Posts Tagged ‘lime’

In its homeland, the Pride of Barbados is a flowering shrub that serves as a medicine, reducing fever, healing wounds, and curing breathing ailments.  I can’t say the same for the drink I made to share the name, but I can personally guarantee that it will certainly make you forget about whatever ails you.

This drink utilizes two of the Mount Gay Rum product line, combining the rich oak and tropical notes of the XO, with the young springy cane in the Eclipse.  I developed this drink specifically for Mount Gay Rums, and think it’s a real winner, and hope you’ll think the same.

Pride of Barbados

• 1 ½ oz Mount Gay XO
• ½ oz Mount Gay Eclipse
• 1 oz Fresh Grapefruit Juice
• ¾ oz Fresh Lime Juice
• 1 oz Allspice Syrup
• 4 drops Vanilla Extract
• 1 dash Angostura Bitters

Shake with 6 ounces of Crushed Ice and pour into Chimney Glass. Garnish with Orange Ribbon and serve with a straw.

Another in the series of Easy Tiki Drinks.

This one’s a Jeff Berry original, out of the Grog Log, the Kapu Kai. In its initial writing, it’s no more than a Daiquiri with Lemon Hart 151 plugged in for a bit of a “supercharge”.  Jeff named this one after the now defunct Kapu Kai in Rancho Cucamonga, CA.  Jeff says…

“Kapu Kai” means “Forbidden Sea.” My thinking was, if you can drink three of these without passing out, then you are permitted to venture on any sea you wish.

I decided to give it a bit of a modification, in homage to this past Thursday Drink Night, and the impending birthday of our own beloved Kaiser Penguin, by upping the portions, per The Bum’s suggestion, and changing the drink up to a swizzle.  Is it still easy tiki?   Well, if you’re lacking forearms, it might be a bit of a bear, but swift feet can still swizzle.

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Kapu-Kai Swizzle

¢ 3/4 oz Lime Juice
¢ 3/4 oz Gomme Syrup
¢ 1 1/2 oz Lemon Hart 151

Build in tall glass, add crushed ice to fill.  Swizzle with spoon or Lele stick until outside of glass begins to frost.  Add more crushed ice if needed.

In fair trade for his knowledge, the bum asked that I don’t hold back on the announcement of his upcoming book, Beachbum Berry Remixed.

The book is a compendium of my first two — the Grog Log and Intoxica!– completely revised, updated, and expanded, with over 70 new and newly discovered vintage exotic recipes.  It’s called Beachbum Berry Remixed, and will be in full color, with lots of new and vintage drink-pic porn.  It’s been 10 years since the Log, and so much has happened since then (including the cocktail revolution that brought us all together) that the books were sorely in need of a makeover.  With any luck it’ll be published before the year is out….

So, good news on that front!  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any more info from the publisher, but just hold onto yer big dirty hat, any info I get will be passed on as soon as I get it.

Continuing in the series of EZ TIKI drinks, here we have the Jasper’s Jamaican, a fantastic little concoction I first tried when prepping for Beachbum Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean seminar at last year’s Tales of the Cocktail.

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Jasper™s Jamaican
¢ ½ oz Lime Juice
¢ ½ oz Pimento Dram
¢ ¼ tsp Sugar
¢ 1 ¼ Appleton V/X
Shake with Ice and Strain into cocktail glass, top with grated nutmeg.

Not unlike the previous drink in its Daiquiri origins, this drink adds Pimento Dram, a tasty allspice and rum based liqueur that’s best in small portions.  Again, and I can’t be blunter about this, the basis of the majority of tiki drinks is going to be the daiquiri…  Hmm, a family tree would be a good idea, I’ll have to talk to my graphics department about that.  The Pimento Dram, now avaialable in retail as St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram, adds a lot of rich spice and has elements of clove, ginger…well, it’s called allspice for a reason!  Pimento Dram was a fairly popular ingredient with Don the Beachcomber, making it into a few of his drinks, and even his famed Don’s Spices #2, which makes for a fantastic Nui Nui.

I’ve got a few more drinks coming up for you folks in the coming weeks, stay tuned!

Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve had a Thursday off.  Not that I had this one off, but I just happened to get out of work early enough to hit up this week’s TDN: Long Island Iced Tea.   An idea had been kicking around in my noggin since the topic had been raised.   What would Donn do?  Well, I’m no Donn, but I thought of a nice list of Rums that fit the bill in making the Donn’s Island a drink in the spirit of the infamous Long Island Iced Tea, while still being flavorful and balanced.  The rums in play are all incredibly (and in one case, surprisingly) smooth and flavorful.  It’s also a good one for getting stinking ripped.  No more than two per week recommended.

