If there was a predominant recurring theme in this blog, and in my drinking life, back when it first started in 2005, it was the search for, or re-creation of, vintage cocktail ingredients that were no longer obtainable.

I don’t do that much anymore, for good reason: primarily because, thanks to folks like Eric Seed but also due to a groundswell of interest in these products, I don’t have to. No longer am I pestering friends and colleagues to mule back a bottle of crème de violette from Japan or ordering from shady-looking websites so I can lay in some pimento dram from Jamaica, and the longing to taste a Sazerac made with true-blue absinthe has long since been sated. True, there’s still no Amer Picon on the shelf of my local liquor store, but easy work-arounds exist, so it’s been quite a while since I’ve found myself really stymied by a cocktail recipe that calls for something I can’t lay my hands on. (That said, crème de noyeaux seems like a pain to make and every version I’ve tried in the U.S. seems kinda crappy, so if anyone has a line on a supply of good noyeaux from France, please let me know.)

Arrack Punch, or Swedish Punsch, is still in the work-around category for now, but since it’s traditionally a homemade concoction, you don’t have to worry about authenticity of flavor. For the past couple of years, ever since Erik Ellestad passed along his recipe for our “Make Your Own Ingredients” session at Tales of the Cocktail, I’ve been working off batches of his early version of Underhill Punsch, made with a base of rum (usually Jamaican, though Demerara can be an interesting detour) pumped up with Batavia arrack, the booze briefly infused with sliced lemons and sweetened with a syrup made with sugar and tea spiked with cardamom. Easy, easy.

But my bottle of homemade Swedish punsch recently ran low, right about the time that David Wondrich’s new book, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl arrived in the mail. I’ve got a longer write-up of Dave’s book planned, complete with recipes for the punches I drank too much of at his Seattle book party on Tuesday night. But one of the recipes that caught my attention while reading the book was one of the simplest and most familiar, in a way: that for Cozzen’s Arrack Punch.

The mixture is simply a version of Swedish Punsch, made much in the same way that Erik does but with a couple of minor tweaks. First off, the flavor flourishes are eliminated — no tea appears in the syrup recipe, nor is cardamom or any other spice part of the equation. But, before you start thinking this version is going to be too boring, take a look at the liquor: there’s no rum to soften the edginess of arrack, so the primary flavor that’s coming out of this punch is that of unedited arrack. The recipe Wondrich cites is from F.S. Cozzens, and it appeared in Wine Press in June, 1854. The version he lists makes 8 cups of punch; I cut the recipe in half, since I don’t go through it all that fast (plus, I used up all the Batavia arrack in the house); here’s the smaller version:

Cozzen’s Arrack Punch
adapted from Punch, by David Wondrich

• 16 ounces Batavia arrack
• 3 medium lemons (go organic – they’re less likely to be coated in wax, and you’re using them peel and all)
• 16 ounces water
• 1/2 pound sugar, preferably something coarse like demerara

Thinly slice the lemons and let them soak in the arrack for 6 hours. While you wait, make a syrup by combining the sugar and water over medium heat, whisking until the sugar is completely dissolved; let the syrup cool before using. At the end of the soak time, gently strain the fruit from the liquid, taking care not to press or crush the fruit or do any of the other things you’re accustomed to doing when removing fruit from an infusion. Combine the syrup with the infused arrack and store in a jar. After a few days have passed, filter the punch for particles and sediment, then bottle and store.

Yes, it’s sweet, but that’s the point — you’re basically using this as a liqueur (or, if serving it on its own, you’re diluting it down so the sweetness is more manageable).

Anyway, now that you’ve got this stuff lying around, here’s a fine drink in which to use it: the Diki Diki.

This drink first popped up in Robert Vermiere’s Cocktails: How to Mix Them, which was first published in 1922 (I wrote an introduction for the reprint version of this from Mud Puddle Books, which came out in 2009). As Vermiere explains,

Diki-Diki is the chief monarch of the Island Ubian (Southern Philippines), who is now 37 years old, weighs 23 lb., and his height is 32 in. The author introduced this cocktail at the Embassy Club in London, February, 1922.

