Cocktail of the Week: The Culross

First, some news. I’m pleased to report I’ve joined the merry band of writers at online magazine EatDrinkFilms as cocktail columnist. Food, booze, and movies? Those are three of my favorite things! “Down the Hatch” – hey, like my book! – will be a monthly feature. My maiden effort honors the magazine’s Northern California roots by looking at the Meyer Lemon Whiskey Sour and the Frisco. Go read it and the rest of the issue while you’re at it.

Whenever I encounter an unfamiliar drink recipe and realize I already have the required ingredients, it’s something of an effort not to cry out “To the bar!”. I stumbled across one the other day while paging through The Savoy Cocktail Book – yes, I do spend my valuable downtime paging through cocktail books, usually in front of a roaring fire with a (rented) dog at my feet, and what’s it to you? – and decided such a voyage of discovery would make the ideal subject for the one hundredth Cocktail of the Week post. Champion, the loaner Labrador nestled by my slippers, barked his assent.

I’m going to repeat that. The ONE HUNDREDTH post. Surely that calls for a drink.

Why not the Culross? I’m not saying this cocktail is unknown. If it’s in Savoy, it’s on a menu somewhere. I’m saying that up to now it’s managed to miss me.

Its Savoy appearance seems to be its debut. No one knows where the name came from, although the Scottish village on the Firth of Forth would be a safe bet. The original recipe called for one-third each Bacardi rum, Kina Lillet and apricot brandy, along with the “juice of ¼ lemon.” Bastardized versions turn up in a handful of later books, often with a heavier pour of rum.

The ratio that was good enough for Harry Craddock would suffice for me. I made my usual substitution of Cocchi Americano for Kina Lillet, the additional snap of cinchona in the Americano a better match for what Harry poured in his day.

As for the juice of one-fourth of a lemon, who has the time to make such calculations in our hectic modern age? A few contemporary recipes upped the lemon juice to full partner, so in went three-quarters of an ounce like the other ingredients.

Drinking the Culross raised another question: Why isn’t this cocktail a perennial favorite? It’s woefully underrated, offering a lovely balance of sweet (brandy), sour (lemon juice), and bitter (Americano), with the rum as stabilizer. Some experts endorse making the drink with apricot eau de vie and I have no doubt it’s splendid in its drier way, but I remain an unabashed brandy partisan. And a Culross convert.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to return this dog while I can still get my deposit back.

The Culross

¾ oz. light rum
¾ oz. Cocchi Americano
¾ oz. apricot brandy
¾ oz. lemon juice

Shake. Strain. No garnish.

Want more Cocktail of the Week? The first fifty-two essays are available in the Kindle bestseller DOWN THE HATCH: ONE MAN’S ONE YEAR ODYSSEY THROUGH CLASSIC COCKTAIL RECIPES AND LORE. Buy it now at Amazon.com.

Cocktail of the Week: The Jungle Bird

Strange how a creature with such beautiful plumage can hide in plain sight.

When Seattle’s Rob Roy changed its menu, we stopped by at the earliest opportunity to sample the latest wonders from Anu Apte and her team. Rosemarie’s eye was immediately drawn to the Jungle Bird. “It sounds like a tiki drink,” she said, “but it has Campari in it.” As we were leaving, she informed me, “We’ll be coming back for more of those.”

A short time later, this Robert Simonson piece in the New York Times offered an update on the Jungle Bird’s migratory pattern. It was coming home to roost at cocktail bars all over the country. The drink is no spring chicken; created at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton in Malaysia, it’s been around since 1978. The recipe was recorded in John J. Poister’s New American Bartender’s Guide (1989), where it was largely ignored. Only when tiki authority Jeff “Beachbum” Berry unearthed it for his 2002 book Intoxica! did its popularity begin to hatch.

What gulls galls me – all right, I’ll lay off the puns – is that I have Poister’s book on my shelf, yet unlike everybody else, I’d never heard about the Bird^*. Poister’s recipe calls for a veritable flotilla of garnishes: a maraschino cherry, an orange slice, a lime slice, and an orchid (listed as optional, and thank our lucky stars for that). He also recommends you “serve in a special ceramic bird container or use a chilled hurricane glass.” You’ll take a basic rocks glass, Poister, and you’ll like it. Most bars now pour the cocktail over a single large ice cube.

I freely confess I am not typically a fan of tiki drinks. More often than not you can only taste the fruit, the rum not hitting you until you wake up in Laughlin with yet another showgirl wife to explain to the uptight authorities. As Rosemarie suspected and Berry confirms in the Simonson article, it’s the presence of Campari that accounts for its success in the contemporary bar scene, its bitterness corkscrewing through the drink and preventing the entire enterprise from floating away on a cloud of sweetness.

