El Presidente

We acquired some rum and some pineapple juice, so I was looking for something to use both. Of course, there are a zillion tiki drinks that use both, but I wanted to do something else. I looked in the usual places: CocktailDB, Joy of Mixology, the Playboy Bar Book, and I kept seeing El Presidente. I liked the idea of this one, being very simple, but the recipes I was seeing were not the same. They all started with rum, but some used white rum and some used gold rum, some had a whole ounce of lime juice, and some even had dry vermouth instead of pineapple juice. I definitely wanted to use pineapple juice, and I wanted to try the gold rum, so I sort of made up my own version, based on the recipes I had seen. I know that I tend to like cocktails in the Sours family, and I tend to like them when the "syrup" agent and the citrus juice are equal. So, here's what I came up with:

2 oz gold rum
1 oz pineapple juice
1/2 oz lime juice
1/2 oz grenadine

Wow, this turned out GREAT. This is going to go into regular rotation at our house, for sure. The pineapple is just the right amount, not too sweet, not too much lime. All the components taste balanced and really delicious. The juice makes a lovely foam on the top. I think this would probably still be good if you only have white rum, though the gold with the pineapple is very smooth.