Vermiere’s recipe for the Diki Diki follows the classic 2:1:1 ratio of spirit:citrus:modifier. This version is bumped back a little bit in the Savoy Cocktail Book, where it appears as a 4:1:1 ratio. These are both pretty tasty ways to go, though I think I prefer the Savoy’s version, which lets the Calvados remain at center stage. But my favorite version of the Diki Diki is from the 2009 revised edition of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails by Ted Haigh, the original edition of which I’ve raided many, many times for this blog over the years. Here’s Doc’s version:

Diki Diki
From Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, Deluxe Edition

• 1 1/2 ounces Calvados
• 3/4 ounce grapefruit juice
• 1/2 ounce Swedish punsch

Shake well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Done.

I really, really enjoy this drink. First, Calvados has a robust quality that carries over well even with sours; it gives the drink some gravitas, without being overwhelming or uncomfortable in the role as big-character whiskies can sometimes be. Between the grapefruit and the punch, there’s a complex ranginess in the drink, with the raw, gamy quality of arrack just barely held in check, where it can throw little barbs of funk into the drink without being offputting. As Josey Packard said when Erik mixed one of these with her, the Diki Diki is a very grown-up drink — this isn’t really for a novice, but at the same time it’s not quite as out there as some of the drinks making the rounds nowadays.

Tags: Drinks, Rum, Sixty in 30, Special Projects by Paul
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I’d like to be able to claim that I’m writing up several Chartreuse drinks based solely on my enthusiasm for the liqueur. A claim like that would probably be about 80 percent right.

I mean, sure, I like the stuff, though I had an adaptation phase for Chartreuse that was almost as long as the one I had for more challenging flavors such as those in Campari or Fernet Branca. With its deep, sonorous potency and a flavor as elaborately rendered and as indecipherable as Sanskrit (for me, anyway), Chartreuse was just way too intense for me to get very close to for a very long time. Eventually, though, after repeat applications of Last Words and Chartreuse Swizzles and the like, I finally came to enjoy a more comfortable relationship with the liqueur.

Anyway, that 80 percent accurate thing, and the remaining 20 percent of the equation? Rack that up to my ongoing efforts to push chocolate into respectability in the cocktail world, and the mind-blowingly close yet weird relationship the two flavors have together.

I’ll get more into this later (and I’ve already touched on it in the past both in print and online), but many folks in the cocktail world seem to automatically dismiss chocolate as a flavor. I suspect this is due to a few reasons; chocolate is such an easily approachable flavor that it has all those candy connotations we try to avoid with more mature beverages; likewise, the sugary blur of chocolate martinis and things of that ilk have justifiably soured many bartenders and drink geeks against anything remotely related; and finally, we just don’t have good chocolate liqueurs available in the U.S. There have been a few steps in this direction, though; the debut of Bittermens Xocolatl Mole bitters have helped make chocolate more respectable, and the subsequent development of similar bitters from Fee Brothers and from Scrappy’s demonstrate there’s some enthusiasm out there, somewhere.

But anyway — back to Chartreuse. I can’t recall when this combo was first introduced to me, but a simple mix of green Chartreuse and hot chocolate apparently has quite a history, if not an accompanying story, especially among the après ski crowd. In cocktails, the pairing of flavors if not strictly speaking the same ingredients hasn’t shown up a lot, at least not until recently, but where it has popped up, the results have largely been devastatingly good.

Here’s a cocktail that blew my mind the first time I tried it: the Pago Pago Cocktail. I first came across this on the Tiki+ iPhone app, developed in conjunction with Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. Since then, the drink has appeared in Beachbum Berry Remixed, an essential volume in any serious drinking library (though the drink shouldn’t be confused with the similarly named Pago Pago, which is a completely different critter). According to Jeff, he came across the Pago Pago Cocktail in a 1940 book called The How and When. Starting with a base of gold Puerto Rican rum — Bacardi 8 works well here, but sometimes I’ll go just slightly richer with something like Cockspur or Mount Gay Eclipse — the drink matches green Chartreuse not only with crème de cacao, but with fresh pineapple as well (NOT pineapple juice — tried it before, and nuh-uh). As seen in drinks such as the Chartreuse Swizzle, pineapple has about as much love for Chartreuse as does chocolate, and the mix of the three (plus a little lime juice) is just an unforgettable combination. I mix this regularly at home, and I recall from one evening at Tales of the Cocktail last summer that there’s a certain love for this drink among the Boston LUPEC crowd; I couldn’t be in better company in my enthusiasm for this drink.