While Simonson is correct in saying rare rums aren’t required here, you’ll want a darker one that will bear up to the Campari. I followed the advice of esteemed New York bartender Giuseppe Gonzalez and used Cruzan Black Strap, the more intense (and, yes, bitter) version made from blackstrap molasses. The complex taste and texture of this spirit leave no doubt who’s in charge here. I appreciated the result more having tried a different variety first – I believe Rob Roy’s fine Jungle Bird is prepared with Amrut Old Port Rum – and would suggest doing likewise in order to understand the drink’s nuances. Perhaps a flight of Jungle Birds? OK, seriously, I’ll stop now.

^*Technically not a pun, but a dated musical reference.

The Jungle Bird

1 ½ oz. dark rum (blackstrap when you’re ready for it)
1 ½ oz. pineapple juice (canned is fine, fresh is infinitely better)
¾ oz. Campari
½ oz. fresh lime juice
½ oz. simple syrup

Shake. Strain. No garnish necessary, but feel free to go nuts. (NOTE: do not garnish with nuts.)

Want more Cocktail of the Week? The first fifty-two essays are available in the Kindle bestseller DOWN THE HATCH: ONE MAN’S ONE YEAR ODYSSEY THROUGH CLASSIC COCKTAIL RECIPES AND LORE. Buy it now at Amazon.com.

Cocktail of the Week: The Millionaire (Rum)

From a post dated roughly a year ago:

It’s too easy, spotlighting the Income Tax around April 15. I should have thought outside the box and featured the Millionaire instead. But I don’t have any apricot brandy on hand. There’s always next year.

I take these pledges seriously, even if you don’t. And as of last month, I finally acquired a truly first-rate apricot brandy. Rum and limes, check. All I needed was some sloe gin. About which I knew little. So I did what I always do: asked at the Zig Zag Cafe.

“If I wanted to buy sloe gin –”

“Plymouth,” Ben Perri told me. “That’s your only choice. The rest are so sweet they’re practically simple syrup. Plymouth. Definitely.”

Remember that. Because I didn’t.

Version #1. Do not let the color alarm you.

Sloe berries are produced by the blackthorn shrub, a sturdy plant often used in hedgerows. In her book The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart calls the berries a “small, sour fruit” not particularly pleasant to eat on their own. The solution, dating back to time immemorial: soak ‘em in hooch. Stewart catalogs a host of variations like the Basque patxaran, in which sloes are macerated in anisette. Sloe gin remains the best known version, described by Kingsley Amis as “the only all-English liqueur. Traditionally drunk at meets, you know, before going off to hunt the jolly old fox. I can think of nothing better to brighten up a wet Sunday after lunch. Within reason, that is.”

The liqueur factors in several classic cocktail recipes of the 1920s, but fell into disuse. That fate largely came about because, as Brother Perri advised, commercially available sloe gins were heavily sweetened to counter the berries’ severe taste, to the point where they crossed the treacle threshold. It also didn’t help that most modern cocktails with sloe gin, aside from the Sloe Gin Fizz, have idiotic names. I’m not even talking about the bachelorette party specials like the Alabama Slammer, the Hot Flash and the Panty Dropper. Leave us consider the simple concoction of sloe gin and orange juice. That’s practically a Screwdriver, hence it shall be dubbed: the Sloe Screw. This single entendre begat the Sloe Comfortable Screw (the preceding plus Southern Comfort, vodka, and reserved confessional seating the next morning), which begat the Sloe Comfortable Screw Against The Wall (all of the above, plus Galliano and a living will). Up next was the Sloe Comfortable Screw Against The Wall On A Waterbed, With Maybe A Little Grand Funk Railroad In The Background, but then cable TV started and everybody kind of forgot about it.

Fortunately, no spirit is neglected in the cocktail renaissance. Sloe gins that preserve the essence of those tiny, angry berries are on the market again, and I had the name of the best. Plymouth. Definitely.

Too bad I couldn’t find any. After trying a few places I ventured into the largest liquor store in Seattle, where I’d had luck before. Nothing. So I asked a clerk.

“Well,” he said dubiously, “we do have one kind ...”

The first thing I noticed about the bottle he led me to was the fine layer of dust on it. Clearly this stuff wasn’t flying off the shelves.

The second thing I noticed was the brand name. Mr. Boston. As in the first bartender’s guide I ever owned, still possess, and rarely consult. A liquor line not lionized for its quality product.

The third thing I noticed was how the product was identified on the label. A strategically placed ampersand and a word in a smaller typeface revealed that I held “Sloe & Gin Cocktail.” Truth in advertising; all sloe gins are liqueurs. Still, it was alarming to be confronted with such stark evidence right there on the dusty bottle.

The fourth thing I noticed was the price. It was uncommonly low, even in a state where recent deregulation has sent liquor costs spiraling.

So of course my initial reaction was: “How bad could it be?”

Why did I buy the stuff, against the advice of a learned professional and the results of the eyeball test? Because I promised I’d make you a Millionaire, dammit. If anyone’s at fault here, it’s you. You know where to send your checks.

