How to Make Cocktails with Stuff You Brought on Your Camping Trip

Festival beer is perfectly fine. The first beer of the day can be particularly enjoyable, but sometimes you just want a cocktail. Unfortunately, hard liquor can be difficult to find at summer festivals, and if mixed drinks are available, they're usually outrageously expensive. It's much more economical to smuggle in a bottle of vodka. But what about the rest of the ingredients? With a bit of creativity, you can create a wide variety of cocktails.

We asked Rick Welcker of cocktail bar Feijoa in Amsterdam to help us come up with camping versions of several classics using only vodka and ingredients that can be found at virtually any festival.

Start your morning by upgrading your cup of instant coffee to a White Russian. The original consists of vodka, Kahlúa, and heavy cream. But it's doubtful that anybody brought Kahlúa or heavy cream. Substitute the coffee liqueur with instant iced coffee, then compensate for the missing booze with an extra splash of vodka, and replace the heavy cream with coffee creamer. Stir everything with a bar of chocolate and enjoy your liquid breakfast.

A Harvey Wallbanger resembles a Screwdriver—orange juice with vodka—but has an additional shot of anise liqueur. Our version is extra thirst-quenching. Pour vodka in a cup and dilute it with Capri Sun, because it's more refreshing than lukewarm OJ from the supermarket. In the Netherlands, we use sugar-covered aniseeds often eaten on biscuits—for the anise taste. Then garnish with a popsicle to keep your drink cold.

A daiquiri is traditionally made with rum, but vodka will do just fine. It also contains strawberries, lime juice, and sugar. To replace the strawberries one can easily use a squeezable fruit pouch—the kind that your mom might have packed you in your school lunch. Mix it up with 7UP or Sprite instead of lime juice, and throw in a strawberry flavored popsicle to cool off your creation.

A Bloody Mary can be enjoyed at any time of day. It's the perfect breakfast, great for lunch, and for our purposes, can be considered dinner. Nobody brings tomato juice to a festival, but if you really think about it hard enough, you can convince yourself that tomato soup is exactly the same. There's always someone in your circle of friends that brings a can of soup. Throw the vodka and tomato soup into a cup with one of those cute rims around your cup, but use crushed Doritos instead of pepper. Then add a splash of chili sauce from the spring-roll stand instead of using Tabasco. Because you most likely didn't bring a celery stick, replace it with a hot dog.

End the evening in style with a dirty martini, normally made with vodka, vermouth, and olive juice, garnished with an olive on a toothpick. You probably won't bring olives, and you can look for vermouth until the cows come home, but you won't find any. But there's a good chance somebody will bringing sausages and some cheap wine, so pour some vodka in a glass, replace the vermouth with the sweetest wine you can find, add some sausage liquid to your drink. Then decorate it with a sausage—preferably stuck onto a popsicle stick or something. Just be creative.

This story originally appeared in Dutch on MUNCHIES NL in July 2016.