"Even if my memories are not real, it’s still me… Shadow." - Shadow from Sonic Adventure 2

Inspiration

Sonic’s rival and self-proclaimed “Ultimate Lifeform”, Shadow the Hedgehog, manifested as a dark drink with potently unique flavors. Originally inspired by his branded G-Fuel energy formula, Shadow the Highball was transformed into something greater by the time-consuming process of cocktail recipe experimentation. Let’s just say it took 50 years and a government conspiracy. What resulted is a cocktail combining the effervescence of Chaos (or rather Coca) Cola, dark and viscous cherry liqueur, vegetal and bright red bell pepper, and prickly aged tequila. Why tequila? Well, because “Shadow loves Latinas”. Obviously.

Workshopping

Energy Drinkspiration

Like with Sonic’s peach shochu highball cocktail, I wanted to build Shadow’s drink from the flavor assigned to him by his G-Fuel flavor. Shadows “Ultimate Chaos Cherry Vanilla Explosion”, or rather just the combo of cherry and vanilla flavors, would be where I would start. I initially was committed to using a sous vide-style infusion for the base spirit of the drink, like I did for Sonic. The two hedgehogs, Sonic and Shadow, were often confused for each other in Sonic Adventure 2, and to spoil the ending for you, I found that I’d have to treat both highballs via separate processes. Like any good experiment, though, I started with ignorance and found my way to “perfection” the hard way. Geez, Camx, channelling your inner Gerald Robotnik there aren’t ’ cha?

Starting with the “cherry” piece of Shadow the Highball, I combined some chopped, deseeded, and destemmed cherries from the grocery store with a base spirit. I’m unsure exactly what type of cherry I used, but they were labeled as “Red Cherries” when I bought them. In choosing the base spirit, I thought about what would make sense for Shadow, a canonically 50+-year-old hedgehog who believes he is the ultimate life form. Something in me felt that Shadow’s mildly narcissistic tendencies would be a good analog to the crowd of folks who bellow that American bourbon is “the perfect [ultimate] spirit”. Bourbon also has a mandatory aging requirement that seemed to be an appropriate callback to Shadow’s canonical age. I was going to run with this idea of doing a cherry-infused bourbon, but during one of my live streams, Chat reminded me of the “Shadow Loves Latinas“ meme. So, in place of bourbon, I tried my hand at using Mexican tequila for the infusion. In particular, I’d use a reposado for its similar aging requirements.

The first infusion used 103.3 g of red cherries vacuum-sealed in 12 ounces of tequila reposado (el Padrino was the brand I used for workshopping). The sous vide bath was set at 150 degrees Fahrenheit (65.6 degrees Celsius) for two hours, after which the mixture was strained out. The leftover cherries were combined with an equal weight of white granulated sugar to create a tequila cherry syrup. This method of infusing a spirit with fruit and then making syrup by macerating the remaining infused fruit pieces was also used for Sonic’s highball, but for peaches and shochu.

The next piece was the “vanilla” flavor. Although reposado tequila may have subtle vanilla flavors imparted by the aging process, I opted to create a syrup instead to have more control over how much vanilla flavor would be present. I also used the sous vide technique to create the vanilla-infused demerara syrup. The notable advantage of vacuum-sealed sous vide is that, unlike with heating on a stovetop, you can bring the water in the syrup up to temperature without risk of any of it boiling off since a sous vide bag keeps everything contained, including moisture. The vanilla demerara syrup used 3.13g of vanilla bean with 200 ml of water and 200 g of demerara sugar. I set the sous vide bath to 150 degrees Fahrenheit (65.6 degrees Celsius) and let it run for 2 hours. The temperature and amount of time here are the same as I used for the tequila infusion. To prepare the vanilla bean, I scored the side of it, scraped out the little beans from inside the pod, and then chopped it into small pieces before sealing the bag shut. This extra step, I figured, would give a stronger vanilla flavor since the smaller pieces provided more surface area for infusion. Following the sous vide bath for the syrup, a bit of demerara sugar remained undissolved, but massaging the bag a bit coerced the sugar to dissolve completely. After the bag cooled to room temperature, I fine-strained it off, leaving most of the small vanilla specks floating in the syrup. Although ultimately not important for this recipe, if you want to completely remove the small black specks, use a coffee filter!