I brought the bottle home, careful not to let the label show; I have a reputation to protect. I opened it and inhaled the aroma, redolent of the finer marker pens of my youth. I tried a small amount. The unalloyed sweetness of cough syrup made me think I’d be better off whipping up a batch of Flaming Moes. Not seeing the point in suffering alone, I offered some to Rosemarie.

Rosemarie: It tastes like NyQuil.

Me: I know. It’s pretty bad.

Rosemarie: I didn’t say it tasted it bad. I said it tasted like NyQuil.

The telltale ampersand.

By now I was regretting the entire enterprise. I’d refrained from buying an inferior apricot brandy, holding out for Giffard’s Abricot du Rousillon. Now I was going to subject its ethereal Gallic charms to some Southie roughneck? Hell, I didn’t even want to waste my few precious remaining limes on the project. Lousy drug cartels. But a promise is a promise.

Because sloe gin predominated in the Millionaire’s original recipe, David Embury wrote in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, “I do not regard it as a true cocktail.” Ted Haigh (Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails) doubled the quotient of rum: problem solved. Haigh’s version is the one I made. He suggests Myers’s Original Dark Rum. I went with Appleton, a sound Jamaican.

Verdict: it wasn’t completely terrible.

You could taste the rum. You got a sense of the lime. You couldn’t avoid the hypercharged sweetness of the sloe gin. It was the apricot brandy that suffered. It was present, but as a distant memory, like the sloe gin had dinner with the apricot on a cruise once, and thought the apricot was super nice, and they exchanged email addresses and totally meant to keep in touch, but never actually did.

Me: So I’m going to get rid of this sloe gin stuff.

Rosemarie: Yeah. (beat) Or you could just put in the back of the liquor cabinet.

And so I did. And there it will sit, until the post-pandemic scavengers find it. And, odds are, leave it untouched.

About a week later, I wandered past a liquor store I’d blown off on my search because this outlet never stocked anything worthwhile. On a whim, I ducked inside. Guess what I found? Go ahead. Guess.

Version #2. Plymouth. Definitely.

There’s no pandering to the palate at Plymouth. Those good people didn’t attempt to sweeten their sloe gin. The aggressive, almost prickly taste of the berries registers in all its unfettered glory, assailing you at the start of each sip, soothing you at the end of it. And an important lesson is learned: try to blunt this effect in the bottle, as Mr. Boston does, and you will lose a vital element you will never regain. Better to keep the ingredient in the raw and let the lime and apricot brandy work on it in the glass.

The Plymouth Sloe Gin Millionaire was a world away from my first attempt. It had a lingering sweetness that was natural, adult, sophisticated. If my maiden Millionaire was like a giggling sorority sister, the other was a woman of the world. And thus did the sloe & gin cocktail get pushed even further back into the liquor cabinet. It’s there if anybody wants it.

Note that there are several drinks called the Millionaire. This one appears as the Millionaire #1 in the Savoy Cocktail Book, #2 in Patrick Gavin Duffy’s Official Mixer’s Manual, and #4 in 1937’s The How and When, where Haigh unearthed it. Many spirit historians view the whiskey-and-egg-white Millionaire as the true bearer of the name. We’ll get to that one next week, when you’re flush with cash from that tax return and ready to celebrate.

The Millionaire

Ted Haigh variation

1 ½ oz. rum
1 oz. lime juice
¾ oz. Plymouth Sloe Gin. Plymouth. Definitely.
¾ oz. apricot brandy

Shake. Strain. Garnish with a lime wedge.

Want more Cocktail of the Week? The first fifty-two essays are available in the Kindle bestseller DOWN THE HATCH: ONE MAN’S ONE YEAR ODYSSEY THROUGH CLASSIC COCKTAIL RECIPES AND LORE. Buy it now at Amazon.com.

Cocktail of the Week: The Hotel Nacional Special

One of the joys of buying a new bottle for the home bar is the opportunity to recreate a perfect memory. Two years ago, I visited San Francisco’s temple of rum Smuggler’s Cove. There, I savored one of the finest cocktails I’ve ever had. With the purchase of some apricot brandy, as discussed last week, I was finally able to try my own hand at the drink.

Wil P. Taylor was the bar manager at the Waldorf-Astoria when Prohibition forced him to ply his trade in warmer if not more temperate climes. He assumed the same role at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana. Charles H. Baker, Jr., singing his praises in The Gentleman’s Companion, said Taylor was at his post in 1933 when the Cuban army “mighty near blasted a marvelous hotel off the map” in order to capture officers loyal to deposed president Gerardo Machado. Taylor, Baker notes, “kept right on managing just as if it had been old times!” In 1946, the Nacional would be the site of an infamous gathering of Mafia chieftains including Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who would eventually strike a deal with Cuba’s president Fulgencio Batista to take over part of the hotel and open a casino there.