Pago Pago Cocktail
adapted from Beachbum Berry Remixed

• 1 1/2 ounces gold Puerto Rican rum
• 3-4 chunks fresh pineapple
• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1/2 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1/4 ounce white crème de cacao

Muddle the pineapple in a cocktail shaker with the lime juice and liqueurs. Add the rum and a bunch of ice, and shake well for about 10 seconds. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish? Hell, does a drink like this need garnish?

The Pago Pago Cocktail is what Chartreuse tastes like on a tropical cruise. But it’s almost December, there are Christmas lights going up — without going the simple & traditional Verte Chaud route, what else is there?

A couple of years ago, this is the question Jamie Boudreau tackled, and the result was this: the Green Glacier. Taking the Chartreuse / chocolate combo to heart, Jamie placed these ingredients on a rich base of brandy, accented with a little Angostura. This has become a regular winter drink in my house, when I’m in the mood for a little richness and, honestly, a little potency (remember that green Chartreuse clocks in at 120 proof, so with nothing more than liquor and liqueur in the glass, the Green Glacier packs some heat). I started by mixing this drink with cognac, but depending on the brand, it can weigh in on the sweet side; recently I’ve gone to using Armagnac, which seems a bit drier and has an earthy flavor that offsets well against the liqueurs.

Green Glacier
created by Jamie Boudreau

• 2 ounces brandy
• 3/4 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1/4 ounce white crème de cacao
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Stir with ice, strain into chilled cocktail glass. Again, no garnish.

A very similar drink came across my radar a few months after I first encountered the Green Glacier, but to be honest I didn’t even think about the similarity between the two until just recently. The Prospector was introduced to me by Jay Jones, then a partner and head bartender at Pourhouse in Vancouver, now a consultant with Barjonesing and an organizer for the upcoming Tales of the Cocktail in Vancouver. Jay’s a longtime fixture of Vancouver’s impressive cocktail scene, and I talked to him in the summer of 2009 for an article that later ran in Imbibe. Jay named The Prospector after Gassy Jack Deighton, a prospector and saloonkeeper who built the first bar in what came to become Vancouver’s Gastown neighborhood (also named after him) almost 150 years ago.

The drink is nearly identical to the Green Glacier — nearly, in that it prunes the brandy (Jones specifies cognac) back by a half-ounce, and similarly docks the Chartreuse by a quarter-ounce but makes up for the liqueur reduction with a bump in the cacao and a little Cointreau (The Prospector is also served over ice, while the Green Glacier is served up, so call that another difference if you like, and while we’re at it 86 the bitters and give it a lemon twist).

But while they look so similar on paper, the drinks are sufficiently different in flavor to merit giving each a try. Where the Green Glacier is rich, heavy and powerful, the Prospector is a bit more relaxed; the Cointreau, even though it’s a liqueur, applies a subtle drying action to the drink, keeping the flavor from sagging, and Cointreau’s resonant orange note also lightens the impact of the Chartreuse, letting it still take center stage at first sip but giving the cacao an opportunity to round out on the finish.

The Prospector
created by Jay Jones, Barjonesing

• 1 1/2 ounces cognac
• 1/2 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1/2 ounce white crème de cacao
• 1/2 ounce Cointreau

Stir ingredients with ice until chilled, about 20 seconds; strain into ice-filled rocks glass; garnish with a big lemon twist.

And while I’d only meant to write up three Chartreuse / chocolate drinks that I really enjoy, there’s one more that really should be mentioned: the Brigadier, from San Francisco bartender Neyah White. Neyah gave me this recipe a couple of years ago, while I was working on an article for Imbibe about Cherry Heering. I used another of Neyah’s recipes in the article, but I did put this up on Serious Eats a while back, and I break this out at home sometimes on cold nights; I don’t usually go for sweet, dessert kinds of drinks, but on a nasty night this very simple variation on the hot chocolate-and-Chartreuse combo can be particularly comforting.

Brigadier
created by Neyah White

• 1 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1 ounce Cherry Heering
• About 4 ounces decent hot chocolate, to taste

Mix ingredients in a warmed mug; stir. Ta-da!

Anyway, there’s four drinks with Chartreuse and chocolate. Okay, I’ll shut up now.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Rum, Sixty in 30 by Paul
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Years ago, when first introduced to the offbeat booze that is rhum agricole, I had a hard time figuring out how a spirit so similar in origin to the molasses-based rums I’d recently become so enthusiastic about could have a flavor and character so goddamn different.