Thanks to Rick for the photography below.

Donn™s Island (concept)

• 1oz Cruzan Dark
• 1oz White Martinique (Premiere Canne used)
• 1oz 10 Cane (or Oronoco)
• 1oz J. Wray & Nephew Overproof
• Juice of 1 lime
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1oz Don’s Mix
• 1d Angostura bitters

Shake all with crushed ice, pour into tall glass, and top with soda water

Though, after a bit more though, and some great input from Chris, and a bit of further home testing, I think this version is a little more… well, freaking delicious.

Donn™s Island

• 1 oz Cruzan Dark (Gold Virgin Islands)
• 1 oz Clemént Premiere Canne (White Martinique)
• 1 oz 10 Cane (or Oronoco)
• 1 oz J. Wray & Nephew Overproof (sub 151 El Dorado… but not Bacardi or any other junk)
• 3/4 oz lime
• 3/4 oz lemon
• 1 oz Donn™s Mix (2:1 Grapefuit juice : cinnamon syrup)
• 1/2 oz Clemént Sirop de Antillais (sub simple)
• 2d Angostura bitters

Shake all with crushed ice, pour into tall glass, and top with soda water

Now THAT is a little more like it.  Make sure to use plenty of ice though, as it packs a lot of heat.  Your best Fog Cutter mug should just about do the trick.

Like it?  Head on over to the TDN Long Island poll, and vote me up a notch.  I’ll make you one the next time you’re in Portland, OR.  Don’t like it?  Let me know what you think it needs in the comments below.

Update: wOOt!  Donn’s Island won the poll!  Thanks to Mud Puddle Books for providing fabulous prizes!

Welcome to the first part on a series of Easy Tiki Drinks.

Tiki Mixology has gotten a bad rap over the years.  The complexity of the concoctions and obscurity of ingredients have deemed Tiki drinks a no-go for home mixologists and bartenders alike.  That most damned ingredient, effort, can be a bitch to wrangle.  As you know, I make my own ingredients, and have searched far and wide for exotic liqueurs and rums.  I recently received a bottle of a discontinued liqueur that I’ve been waiting to obtain for about 8 years.  Such is the life of the obsessive.

But for those who aren’t willing to go the extra mile to drink like Donn or Vic, I thought I’d put together a few of my favorite super simple Tiki Drinks.  No more than 4 ingredients, nothing more exotic than a trip to the grocery store, and as little homemade as possible.  I might make a tinge of difference on a recipe here or there, eliminating garnish or so, just to show you that behind all the ice cones and feathered lime shells, the base of the drink is something pure and spectacular.

This drink below, the Derby Daiquiri, is the spawn of Mariano Licudine, one of the mixologists at Florida’s famed Mai Kai.  You could say for certain that  this is one of the drinks that put the Mai Kai on the map as a prominent purveyor of polypop potables.  Mariano had been a bartender at Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood and Chicago, and for more than a decade worked his way up the chain until he was their #2 mixologist.  He was then headhunted by the Bob and Jack Thornton, who were in the process of putting together the Mai Kai.  There he took on the #1 slot, and made the Mai Kai’s menu, bar, and bartending program his own.

Mariano developed this drinkin 1959 for a Rums of Puerto Rico cocktail competition.  It soon made its way to Esquire and other magazines, even being named the signature drink of the Gulfstream Racetrack’s Florida Derby.  There’s plenty more information on Mariano and the Mai Kai in Jeff Berry’s Sippin’ Safari .

Originally served with crushed ice and in an ice shell, this drink stands up just fine without those geegaws and doodads.  It even had its own distinct but now all-but-extinct specialty cocktail glass, which can be found on the Beachbum’s Grog Blog.  Nifty, but also unnecessary.

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Derby Daiquiri

• 1 oz Orange Juice
• ½ oz Lime
• ½ oz Simple Syrup
• 1½ oz Light Puerto Rican Rum

Shake with Ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Sweet and sultry simplicity.  It’s essentially a Daiquiri, but with the sweet richness of orange juice added for a faux-tropical kick.  I think over the next few posts, you’ll see just what an influence the Daiquiri had in the development of Tiki Mixology.  Hell, as I like to wax poetic about, the potent combo of Rum and Lime is what America craved after all those trips to Cuba during the “noble experiment”.

If you have trouble with this one… well, hope you enjoy hi-balls!  You lazy bums…

I’ve got a few more easy ones for you that I’ll be posting all this week.  See you in the funny pages.