The recipe for the drink that we have been calling a "Dirty Charlemagne" at Scholar HQ is:

2 oz Gin
1 oz Chambord
Tonic
Ice

Yes, it is a Gin and Tonic with some Chambord splashed in. Any drink named after Charlemagne needs to have some Chambord in it, even though it was Louis XIV that made it the Liqueur Royale.

I think we Scholars can come up with an improved Dirty Charlemagne formula for this modern day and age (with 100% less mercury), but it would take some doing and some of you might want a drink you can call a Dirty Charlemagne with our blessing before we figure out something suitably strange that doesn't taste awful.

--Geoff

The discerning reader will have noticed that, in the last episode, Peter the Great was sleeping in a wheelbarrow, and that, further, in this episode, he is seen consuming some presumably alcoholic beverage. It turns out that the alcohol-wheelbarrow one-two punch was a favorite of Peter's. It all happened during the England leg of his Great Embassy. He and his entourage were put up in a rich Englishman's home for the duration of their stay. While there, they discovered his wheelbarrows. There were no wheelbarrows in Russia at the time, so Peter and the boys got really excited about them and did the only logical thing they could have done under the circumstances.

They got really drunk, grabbed the wheelbarrows, and took turns launching each other into the Englishman's painstakingly kept hedges. When he came back after the Russians had left, he found his floors torn up, his paintings punched in, and a bunch of wheelbarrows inexplicably stuck in his destroyed hedges.

Somehow, this story strikes me as beautiful.

- Count Dolby von Luckner