Chaos Cola

To bring the “highball” to Shadow the Highball, I briefly considered my options for carbonation. One route was to create Shadow’s drink and force carbonate it with an iSi whipper. My meta interpretation for forced carbonation is that it could represent the pressure Shadow feels after the events of his troubled past. It could also represent him being contained in a secret military base for 50 years (the iSi whipper being a metaphor for the G.U.N. base on Prison Island). As I thought further, I determined that forced carbonation felt a bit more futuristic in style, and I reserved its use for the drink for Silver, who is literally from the future. Instead, I opted to use Coca-Cola for carbonation. On the one hand, its dark caramel color is dark like Shadow’s fur, but it’s also a shoutout to the Chaos Cola advertisements that debuted alongside Shadow in the video games.

The ingredients that I had at this point were a couple of syrups, cola, infused tequila, and spare citrus. It dawned on me that with what I had, I could just make a riff on the batanga cocktail, or simply a tequila-coke with lime and salt. So I tried a demo recipe with vanilla demerara syrup, cherry-infused reposado tequila, cola, and lime juice, and found that it lacked a bit of balance. The vanilla flavor was mildly present, and the tequila flavor seemed to have disappeared. I’d come to find later that the vegetal pointedness of the tequila had been muted by the cherry infusion, in addition to being diluted by the cola! Things just weren’t popping.

Those Damn Red Quill Highlights

Sorry for the brief cussing there, had to channel my E10+ rating for this blog post since Shadow the Hedgehog 2005 was also given that rating. But seriously, when I look at Shadow’s design, I can’t help but appreciate that his red quill highlights remind me of red bell peppers. What I had originally envisioned for Shadow’s design was a black cocktail with corresponding red highlights, so it was time to experiment with bell peppers as a flavor component.

Before I continued workshopping, I researched a bit whether or not the flavor of a pepper would work with the ingredients I had. Intuitively, spicy margaritas work, so peppers and tequila are already a good combo. I found in The Flavor Matrix that cherries (categorized as Stone Fruits) have a 62% similarity to Capsicum (the fruit family that peppers belong to, whether spicy or otherwise). Further flipping through The Flavor Matrix, I couldn’t find any direct connection between peppers and vanilla, nor cherries and vanilla. Despite the book not articulating a direct connection through its diagrams, cherry and vanilla are a flavor combo I’ve long been a fan of. So, there’s a similarity between peppers and cherries and an affinity between cherries and vanilla. Therefore, there’s an indirect connection between peppers and vanilla via cherries, acting as a bridge between them. This technique of combining flavors has a name, “flavor bridging”, and it was time to put this bridge to the test!

Chaos Capsicum

I played around with red bell peppers, an exceedingly large amount, while workshopping Shadow. Just to give you a heads up, this section details red pepper experiments with clarification, juicing, fermentation, and garnishing, and it ends with the recipe for demerara red bell pepper syrup used in this drink and the mocktail variation.

At this point, I had not experimented much with bell peppers in cocktails except for a small recipe sent to me by a friend of mine using yellow bell pepper in 2021. I was reintroduced to using them in cocktails when I began reading Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques & Reinvented Recipes by Ben Schaffer and Garret Richard. Early in the book, they describe various not-so-conventional fruit juices, including that of the bell pepper. According to Ben and Garret, pepper juice can be made in a pinch by thinly chopping up bell peppers and squeezing them in some cheesecloth. This technique either requires really small pieces of peppers, or a rather sizeable strength of the arms. I evidently didn’t have either of these, and I enlisted the help of a food processor to juice the peppers.

