The kitchen smells like fag ends and stale yeast. Your head is a bottle of ghosts, mouth like a fur boot. The lounge, a forest of empties, footprints on the ceiling. In the backyard, someone you’ve never seen before is passed out in the rain.
The Sharehouse bash: excellent idea at the time, a world of pain the next morning.
Throughout the years, certain bashes have gained legendary status—P.A Mansion’s ‘Big Lebowski’ night with complementary White Russians, Slam Palace’s ‘What the Hell are you Wearing’ affair, and every Christmas Night when our pal Yuri would corral half of Melbourne into his weatherboard bungalow in the inner north for an night of post-turkey cans and toga, culminating in death threats from neighbours and fury that he’d once again ruined Christmas.
Those, and many other mornings, were indeed busted-ass. But nothing compares to a morning after in Berlin. Here, the party stakes are premium. Berliners are masters of endurance; they spread their good times out. Beer flows cheaper than water, happy hours are happy nights, and clubs are known to open doors on Thursdays and close, reluctantly, on Tuesday mornings. No one knows what a long mac is, communicating with Deutsch pharmacists is fraught with peril at the most cognisant of times, and besides, trying to combat the kind of aftermath that Berlin wreaks upon you armed with a coffee and a pill is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
To shake the fear and keep your ship up, you need more. You need a drink with three kinds of meat.
You need: The Bloody Berliner.
Sure, it’s smoky, dirty and on the brown side, but so are you. Featuring a double vodka hit, real Worcestershire sauce, traditional and chipotle Tabasco, a bacon stirrer and grease wand of cornichon with two varieties of German sausage, the Bloody Berliner is a smoky, meaty, pickled affair, for those rag order mornings when you’ve been truly smoked, meated and pickled.
- 1 Lime wedge
- 120ml of tomato juice
- 60ml of vodka
- 1 Tbls of Worcestershire sauce
- ½ Tsp of Tabasco Sauce
- ½ Tsp of Tabasco Chipotle Sauce
- Freshly ground sea salt
- Freshly ground black pepper
- Ice
- Long glass (pint)
- GARNISH:
- 2 Cocktail cornichons
- 1 Speck-Würstchen (small sausage wrapped in bacon)
- 1 Schinken Knacker (knackwurst sausage, or similar)
- 1 Slice of streaky bacon
- 1 Lime slice
- 1 Kitchen bamboo skewer
- ½ Tsp of mustard
- Heat frying pan on medium and start cooking bacon and both types of sausages.
- Lightly rub the rim of the glass with the lime wedge. In a saucer, grind salt and pepper and mix. Roll the lip of the glass into the mixture to coat evenly. Fill the glass with ice and set aside.
- In a cocktail shaker, add a squeeze of lime, tomato juice, vodka, Worcestershire sauce, both Tabasco sauces and a pinch of the salt and pepper mix. Add some ice, shake to combine and strain into prepared glass.
- To make the garnish, place a slice of sausage followed by cornichon in succession until half of the skewer is covered. Stand skewer in drink, and top with a dollop of mustard.
- Place the lime slice on the rim of the glass and add the streaky bacon stirrer. Voila! Feel the Berliner's redemptive power coarse through your veins. And party on.

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