You’re welcome to use the name in your corn cocktails. There’s a bunch of others available too. The Corn Supremacy, The Corn Ultimatum, and The Corn Legacy. In terms of action movies with lots of sequels, the whole Bourne thing got tiring at the end but the original three are pretty damn good. They’re certainly up there with best trilogies along with Nolan’s Dark Knight, the original Star Wars, and the original Indiana Jones stuff. Before you think of inserting your own, the criteria is quite steep. All three movies have to be good and have to stand the test of time. For instance: the original Matrix doesn’t count. And, yes, I’m sorry to say, the Lord of the Rings trilogy just doesn’t hold up the way it used to.

Matt Damon entered into our lives with Good Will Hunting, a story about a genius douchebag from Boston, and co-won an Oscar for best original screenplay with his buddy, Ben Affleck. Quite a feat considering Damon was only 27 years old. Since then, he’s ingrained himself into our lives with a number of iconic roles in movies such as Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ocean’s Eleven, The Departed, True Grit, Elysium, Interstellar, and The Martian. He’s just one of those solid guys that’s good in everything and despite his fame and fortune still seems like the normal type of guy that would be fun to have a beer with.

Let’s examine the ingredients in this new cocktail.

Corn Identity

1.5 oz. Mezcal

1 oz. Cornpico

.5 oz. Corngeat

.5 oz. Bananum

.25 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

Blackstrap Floater

Corn salt and pickled fresno tajin rimmer.

A floater and a rimmer. Yeah, I know. Sometimes you gotta cheese out. I think we’ve been slightly obsessing over the corn ‘n’ oil cocktail and thinking of ways to bring it up a bit. A blackstrap floater still gives it that Exxon Valdez oil spill look while the tajin rimmer is a nice decoration and tastes cool. I really love rimmers on cocktails, I don’t care what anyone thinks.

I thin I want to stop using the term “zero waste” because there’s always going to be waste of some sort and any actual organic waste at Rustic goes into a compost bin, so it goes to a good place. I’d like to think of using the entirety of any ingredient more as something like “Intelligent Usage” or “Squeezing the most out of your ingredients.” Something like that. For instance, we used spent corn cobs to make corn stock but when we finished with them they still went into the compost bin. Waste was still created. We used as much as we could but zero waste would mean we made corn cob pipes and sold them behind the bar. Do you get what I’m saying? We’re making a ton of noyaux with all the stone fruit pits but the pits still go into the trash when their usefulness is over. “Zero waste” would mean the pits were put in some hippie candle and named “Almond Sunset” or some crap.

For the Corn Identity we simply pulled as much of the corn out of the corn that we could. We first cut the kernels off, juiced them, and made corn pudding with the resulting juice. This is much easier than it sounds. You just cook the corn juice over low heat for about fifteen minutes, whisking constantly, and it’ll thicken on its own. To this we add a couple dashes of shio koji to up the umami content already present in the corn and give it a little oomph.

After juicing there’s a lot of pulp. This goes toward making more corn amazake for the corngeat. Easy enough.

We add one cup of water per spent cob and just let it all simmer down slowly in a big ol’ pot. The last batch was twelve cobs, so twelve cups, and we ended up with 2 cups of corn broth. To this Angel made a 2:1 weaker style syrup. 2 parts corn stock, one part sugar, by blending the two together in the Vitamixer.

The “cornpico” is a little different from our other calpico styles. It’s a 2:1:1 split. So two parts basic calpico (with no syrups added), one part corn pudding, one part corn stock syrup. we do this on the scale. For reference: 500 grams basic calpico, 250 grams corn pudding, 250 grams corn stock syrup.

The corn salt was made from taking corn juice and cooking it down with salt on low heat for a couple of hours. Pretty weird. We had some leftover pickled fresnos from a cocktail we did called the Oaxacan Love Triangle. I pulled them out of the vinegar, dehydrated them, buzzed them, and put them in the tajin mix with the corn and some grated lime zest. Again, something fresh, something forgotten.

Weird but good.