Clarifying Bell Pepper Juice

I was incredibly taken aback by the vibrant red color that resulted from the juicing. Incredibly, the juice appeared to have a neon color! I did quite a few experiments with the juice to see what it was capable of. Of note, I tried clarifying it with some Pectinex Ultra-SPL and found that the clarified juice was very watery, rather bitter, and didn’t retain a lot of pepper flavor. A few demo drinks with regular, not-clarified red bell pepper juice had me in love with the flavor combination between it and the cherries. It had a vegetal tanginess that I’d yet to experience in a drink before. I workshopped extensively with the juice before settling on making a syrup out of it by adding sugar to it. To state briefly why, the bell pepper juice as a syrup tasted better and was less redundant than using the juice on its own. I explain this in greater detail in the following section.

Bell Pepper Syrups

In making my way through Tropical Standard, I convinced myself to purchase a Brix refractometer for the XBar. A pretty worthwhile investment and not too expensive either, at about 20 bucks ($22 USD). It uses optics to measure the relative presence of sugar in a liquid solution. The refractometer allowed me the means to create a syrup with a more precise level of sweetness. When you’re making syrups with just sugar and water, it's easy to dial in the resulting sweetness by just using a scale. However, when fruits and juices get involved, the level of sugar imparted by the fruit itself can vary between seasons, between harvests, and even between individual fruits from different branches and vines! As I get better equipped at dialing in on recipes, I want to try and be as precise as possible, and this was a great place to start!

I crafted two syrups from the red bell pepper juice, one with white granulated sugar and one with demerara sugar. Using the Brix refractometer, I attempted to create syrups that measured as close to 50 Brix as possible, or 50% sugar. Stated differently, a 50 Brix syrup is the same level of sweetness as a 1-to-1 simple syrup by weight.

To dial in the sweetness, I measured the sugar level of the red bell pepper juice on its own. Then I added enough white granulated sugar or demerara sugar to 100 ml batches of juice to bring each of them up to a 50 Brix reading. After adding 89 g of white granulated sugar, I got a reading of 55 Brix or 55% sugar. For the demerara syrup, after adding 80 g of demerara sugar, I got a reading of 52 Brix or 52% sugar by weight. Either my calculations were a bit off, or there was some room for error in my measuring equipment. I came pretty darn close, though! Throughout my workshopping, I found the most success with the demerara syrup and rewrote the steps to create it at the end of this section.

Lacto-Fermenting Bell Peppers

With all the scraps I’d produced from like a dozen bell peppers I’d sacrificed for Shadow, I got the idea to attempt a lacto-ferment on the leftover pepper pieces. I’d recently learned that if you combine 2% of the weight of something with sugar in it, then vacuum seal it, then leave it in a warm, dark place for a while, you can ferment and pickle almost anything. As a quick aside, I’ve made the habit of eating a bagel with pickled capers and cream cheese every morning, so perhaps some pickled peppers would work as an additional condiment? After sealing the pepper pieces and salt in a bag, about one week later, the bag had inflated, indicating that small microbes (hopefully helpful bacteria known as lactobacillus) had begun converting sugars into carbon dioxide, lactic acid, and possibly a bit of alcohol. What resulted was some deliciously tangy and mildly fermented-smelling pickled peppers and a corresponding brine. Knowing that this lacto-fermentation process results in some lactic acid, I wondered if the acidity of the brine could work as a cocktail ingredient for Shadow. Besides, he’d been sitting in a containment facility for 50 years, so who’s to say that he didn’t develop some fermenty funk while he was down there? I made a simple lacto fermented red bell pepper syrup, combining equal weights of brine and white granulated sugar. In one of the demo recipes, the syrup imparted an almost milky texture and a sweet flavor reminiscent of milk chocolate with a mild saltiness. A very intriguing result, but the resulting candy-like consistency and muted prickliness of the tequila just didn’t fit. There’s definitely something worth exploring here with lacto-fermented brine syrups, but I’ll save that for another recipe.