Taylor’s reputation was made with a cocktail perfected during his stint at the Nacional, which Baker would immortalize as “one of the three finest Bacardi drinks known to science.” It’s a daiquiri variation – in some circles it’s known as a Nacional Daiquiri – but what a variation. A few words on the ingredients.

Rum. Recipes call for either an aged or a white rum. Aged, obviously, is preferred. I used white.

Pineapple juice. For the most part, canned pineapple juice is viewed as an acceptable substitute in cocktails. I’d make an exception for the Hotel Nacional Special, where that intense flavor is the entire point. Hold out for fresh juice.

Apricot brandy. Again the question is raised of whether to use apricot brandy (read: a sweet apricot liqueur) or a drier eau de vie. Taylor, in his original recipe, specified “dry apricot brandy,” which would indicate the latter. I don’t have an eau de vie, so the choice was easy. Besides, the liqueur’s additional sweetness is far from an obstacle here, blending with the pineapple’s fulsomeness in splendid style.

Simple syrup. Reliable sources endorse using pineapple gomme syrup, a sweetener made with gum arabic, which combines the simple and the pineapple juice into a single element. I cannot speak to that innovation myself, but regular simple in conjunction with fresh pineapple juice worked magic.

Lime juice. Just regular fresh lime juice. Nothing to see here. Move along.

My rendition of the Hotel Nacional Special didn’t match the one served at Smuggler’s Cove in terms of sheer transcendence – they frothed a pineapple right in front of me, for God’s sake – but it was still a roaring success. The luxuriant taste of the pineapple crossed with the apricot’s sweet earthiness isn’t a memory any more. It’s only a few shakes away.

The Hotel Nacional Special

2 oz. rum
1 oz. pineapple juice
½ oz. lime juice
½ oz. simple syrup
¼ oz. apricot brandy

Shake. Strain. Garnish with a lime wheel.

Want more Cocktail of the Week? The first fifty-two essays are available in the Kindle bestseller DOWN THE HATCH: ONE MAN’S ONE YEAR ODYSSEY THROUGH CLASSIC COCKTAIL RECIPES AND LORE. Buy it now at Amazon.com.

Cocktail of the Week: The El Presidente

On a week when each citizen was called upon to exercise his or her franchise, I give to a cocktail something I am unlikely to extend to a candidate: a second chance.

The El Presidente was created in Havana. Several of the city’s bars lay claim to the drink, although its likeliest origin according to cocktail historian David Wondrich is expatriate Yanqui bartender Eddie Woelke at the Jockey Club. Given that a recipe appeared in a 1919 newspaper, odds are the cocktail was christened after Cuba’s then-jefe Mario García Menocal. It quickly became popular on the island and made the jump to another, Manhattan, by 1925. The apocryphal story goes that in 1928, Menocal’s successor Gerardo Machado offered one to Calvin Coolidge on a state visit, but owing to Prohibition America’s El Presidente declined.

Exhibit A

Many a cocktail pioneer championed the drink. Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron dubbed it Cuba’s answer to the martini. David Embury, in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, called it “the leading rum cocktail of the aromatic type.” No one did more to popularize the El Presidente than Charles H. Baker, Jr. In his Gentleman’s Companion it’s enshrined as “The Habana Presidente, now Known to Many, but Sound Enough in Its Own Right for Listing in any Spiritual Volume,” and he suggests “every visiting Americano should go to (Havana bar) La Florida and get one from headquarters. The mix is simple and satisfying.” That mix, for the record, is rum, dry vermouth, grenadine and curaçao, and that’s exactly how I first had the drink at San Francisco’s marvelous temple of all things tropical Smuggler’s Cove.

A curious thing happened as the cocktail’s popularity waned: the recipe changed. Blame, as discussed last week, the scarcity of quality curaçao. The schism is laid bare in my late 1980s Mr. Boston guide. It takes a bicameral approach, featuring two versions of the El Presidente, one with lime and pineapple juice, the other with dry vermouth and bitters, nary a drop of curaçao to be seen. Baker had noted that the Special, served at the competing Havana bar Sloppy Joe’s, was an El Presidente with lime, which may explain where the citrus originated. My first attempt at fixing the cocktail myself was based on this later iteration, specifically gaz regan’s The Joy of Mixology recipe extrapolated from a 1949 Old Mr. Boston guide. Submitted into evidence as Exhibit A is a photograph, taken at the old Chez K. This drink – featuring lime and pineapple juices as well as the telltale neon glow of bottled grenadine – tasted nothing like what I’d sipped in San Francisco, proving an underwhelming variation on a daiquiri.

