Hey guys? Help me brainstorm how to make a new drink I'm kicking around.

[xiphias]

It's called the "Boba Libre".

See, the "Cuba Libre" is the official bartender name for a rum and coke. "Boba" are those tapioca pearls that you get in bubble tea.

And it's not quite working yet. I can't get the texture of the boba right. I may just need to practice with normal boba for a while.

So, you boil the tapioca pearls for, like, 25 minutes, then you let them cool for half an hour, and they'll supposedly stay appropriately chewy for several hours after that.

I've been doing the boiling in rum instead of water, and then putting the rum-soaked boba into a glass and pouring Coke over it.

It's almost working. But the texture is just a little off.

Any thoughts? The pot the boba boil in is sealed tightly to keep any alcohol vapors from escaping, and to keep oxygen out, so that the whole thing doesn't just catch on fire -- and it's a glass lid, so I can watch the alcohol condense on the top of the pot and drip back down in.

Should I be boiling the boba longer, assuming that the mixture is boiling at, say, 200 degrees F (93 C), instead of 212 F / 100 C? (Alcohol has a boiling point of 173 F/ 78.3 C, and distilled liquors are usually 40% alcohol, 60% water, so would that mean that it's boiling at about 200 degrees? Or would it mean that the alcohol is floating around as a vapor, and that then the water boils normally?)

Does anyone know anything about the specific chemistry of tapioca?

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I doubt it will make that much difference. The amount of non-alcohol non-water stuff in rum is fairly trivial for the level of chemistry we're talking about. Maybe if I was using a dark Jamacan rum, too, that might be significant. But this is just Bacardi, and chemically, I suspect that the difference between Bacardi and vodka is basically a few ppm of aromatic esters.

. . .

Okay, I just had a teaspoon of Bacardi while holding my nose, and there IS a very slight taste difference between Bacardi and vodka, but not a hell of a lot. Without aroma, there's not that much rum-like about Bacardi. It's all in the aroma. So I continue in my suspicion that there won't be that much difference for this level of chemistry.