Thirsty Thursday: HWY 129
If you’ve never had the privilege of mini-road tripping down Highway 129 between Macon and Athens, Georgia, you may want to reevaluate your summer itinerary. I’m shooting this route for the hundredth time, shuttling myself home for holidays. In this case, I’m headed to my mom’s for Mother’s Day.
Georgia is a magical place for nostalgists. Its back-country highways are beautified by rust and worn out wood, misspelled fruit stand signs, and overwhelming verdancy. The asphalt glitters with mica. Artifacts of bygone eras mark each mile. Take this house, about 15 miles from my mother’s, as example:
If I don’t get stuck behind a logging truck, good old boy, or tiny grandmother in a maroon Buick, I can negotiate hillside curves with breezy fluidity. It’s only the second week of May, but it’s ninety-five degrees outside and the clouds are mountainous for a thunderstorm. Just two days ago, a storm poured summer straight onto Georgia. It’s early in the season, yet I want nothing more than to lay in the deep shade of a pecan orchard while heat ripples through the grass. I want peaches.
There are so many things about this road that I love: the antique store at a gas station near Bishop where I find the best records, the Microcar Museum, pecan groves, hay bales, cows half-submerged in pond mud, BBQ joints (like Zeb’s), lonely mid-pasture trees, and the inescapable heat that melted the chocolates that my mother got me for Easter. They are still melting in the back seat.
Thank god for this lady.She has been selling peaches at the same stand for the last seventeen years.
Thank god for her brother, who drove to South Georgia to bring back these small, but perfect, early peaches. She doesn’t want her picture taken, but she lets me snap a photo of her hands. It’s her great silver mullet and fanny pack that I want to commemorate, but look at that little peach. Small but slurp-able. This is ingredient No. 1 of the cocktail I’m making tonight.
RECIPE
5 slices of a small peach
1.5 oz Leopold Bros. Peach Whiskey
1 oz Belle Meade bourbon
.25 oz Zucca
.25 oz Orgeat
.5 oz lemon juice
Muddle peaches in the base of your shaking tin. Add all other ingredients. Top with ice. Shake until chilled, then strain over crushed ice. Garnish with as much peach as you’re willing to share.
What I love about cocktails is their propensity for complexity, and how each flavor can imbue a time and place. Leopold Brothers’ Peach Whiskey is the only peach-flavored libation that doesn’t make me think of lollipops. It reminds me of peach juice between my fingers and of whiskey out of the bottle on Lake Juliette. Belle Meade is a cinnamon-spicy bourbon with caramel notes, adding a cobbler feel to the concoction. Zucca is the realist of the group, chastising my sappiness and adding a realistic bitter note. Orgeat lends a silkiness to the mouthfeel, like peach flesh. Lemon juice, for brightness like sunshine. The peach is best either warm off the tree or ice cold out of the fridge on a hot afternoon.
I’m giving you this recipe before summer (and peaches) begin in earnest, so that you can have access to it right when you get your first fresh peach. This is how summer in Georgia tastes to me. The flavor reflects the places and emotions I experience on this drive, so I’m calling this cocktail The HWY-129.
