Join me as I go on a wild ride with Leighton Rathbone, the 2019 title holder of the South African leg of the Angostura Global Cocktail Competition.
Leighton Rathbone, you wake up after a large night and reach for your phone. Your feed is full of terrifying videos of the walking dead. You have time to grab three objects to help you survive. What are they?
A bottle of bourbon (medical aid cowboy style!), my baseball bat and my phone (will be damned if I’m doing this without a kickass soundtrack).
You get the chance to escape by boarding a space shuttle, and circumnavigating the earth until the mayhem has subsided. You can programme one cocktail into the replicator, which you can imbibe, at will, for the next however many years. What’s it going to be?
Boulevardiers on tap? Yes please!
You get exposed to radiation while on a space walk. Pick a superpower.
Immortality (with a kill switch).
You crash land on a beautiful deserted island during re-entry. You stumble across a magical fridge that contains ice and an unlimited supply of five ingredients. What would you like them to be?
Buffalo Trace Bourbon, limes, sugar, Windhoek draught and Angostura Aromatic Bitters.
You open an old bottle that comes bobbing along in the ocean, and out pops a genie. For your wish, you can be transported to a time and place of your choosing. Where, and to when, do you go?
15 August 1969, Bethel, New York (the first Woodstock music festival).
You get framed for murder, and are on death row. Choose your last meal.
Medium rare T-bone steak, fried eggs and chips.
The electric chair has somehow – thrown you back to your timeline, but you’re barely alive (maybe it was your superpower kicking in). To survive, your consciousness must be melded with another person’s, and you must live out your life as them. Who are you now?
Josh Homme, lead of Queens of the Stone Age and many other bands.
You sacrifice your life for another. Your reward, in the afterlife, is that you can have a drink with anyone you like, dead or alive. Who do you choose?
Hunter S Thompson.
