When I first joined this site I had a lofty goal of burning through my Steam backlog while drinking and writing about it. I thought it would be a nice little exercise in finishing off some games while getting to experience a variety of alcoholic beverages. Then I made the mistake of choosing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as my first game.
The game
Skyrim is a massively single player role playing game. There is a great deal of freedom in this game; there are no character classes or fixed paths. How you play the game is up to you – skills are broadly categorized into fighter, mage or thief skills and you are free to mix and match skills however you want. If you want to sneak around pick-pocketing everyone until you use chain lightning on them you can do that. If you want to be a blacksmith that makes poisons and a bow that works too.
In addition to the main quest (Spoiler alert : you start as an obscure nobody that actually has a great destiny to save the world. In an RPG? Unheard of!) that can be finished in a few hours the bulk of the game consists of hundreds of side quests. In addition to stealing remarkably well preserved thousand year old tomatoes from ancient crypts and killing all the dragons as an unstoppable juggernaut you can become a homeowner, the master of multiple guilds and a noble for various cities. Skyrim is a truly huge game. I spent more than 80 hours and didn’t do everything there was to do.
Choosing The Drink
Considerations:
- This is a role playing game that takes thousands of hours to play
- This takes place in fantasy Greenland with nothing but snow and ice and snowy icy mountains everywhere.
- The characters in Skyrim all drink and talk about mead.
As this game is a very long game you want a drink that you can enjoy for an extended period of time without having to get up for refills. As the game takes place in a fantasy viking land akvavit would be a good choice. If you are in fact a viking or someone that tends to spend time at renasiance fairs you might drink mead. Since I didn’t have any akvavit and I don’t enjoy drunken diabetics piss I went with whiskey. Normally I would recommend a bourbon whiskey for a role playing game but I feel that scotch matches the snowy mountain environment better. For the Skyrim drink I chose a widely available mid range – The Glenlivit 12 year Single Malt.
The Recipe
This section will actually have drink recipes for other games but it’s scotch so…. 
- Find glass.
- Put 1 icecube in glass. While you don’t have to use a Han Solo carbonite ice cube you really should.
- Pour scotch in glass.
- Enjoy
You are now ready to play a lot of Skyrim.