The contender, not the pretender

The recount was prompted by the triumphant resurrection of curaçao. The Wondrich-developed Pierre Ferrand variety, with its orange notes on a solid foundation of cognac, sets off magnificent sparks here. I resisted the temptation to add more, because curaçao’s flavor is so textured that a little accomplishes a great deal. Some recipes call for equal parts rum and dry vermouth, but in my regime I established a clear hierarchy: rum as the strongman, then vermouth, then curaçao, and finally grenadine.

Only not grenadine. I have of late been substituting pomegranate molasses. On the plus side it provides an intensity of taste that most grenadines can’t match. The drawback is it doesn’t dissolve very well. Diluting the molasses largely alleviates that problem. I gave the resulting cocktail the strongest endorsement possible: as soon as it was finished, I made another one.

The El Presidente

1 ½ oz. rum
¾ oz. dry vermouth
½ oz. orange curaçao
½ tsp. grenadine or diluted pomegranate molasses

Stir. Strain. Garnish with an orange peel.

Want more Cocktail of the Week? The first fifty-two essays are available in the Kindle bestseller DOWN THE HATCH: ONE MAN’S ONE YEAR ODYSSEY THROUGH CLASSIC COCKTAIL RECIPES AND LORE. Buy it now at Amazon.com.

Cocktail of the Week: The Between The Sheets

Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.

Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?

Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.

From GHOSTBUSTERS

The timeless advice of a trusted academic is also my usual response to the mixing of base spirits. One, typically, is enough. The case of the Between The Sheets isn’t abetted by its name, which can also be appended to anything read from a fortune cookie. It was a bitter disappointment, then, that the Playboy Bartender’s Guide, always a reliable source of vaguely smutty drink advice, simply observed that the Between The Sheets is a variation on the rum Sidecar.

The cocktail dates back to the Prohibition era and is credited to the usual places; Harry’s New York Bar Paris comes up, but Harry’s New York Bar Paris always comes up. Given the combustible combination of potent potables, it’s not surprising that some experts viewed it askance. In early editions of The Official Mixer’s Manual, it was branded with the advisory asterisk that was essentially Patrick Gavin Duffy tossing up his hands and saying, “I’ll tell you how to make it. I’m not telling you to drink it.” Charles H. Baker, Jr. first sampled it in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on a day of rioting between Arabs and Jews. “We won’t go into the politics of the thing,” he observes in his customary style in The Gentleman’s Companion, “but it was a nasty mess.” As for the cocktail itself, he declares it “totally sound.”

And it is. Partisans of the Sidecar may want to give it a whirl, the rum bestowing a tropical kick on the proceedings. There are versions prescribing Benedictine in place of rum, but if you’re going to baffle the palate, says I, baffle it but good. I personally don’t sugar the rim of the glass, as you would in a standard Sidecar, because the rum (or the Benedictine) will provide sufficient sweetness. And depending on which recipe you consult, the amount of lemon juice varies from a dash to a portion equal to the other ingredients. Here I’ve opted for enough to keep the drink squarely in the Sour family, where it belongs. Whatever preparation you settle on, the Between the Sheets is better than its name.

The Between The Sheets

1 oz. light rum
1 oz. brandy (Cognac)
1 oz. Cointreau
¾ oz. lemon juice

Shake. Strain. No garnish.

Cocktail of the Week: The Dark & Stormy

Let me help you clear that ginger beer from last week out of your fridge. Here’s another drink to use it in. Only be careful what you call it.

The Dark & Stormy, one of the two unofficial national cocktails of Bermuda, has a marvelously evocative name. Dark rum, ginger beer. What could be simpler? A lot, it turns out, once the lawyers get involved.

Blame the Royal Navy for the drink’s existence. Back when it was still issuing a daily ration of rum to sailors, it opened a ginger beer bottling plant at its primary base in Bermuda. The rest of the story writes itself. Gosling Brothers, Ltd., founded in the islands in 1806, became best known for a particularly dark variety of rum first sold only in barrels, then in repurposed champagne bottles liberated from the officers’ mess and resealed using black wax. Hence the name Gosling’s Black Seal rum.

In the 1970s, the company trademarked the Dark & Stormy name, usually rendered Dark ‘n Stormy. As this Diffords Guide article explains, “it is the name of the drink that is protected under law, not its ingredients.” What does this mean? You won’t get hassled by the man if you pour a dark rum other than Gosling’s Black Seal into your ginger beer. But if you choose another brand, choose another name for the resulting beverage while you’re at it, because in the eyes of the law it ain’t a Dark & Stormy. Or a Dark ‘n Stormy. Sorry. The nuances of trademark elude me.

For decades Barritt’s Ginger Beer of Bermuda was the favored partner in this drink. Now Gosling’s makes their own. (I’m still using Crabbie’s out of England.) In America lime juice is typically added, a Yankee innovation that would be frowned on in the islands where even the lime garnish is deemed optional. Some recipes use simple syrup, and at least one deploys peeled ginger root for an additional boost of spice. Dale DeGroff cooked up an alternate take that deploys two kinds of rum as well as pineapple and orange juice, which at least in terms of ingredients pushes the drink closer to a rum swizzle, Bermuda’s other unofficial national cocktail.