Fortunately, my first sip of rhum agricole was poured by Ed Hamilton, who at the time was just starting to import the Martinique rum from Neisson and La Favorite, and who was coming through Seattle on a rainy Labor Day weekend. This was in 2005, I had just started this blog a few months earlier, and Ed had invited me to attend his tasting session at Zig Zag Café. In addition to being an importer for these and other rums, Ed’s also perhaps the most ardent and opinionated advocate of rhum agricole I’ve ever met, the kind of person every novel spirit needs in order to get the kind of audience it requires.

To be honest, I wasn’t a fan of this stuff right away. I liked the peppery aroma of La Favorite blanc, which reminded me of a silver tequila, but neither my perspective nor my palate were ready yet to appreciate the vegetal rusticity of rhum agricole’s flavor. It took me a couple of years to truly warm up to cane-based rums; I had to come at them from a training-wheels perspective, sipping Ti Punches made with lighter-styled agricoles such as Rhum Clement, softening rhum agricole’s contrarian flavor by mixing it with molasses-based rums in classic tiki drinks, and learning to appreciate the nuances of aged cane rums by working through the arguably more approachable (for the novice) Haitian rums from Barbancourt. Best of all, just as I was starting to develop a taste for the earthy flavors of cane rums, I encountered Martinique-made Rhum J.M., which has a line of agricoles ranging from a 100-proof (always extra points in my book) rhum blanc to aged varieties that took my mild infatuation with cane rum and turned it into full-blown love.

Once I got to that point, I found plenty of other people already there. I’ve already mentioned Thad Vogler of Bar Agricole in San Francisco, and his fondness for artisanal spirits that maintain some relationship of flavor and character with the substance from which they’re made. Thad’s enthusiasm for rhum agricole is every bit as dedicated as Ed Hamilton’s, and talking to Thad and trying some of his drinks helped turn me into an agricole booster. I wrote about cane rums in July for the San Francisco Chronicle; here’s a drink that ran with the story, that Thad is serving at Bar Agricole: the Agricole Presidente.

Obviously, this is an agricole twist on the Cuban classic El Presidente, which also happens to be the very first drink I ever wrote up for the Cocktail Chronicles. While I haven’t mixed one in quite a while, I’ve always been a fan of the combination of light rum, dry vermouth and curacao, with a dribble of grenadine more for color than anything else.

Swap the base of uber-light Cuban-style rum for the rangy, knuckles-and-elbows flavor of agricole blanc, and you’ve got quite a different drink: where classic Presidentes can suffer from flaccidity, as the blank canvas of white rum can lend little to the fleshiness of curacao and the flatness of vermouth, when made with agricole the drink is taut and lean, with the rum’s signature grassiness and vegetal tang intact. Overall, it’s an excellent take on this cocktail. A couple of production notes: Thad recommends Neisson blanc as the rum of choice; I used Rhum J.M. in mine, because I like it and because I happened to have some on hand. Bar Agricole also uses a house curacao; having nothing like that myself, I opted for Rhum Clement’s Creole Shrubb, a curacao-like orange liqueur with a Martinique rum base. Thad also uses a blanc vermouth rather than a dry; the slight bump of sweetness helps make the agricole bite more agreeable, plus the Creole Shrubb is a relatively drier liqueur than most curacaos, so this helps make up the gap. And, of course, homemade grenadine.

Agricole Presidente

• 1 1/2 ounces rhum agricole blanc
• 1/2 ounce Dolin blanc vermouth
• 1 teaspoon curacao
• 1 teaspoon grenadine
• 2 dashes orange bitters (I used Angostura orange)
• Lemon twist, for garnish

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass and fill with ice. Stir well until chilled, about 30 seconds. Strain into chilled cocktail glass; give that lemon peel a twist over the drink and use as garnish.

While young cane rums are bright, peppery and grassy, older cane-based rums take on the familiar caramel and vanilla notes from barrel aging, but they also turn more serene, less flabby than molasses-based rums in their old age but with wrinkles of flavor that make them more resemble aged brandies or whiskies. Get a good one and it’s worth just sipping on its own, but aged cane rums are also excellent in spirit-forward cocktails that lightly adorn the rum’s flavor with a few complementing characteristics.

