. Here, this will jog your memory. This dude, Denver Riggleman (cool but creepy name), who ran for congress in Virginia had this strange side gig as a writer of bigfoot erotica. The story goes, he saw something in the woods as a kid and it stayed with him for life. His opponent brought up one of his books, “Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him” in order to gain her side some momentum but her efforts proved futile. The guy still got elected.

Sasquatch does sort of sound like loquat. That’s just how my mind works. Expect a drink soon.