Crushed Ruby

“This shall truly be a feast to remember!” He declared, rubbing his hands together eagerly.
“Or possibly to forget,” Azra commented dryly as she eyed a cart laden with kegs, “Depending on consumption.”

Dwarven food is intolerable at best to other humanoid species, and their liquor is often no different. All but the mildest of Dwarven drinks will have most people in heaps on the floor, if not laid up in the local healer's spare bed for a couple of days. This is where Crushed Ruby comes in; it is tolerable and therefore tradable to other species, and also serves as a suitable drink for those amongst the Dwarves who do not like alcohol much. It still has to be cut with another beverage for the most part before being drunk, and what that other beverage is will vary between cultures, and is named for the red colour of the liquor.

Ingredients

Unlike most other Dwarven liquors, which use wildly poisonous ingredients like mistletoe and yew berries, Crushed Ruby is mostly made out of sloes and flavoured with local sweet fruits and spices from Kandar, Ouster-Mark and occasionally Antarak. The Redlocked Dwarves variant is far more like the few types of alcohol brewed in Kandar, and is usually spicily flavoured and much more concentrated. Outside of Kandar it is known as Fire Ruby.

Manufacturing process

During the process of creating and flavouring the liquor, it is decanted multiple times in order to ensure it is a clear drink without sediment. The process also takes at least a year for the best products; time to both create the base liquor and then flavour it.

Consumption

Crushed Ruby is mixed with different beverages across species and cultures. For example, in Kandar and Antarak liquors are essentially only ever cut with water and they retain that for the Redlocked Dwarves' own variant of it, which is more suited to such practice. In Candala, and especially amongst the elves of the Illian Kingdom, it is cut with fruit juices, though you will occasionally find it cut with floral flavoured water in richer areas. Citizens of Daijo, Feng-Young and the Scattered Isles actually tend to drink it pure in small amounts. In the Empire, it is almost uniformly mixed with floral cordials and water, though in more urban and affluent areas it is not uncommon to have such mixes carbonated by magic.

Item type

Consumable, Food / Drink

Rarity

Common in and near dwarven cities