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.

Dark & Stormy, Cuba Libre

My husband just got back from a trip to Costa Rica, so he's been inspired to cook, and we've been eating black beans and rice, chicken, mangoes, avocadoes, pineapple -- great stuff. It has put me in the mood for rum drinks. Now, we've all ordered a rum & Coke in a bar, and frankly, I have always thought it was kind of terrible. The combination of cheap white rum and the kind of cola that comes out of a bar gun, filled out with way too much ice, is just uninspired and overly sweet and bland.

I have read before that a rum & Coke becomes a Cuba Libre when you put some lime in it. I've been reading Gary Regan's The Joy of Mixology and trying some of his recipes for basic drinks, as a sort of starting point, so I thought I'd see what he had to say for the Cuba Libre. To me, it looked like a lot of lime and not much Coke. Hmmmm. Turns out that changing that ratio is what makes a not very interesting rum & Coke into a rather delicious, refreshing, and well-balanced highball.

Cuba Libre
2 oz white rum
1 oz lime juice
3-4 oz cola

Some will say you can't make a Dark & Stormy unless you're using Gosling's Black Seal rum and Gosling's ginger beer. I've never had one made this "official" way, but dark rum with ginger beer or ginger ale and lime is a great basic highball that you shouldn't avoid just because you don't have any Gosling's. Call mine a Dim & Drizzly if you must. I used Kraken, which is a spiced rum, but the spiciness is pretty subtle. I often use it in a recipe that calls for dark rum, just because we happen to like it. We have been known to have homebrew ginger beer in the house, and we enjoy Fever Tree's ginger beer, too, but we didn't have any of that stuff right now, and we did have a bottle of Blenheim's ginger ale. Blenheim's has a spicy kick to it, so it's not a bad stand-in for ginger beer. I consulted Gaz Regan again:

Dark & Stormy
2 oz dark rum
3-4 oz ginger beer
squeeze of lime wedge

It was interesting to have these two drinks back-to-back -- the Coca-Cola in the Cuba Libre and the dark rum in the Dark & Stormy both have that sort of brown sugar/coffee/caramel flavor that tastes like the Caribbean and goes so perfectly with rum and lime. Now that I've had these with the right proportions, they are definitely both going into my regular rotation.

The Cardinal's Cocktail

Well, I did some drinking over the holidays, but I did not write anything. Suffice to say that my husband and I finally discovered what a difference homemade makes when it comes to eggnog. Husband made two batches of a somewhat famous recipe from an old Four Roses ad, and we were invited to share some of a friend's batch that had been aged for one year (Really! Alton Brown's recipe). The two eggnogs were different, but both were delicious and in no way like the stuff you buy at the grocery store.

Speaking of homemade being well worth the effort, a friend of ours gave us a bottle of homemade falernum and a bottle of homemade orgeat yesterday. I will write more about the falernum soon, but for tonight I tried the orgeat. Orgeat is a syrup made of almonds and a few other ingredients. Its most well-known use is in the Mai-Tai, but I wanted to try to find something different, so I consulted the CocktailDB and found this one that I had never heard of, called Cardinal's Cocktail. I have had no luck finding out any history of this one because most drinks I have seen called Cardinal involve red wine or Campari, for the bright red color. I'm not sure why this version is not better known, because it's really delicious. The only problem I could find with it was that it was all gone way too quickly.

Cardinal's Cocktail
1 1/2 oz white rum
3/4 oz lime juice
1/4 oz triple sec (Cointreau)
1/4 oz grenadine
1/4 oz orgeat

I have tried store-bought orgeat that was a "gourmet" brand and I didn't think it had much almond flavor at all, but this homemade stuff is terrific. It's thick with a pinky-beigey color, and you have to shake it really well but the flavor is sweet almond, like marzipan.

This recipe as written had 1 oz of lime juice, but it made more sense to me to cut it to 3/4 oz, to make it equal parts lime juice and sweetening ingredients. The balance came out just right, I thought. It definitely didn't need more lime.

If you don't know CocktailDB.com, definitely check it out. It's run by Martin Douderoff and Ted Haigh, aka Dr. Cocktail, the author of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. Not only is it a great resource about recipes and ingredients, but also it features really fun photos of bottles from Haigh's personal collection.