Bell Peppers as a Garnish

The last piece of fun I had with the bell peppers was determining how to make a garnish out of them! I envisioned Shadow’s drink as being dark in color with the skins of a bell pepper creating that iconic red quill highlight on the glassware. You can’t really peel a bell pepper in the same way you can a citrus, so I took two approaches for the garnish. One way was to just cut strips from a red bell pepper and place them inside the glass, wedged between the walls of the glass and an ice spear. Turns out that the dark color of the drink pretty much completely hides even the vibrant skin of the bell pepper slices, and placing them in the drink wouldn’t work for one of this color. The second approach, the one I ultimately wound up with, was to carefully carve away the thin skin of the bell pepper with a knife. The thinness of the skin and the residual juice made it so that I could stick the skin to the outside of the glass, curving it around the glass’s surface. With the dark drink on the inside of the glass and the vibrant skins on the outside, the contrast was much more appreciable. I provide further details on how to make this garnish in a later section, since it’s a bit less intuitive.

Demerara Red Bell Pepper Syrup (52 Brix)

• Slice up one red bell pepper, making sure to remove the stems, the seeds, and as much white pith from the inside as possible.

• Dice the remaining pieces of pepper and either blend them or spin them in a food processor until a noticeable juice has formed.

• Pour the processed pepper pieces over cheesecloth, and squeeze to separate the neon red juice from the pepper chunks.

  • You can combine the resulting pepper chunks with 2% of their weight in salt and lacto-ferment them for a nicely pickled condiment. The brine from this lacto ferment also has the potential for an intriguing cocktail ingredient.

• For a 52 Brix syrup (or 52% sugar by weight), I added 80g of demerara sugar to every 100 ml of red bell pepper juice.

  • The sugar content will vary for each pepper, and for an exact measurement, I recommend getting a Brix refractometer to use for a more precise recipe.

The Ultimate Ratio

At this point in the workshopping process, I’d done a few demo drinks using the vanilla demerara syrup, cherry-infused reposado tequila, red bell pepper juice, and Coca-Cola. Those demo drinks seemed to always wind up a bit flat in flavor. To start with, the cherry flavor from the tequila was mild at best, and somehow the infusion process unintentionally muted the vegetal bite of the tequila. It made the tequila a bit softer, which could have its applications, but it was now being overshadowed by the bright flavor of the red bell pepper juice.

For the sake of recovering, I backtracked the recipe and tried using non-infused reposado tequila, which brought back the prickly and mildly smoky agave flavor that was seemingly lost to the infusion. With the infusion scrapped, now I needed to add back that cherry flavor. I tried a bit of cherry liqueur to try and regain balance, and suddenly things turned for the better. That version of the drink, comprised of 1 part vanilla demerara syrup, 1 part red bell pepper juice, 1 part Coca-Cola, 1 part cherry Heering, and 3 parts reposado tequila, was the best one yet. The cocktail was bursting with flavor, much more prominently than with the infused tequila. It tasted like a cola-forward mix of sweet vanilla and vegetal agave. It was a little sweet, but when I added lemon or lime juice to balance it out, it became more fruit-forward. That shift was a bit too far away from Shadow’s brooding persona.

With a solid flavor foundation in place, I broke the drink back down to understand what each ingredient was doing. It became clear there was some flavor overlap, particularly with the vanilla: it was coming from the syrup, the Coca-Cola, and a bit from the tequila. The way it tasted was a bit more candy-like than what it could have been if the vanilla flavor were a bit less prominent. To tone down the vanilla without losing the subtle caramel from the demerara, I used the demerara red bell pepper syrup, ditching the added vanilla flavor entirely.

For true story, I tested a few combinations of ingredients. Blanco vs. reposado tequila, and white sugar bell pepper syrup vs. the demerara syrup. Here were my brief thoughts on each combo

• Blanco Tequila (Hervas) + White Sugar Red Bell Pepper Syrup

  • Brighter, vegetal, and slightly smoky. The tequila takes the spotlight, with Coca-Cola the only other ingredient really making an appearance.