My own version trusts the ginger beer to do its job but ups the ante with lime bitters for an extra tropical punch. I haven’t consulted with my attorneys to see whether this change violates the law, so as the legal fog clears I’ve filed a claim on the name The Tenebrous & Gusty. Whatever you call it, it’s one of the great refreshments of summer.

The Dark & Stormy

2 oz. Gosling’s Black Seal rum
3 oz. ginger beer
2 lime wedges
2-3 dashes of lime bitters

Add the bitters to a highball glass filled with ice. Pour in the Gosling’s Black Seal rum. Top with ginger beer. Squeeze the lime wedges into the drink, then add them to the glass. Stir.

Cocktail of the Week: The Liberty

One of the benefits to living in Seattle is that come the most wonderful time of the year, there’s no need to fool around with holiday cocktails. Not when plenty of bars in town are making drinks suitable to the season. Rob Roy does a full Advent calendar, offering a different concoction every night in December closing with a Blue Blazer – Scotch set afire and poured between metal mugs – on Christmas Eve. (This year’s variation featured chartreuse. I missed it.) Sun Liquor serves up superlative egg nog. Earlier this week at Vito’s I savored the warm rum variation known as a Tom & Jerry, presented in the traditional mug. Says Tom & Jerry right on it.

Still, on occasion the Christmas spirit moves me to fix an appropriate yet simple cocktail. The weather demands crispness, which sends me straight to the applejack. But around the corner is the start of the new year, with its hope of sunnier times and balmier climes. Why not acknowledge that promise with some rum?

The Liberty brings both tastes together to smashing effect. The drink is often served over crushed ice as a summer cooler. But I find that its smooth blend of introspection and anticipation, up in a cocktail glass, plays every bit as well at the holidays. (Who am I kidding? The Liberty is pure alcohol, so whatever the calendar says it packs a wallop.)

The original recipe, as it appears in The Savoy Cocktail Book and Patrick Gavin Duffy’s Official Mixer’s Manual, is as basic as can be: applejack, a smaller quantity of rum, sugar. Later iterations called for a dash of lime juice, which makes a nice addition. The Liberty may not be an obvious Yuletide option, but it’s one guaranteed to make the season bright.

The Liberty

2 oz. applejack
1 oz. rum
¼ oz. simple syrup
splash of fresh lime juice

Stir. Strain. No garnish.

Cocktail of the Week: The Cuba Libre

We’re not talking about a simple rum and Coke here. It’s called a Cuba Libre. If you want to sound knowledgeable, pronounce it Kooba Lee-Bray. If you really want to sound knowledgeable, guzzle them while grousing about goddamn Kennedy calling off the additional air cover back in ’61. This will ensure that the seats on either side of you at the bar remain unoccupied.

True confession time: I never had respect for the rum’n’Coke. And I wasn’t alone. Spirits writer Jason Wilson dubs it “a lazy person’s drink.” The venerable Kingsley Amis took issue with the Coca-Cola half of the equation, feeling that rum was “quite wasted in my view when teamed with that horrible stuff. I love America, but any nation that produces drive-in churches, Woody Allen and cola drinks can’t be all good.”

The story goes that the Rough Riders brought the then now-in-bottles! soda to Cuba when they went to liberate the island nation in 1898, mixed it with the native flavoring rum, and drank to their inevitable success with the battle cry of “Free Cuba!” Too bad the timeline doesn’t quite work out; the drink didn’t catch on until after the Spanish-American War. I have visions of servicemen stationed in Havana once hostilities had ended offering the toast ironically but that too is wrong, irony not being invented by Madison Avenue advertising men until the mid-1960s.

Order a rum and Coke in many bars and you’ll receive a bonus lime wedge if you’re lucky. It’s here that the problem begins; no mere garnish, lime was originally an essential ingredient in the Cuba Libre. In The Gentleman’s Companion, Charles H. Baker, Jr. lamented the cocktail’s popularity in the 1930s. “The only trouble with the drink is that it started by accident and without imagination, has been carried along by the ease of its supply. Under any condition it is too sweet. What’s to do?” Baker, engaging in “clinical experimenting for which our insurance carriers heartily dislike us,” determined that the juice of one small lime was necessary. He also suggested muddling lime peel in the glass before building the drink. The Joy of Mixology author Gary Regan finds that step excessive, but observes that lime juice is necessary “to balance out the sweetness of the cola.”

Another statement from Gaz worth noting: “This drink is seldom held in high regard, but when made properly it can be a heavenly potion.” Which explains why the Cuba Libre and its variations turn up with regularity in craft cocktail bars.

Many such establishments make their own cola. I don’t. What got me to take a fresh look at the Cuba Libre was the abundance of cane colas now commonly available, including Mexican Coca Cola and my default choice, Trader Joe’s Vintage Cola. These are truer to the cocktail’s history and easier on the teeth. Turns out the experts are right; the addition of an ounce of lime juice turns a frat boy’s stalwart into something worth lingering over. Provided you brush afterwards. (This message brought to you by the American Dental Association.)

Jason Wilson suggests other changes that push the drink toward its tropical origins. (Good luck getting authentic Cuban rum – or authentic circa 1900 Coca-Cola with that extra snap of cocaine, for that matter.) Meyer lemon or key lime juice instead of regular lime, a few dashes of Angostura bitters, even – madre de Dios – adding some gin. I’ve laid on more soda, prepared to indulge in some clinical experimenting of my own.

The Cuba Libre 

2 oz. rum
1 oz. lime juice
approximately 3 oz. chilled cane cola

Build in the order given in an ice-filled Tom Collins glass. Garnish with a lime wedge.

Cocktail of the Week: The Beachcomber

Sometimes you can go to the source and still come back unsatisfied.

The 1934 opening of Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood, U.S.A. is usually regarded as the birthplace of tiki culture and its many attendant cocktails. But “Trader Vic” Bergeron turned it into a movement with his chain of restaurants, the first in Oakland, California. Seattle was next. I never visited the Westin Hotel location, which closed over 20 years ago. At approximately the same time Trader Vic’s made the news when Donald Trump shuttered the outpost in New York’s Plaza Hotel. Trump said he found the place “tacky.” (I’ll pause to let you think about that for a minute.) There’s still a Trader Vic’s franchise in Portland among other cities, with a slew of them in the Middle East.

I’ve got a copy of the 1972 revised edition of Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide. The original was published in 1947. The illustrations feature what look like gremlins monkeying around the bar, no doubt the consequence of a Mai Tai or twelve. The book is written in a pleasingly gruff style, with Vic grousing about the recent crop of newer libations (“Some of those inventions are good, but some of them are terrible; I think that most of them would blind you if you drank them.”) and declaring that his “redo” of the guide would omit “nonsense” recipes for “outdated stuff that you’ll never use” such as “Cobblers, Crustas, Fixes, Sangarees, Scaffas and Shrubs” – all of which still appear in cocktail books, with many back in vogue. A section on annoying customers has a sentence that begins: “Another wiseacre who burns me to a crisp ...”

Paging through the book, I selected a relatively simple cocktail, the Beachcomber. Vic’s version is made with shaved ice in an electric blender. Aside from opting for a low-tech preparation – a Boston shaker, sans shaved ice – I followed his instructions to the letter. Two ounces of light Puerto Rican rum, half an ounce of Cointreau, the juice of half a lime, two dashes of maraschino.

The result was distinctly ... unmemorable. The Cointreau barely got any purchase, and the maraschino didn’t register at all. I’d essentially muddied a decent rum.

A few weeks later I came across the drink in Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology. He “reformulated” Vic’s original recipe, doubling the amount of triple sec while simultaneously stepping up the maraschino. Regan’s version has a lovely balance, which you can further adjust by altering the amounts of triple sec and maraschino to taste. The Beachcomber really doesn’t qualify as a tiki drink. The recipe is too basic; hell, it features only one kind of rum. But pop a cocktail umbrella in the glass, and no one will care.

The Beachcomber

Gary Regan variation on the original “Trader Vic” Bergeron recipe

2 oz. light rum
1 oz. triple sec
¼ oz. maraschino
½ oz. fresh lime juice

Shake. Strain. No garnish.

Cocktail of the Week: The Hemingway Daiquiri, aka The Papa Doble

Let it be known that daiquiris existed before Ernest Hemingway put them on the map, and that they were good. With a recipe that simple – rum, lime, sugar – how could they not be? Charles H. Baker, Jr. claimed in The Gentleman’s Companion that the cocktail was cooked up in 1898 by mining engineers working in Cuba in order to stave off infection, alcohol being a potent disinfectant, lime needed to take the edge off the rum, sugar required to cut the lime. (I can only hope these engineers received copious amounts of grant money for their efforts and were shortlisted for the Nobel.) David Embury, the authority’s authority, wrote in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks that “this is a cocktail that is difficult to improve upon,” calling it “vastly superior ... to the Manhattan.” To which I say: hold the fucking phone, Dave.

But it’s Hemingway who popularized the drink. Legend has it that he ducked into Havana’s La Florida, known colloquially as the Floridita, to use the facilities. Presiding bartender and local legend Constante Ribalaigua Vert prevailed upon the writer to try his Daiquiri #3. Hemingway did, offering his praises along with the caveat that he preferred his without sugar – and with double rum. That version soon appeared on menus.