• Reposado Tequila (el Padrino) + White Sugar Red Bell Pepper  Syrup

  • A smoother, easier-drinking combo. Slightly too Coca-Cola-forward and bordering on red bell pepper candy. Fun, but not quite fitting Shadow’s edge.

• Blanco Tequila (Hervas) + Demerara Sugar Red Bell Pepper  Syrup

  • Cleaner sweetness with the vanilla toned down. Still ends a bit tequila-forward, and the red pepper feels like a background player, but the improved balance is noticeable.

• Reposado Tequila (el Padrino) + Demera Sugar Red Bell Pepper Syrup

  • Flavors are the most cooperative here. The demerara adds depth, the tequila doesn't overpower, and the drink finishes like a refined cherry cola with subtle vegetal warmth.

  • This combo was the clear winner.

Ingredient-by-ingredient comparisons like this are something I’d like to do more regularly while developing drinks. It reminds me of how certain tiki recipes call out specific rums, or how swapping one gin or vermouth can significantly reshape a negroni. Especially for character-inspired drinks like this one, that kind of detail, I feel, makes an important difference. Well, maybe “important” isn’t the right word. To speak a bit nihilistically, it’s just a drink after all. At the very least, the intention behind particular choices of ingredients can give a drink its unique identity.

Honestly, I can’t help but imagine how much better, how much more “ultimate” Shadow’s drink could be if I could cross compare between even more tequilas, colas, cherry liqueurs, and even red peppers. But hey, I’m no Gerald Robotnik, and I don’t have access to alien DNA (looking at you, Black Doom).

My one final chase at perfection? Color. The drink already has a darker brown color, but it really doesn’t match Shadow’s jet black quills. The only way I’ve found to really nail that shade is with either food coloring or activated charcoal. I typically avoid the latter since it can interfere with certain medications. For the photoshoot, I used a bit of charcoal to get that perfect look, but for actual drinking, I’d recommend skipping it. The flavor stands on its own.

Bell Pepper Skin Garnish

To represent Shadow’s iconic red quill highlights, I opted to take the skin of a red bell pepper and adhere it to the sides of a tall glass. Not only do the skins provide a nice contrast with the dark drink behind them, but they also give a hint to the drinker that red peppers were used as one of the ingredients in the drink. To create the garnish as pictured, I’d recommend the following steps:

• Turn a red bell pepper on its side and slice it like you would a citrus wheel. The cross section’s center should contain pieces of the core, and perhaps some seeds.

• Discard the seeded core and slice into one side of the cross-section such that you can extend the bell pepper slice in a straight line.

• Flip the long slice such that the outer skin of the bell pepper faces upward.

• Carefully carve the skin of the pepper off the juicy flesh beneath. You should be left with a thick fleshy line of red bell pepper flesh (this is edible, and you deserve a snack) and the thin skin of the pepper in the form of a long, thin rectangle.

• Take the flesh side of the pepper skin and place it on the side of your serving glass (it should be a little bit sticky from the residual juice of the carving process).

• Chances are, your glass isn’t as tall as the length of skin you cut, take some scissors and snip off the top of it, you can continue cutting the skin into smaller pieces to add additional “highlights” to the glass.

Non-Alcoholic Version

Shadow the Highball the Mocktail is very similar to the cocktail, except that it swaps out the alcoholic ingredients with non-alcoholic alternatives, and adjusts the ratios slightly. The reposado tequila was replaced with a tequila alternative that maintains the smoky flavor and adds a bit of a spicy kick. The cherry liqueur was replaced with Luxardo maraschino cherry syrup. This is the syrup that the cherries are sitting in when you buy a jar of Luxardo maraschino cherries.

Technically, any cherry syrup will do here, but you get bonus points if you use MARIA-schino cherries. See what I did there? 💀 RIP

Flavor Analysis

A bubbling flavor of caramelly bell pepper gives way to a cherry cola finish, segued by a light underlying flavor of vegetal tequila.