Ribalaigua elevated the standard recipe by adding grapefruit juice and maraschino, the liqueur made from Marasca cherries. A few drops of the latter provided a note of sustained, smoky sweetness that was enough for Papa, who was diabetic. He also didn’t want to slow his consumption; referring to his heroic intake, he said, “if you drank that many with sugar it would make you sick.” Hem also liked that his formula “had no taste of alcohol.” According to cocktail writer Eric Felten, in the daiquiris Hemingway downed “flavor gets snowed under by the mounds of shaved ice.”

You should know that I’m not making the Hemingway Daiquiri in Hemingway style. I don’t want mounds of shaved ice. I prefer a clean glass and concentrated spirits. And the fact remains that a traditional daiquiri has sugar. As Dale DeGroff notes in The Craft of the Cocktail, “You can be sure that for the average customer at the Floridita, the Simple Syrup was part of the recipe.” The problem is that there are too many conflicting recipes. Particularly vexing is the question of restoring the sweetener. Papa liked his daiquiris with a lot of lime, so do you scale that back or add more Simple? How do you then balance the other elements? And let’s leave aside the fact that Hemingway was enjoying his drinks with authentic Cuban rum.

I’ve taken a Gordian Knot approach to the conundrum. The recipe below is the result. I like it enormously. Hemingway wouldn’t. There’s too much sugar and there ain’t enough rum. But we could still while away a scorching afternoon in Havana, each enjoying our own rendition of the drink. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The Hemingway Daiquiri, aka The Papa Doble

1 ½ oz. rum
¾ oz. lime juice
½ oz. grapefruit juice
½ oz. maraschino
½ oz. simple syrup

Shake. Strain. Garnish with a lime wheel (not pictured; I needed all the limes).

Cocktail of the Week: The Mary Pickford

Drink enough cocktails and you’ll soon establish preferences, developing a personal hierarchy of spirits. Mine looks like this:

1. Rye
1A. Bourbon
2. Gin

Then there’s fifty feet of crap. And then there’s us. (Sorry. Moneyball is on cable and I keep leaving it on.)

I wanted to expand my horizons, work outside my comfort zone. That meant rum. With its broad flavor profile, it blends admirably well while maintaining its own presence, leaving plenty of room for experimentation. I’d gained some valuable perspective on this spirit from Wayne Curtis’ And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, which points out how at every key juncture in the development of America, rum was being poured somewhere.

Even more illuminating reading came courtesy of Charles H. Baker Jr., whom I have come to regard as one of the great men of the twentieth century. Baker was a writer who married exceedingly well, a fortuitous turn of events that permitted him to do the great work he was put on this earth to do: he travelled the globe sampling cocktails and recording their recipes for posterity. They were collected in the second volume of his 1939 book The Gentleman’s Companion, later reprinted as Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask. Everything about Baker’s book speaks to a panache that is now in short supply. A Tahitian cocktail is introduced to him by a friend who “with 2 or 3 other Yale men set off from New London to circle the globe in their 65 foot schooner Chance,” and the concoction itself is “an insidious drink that ladies prefer, often to their eventual risk, joy and sorrow.” No wonder he still has ardent admirers.

As many of Baker’s recipes come from exotic, far-flung locales, rum is a staple. Earlier this year I visited Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco, a truly impressive bar with a lengthy menu drawing liberally from Baker’s book. Drinks are prepared and served in a style that would meet with the maestro’s approval. Their rendition of the Hotel Nacional Special, a mixture of rum, apricot brandy, and lime and pineapple juices which Baker dubs “one of the three finest Bacardi drinks known to science,” verges on a religious experience.

For my first stab at a more adventuresome rum drink I chose another born of Cuba. The Mary Pickford, crafted at Havana’s Jockey Club, was indeed named after the silent film legend, so how could I resist? There is no evidence, alas, that she ever sampled it.

The drink calls for pineapple juice, which both spurred me on and gave me pause. Freshly squeezed juice is mandatory when making cocktails. At Smuggler’s Cove, whole pineapple chunks were liquefied before my eyes for the Hotel Nacional Special. I attempted something similar with frozen pineapple chunks and a hand blender. The result was a fruit slurry that wouldn’t exactly mix well, although it did make a tasty dessert. In The PDT Cocktail Book, Jim Meehan notes that fresh pineapple juice is “preferable to canned” provided you can afford a juice extractor; I read his use of “preferable” as a tacit blessing to embrace canned juice.

One last note: three of the four founders of United Artists – Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks – have cocktails named after them. The sole holdout is director D.W. Griffith. (OK, technically there was a fifth name on the UA paperwork, that of lawyer and former Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo. But what with Prohibition, who’d order a drink named after a T-Man?) Griffith’s legacy is an admittedly complicated one, but in the interests of completion the man needs his own cocktail. I am consulting with experts now to right this wrong.

The Mary Pickford

2 oz. rum
¾ oz. pineapple juice
½ oz. maraschino
¼ oz. grenadine

Shake. Strain. No garnish.