I didn’t discover this truth on my own; what really drove it home happened a little over a year ago, when I was sitting at Heaven’s Dog in San Francisco and Erik Adkins prepared a Cap Haitien Rum and Honey. I was familiar with the drink, of course; it’s from Charles H. Baker’s Gentleman’s Companion from 1939, a book I’ve referenced dozens of times over the years, and even if I hadn’t seen it there, the drink is simply a rum Old Fashioned sweetened with honey rather than sugar. Baker’s drink descriptions are incomparable — of this, also called the Clairene au Miel, he writes it’s “a Wary Exotic Contributed by Glenn “Stiff” Stewart of Easton, Maryland, & Miami Beach, Who Spent Much Time in Haiti as American Minister” — but his recipes often leave much to be desired. Baker’s version of this drink calls for equal parts white Haitian rum and Bacardi, or any good dark rum; he also stipulates no bitters or garnish to be used, which is an instruction that should be ignored.

The drink was tweaked at Heaven’s Dog to use Barbancourt 15, an excellent aged cane rum from Haiti; I typically mix it with the similarly wonderful (and cheaper) Barbancourt 8, though I’ve also developed a taste for this drink mixed with the aged Agua Libre, a cane-based rum from St. George Spirits in Alameda, California, that is bolder and earthier than Barbancourt. Also, needless to say, go big on the honey for this one; if you’re mixing with a good aged rum, you don’t want to give the drink a little squeeze from a plastic bear. I use a really dark and rich honey from New Zealand, which was an impulse buy at some point; look for something dark and expensive with an unpronounceable name.

Cap Haitien Rum & Honey (adaptation)

• 2 1/2 ounces Barbancourt 8 or 15, or other good aged cane rum
• 1 teaspoon good honey, mixed with an equal amount of hot water for mixability
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Mix honey and water in an Old Fashioned glass and stir to mix; add rum and stir again. Add ice – fewer, bigger chunks are good here – stir to mix & chill.

Tags: Drinks, Rum, Sixty in 30 by Paul
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In case you’re new to this blog, I’m a longtime fan of tiki, and ever since I got my spiral-bound copy of Grog Log for Christmas several years back, I’ve kept an ingredient list in my notebook for those times when I’m in grocery or liquor stores that have an inventory leaning to the esoteric, so I’ll know if that jar of guava jelly or that box of passion fruit juice has any future in a rum drink.

But some exotic drinks have a “guess you had to be there” air about them, with ingredients that may not be that hard to obtain but that raise significant concerns — such as, “Isn’t that stuff crap?” and “What the hell would I do with a whole bottle of that stuff?”

Case in point: the Planet of the Apes, an original drink by Jeff “Beachbum” Berry (it first appeared in Grog Log, but now it’s also in Beachbum Berry Remixed, an essential volume for any home bar, tiki or otherwise) that lists among its ingredients pineapple juice (no problem), orange juice (ditto), dark Jamaican rum (are you kidding me? I’ve got loads!) and crème de banana (um, what?). (The drink also calls for fresh lime juice, and in case you didn’t read my previous post, the theme for this month’s Mixology Monday is “Lime,” as selected by this month’s host, Doug at Pegu Blog.)

In almost every liquor store I’ve been to, the only “crème de banana” I’ve seen on the shelf has been a urine-yellow syrupy liqueur that likely has a flavor closer to that of Juicy Fruit than to a real banana. Once or twice a year, however, I venture north to Vancouver, and as I learned several years ago, in that fair city it’s possible to obtain liqueurs produced by the French firm Giffard, including a premium line of liqueurs that are among the best and most evocative of fresh fruit that I’ve ever tasted.

Enter Giffard’s Banane du Bresil, which the company describes as “A blend of slow maceration of best bananas from Brazil, spirit of bananas for an intense aroma, and a touch of Cognac to add body.” Figuring that maybe it’s time I kept a banana liqueur around the house — either for times when I’m in the mood for a daiquiri with a twist, or for exotic-drink explorations such as the Planet of the Apes, or for just shocking the hell out of guests — I picked up a bottle earlier this month while spending the weekend in Vancouver. To be honest, I picked up two bottles, one of which is currently en route to Southern California, and I can now attest that there’s perhaps no better way to provoke a look of curiosity and concern on a liquor store employee’s face than by putting two bottles of fancy banana liqueur on the counter.

Anyway, back to the drink. Berry notes this drink is based on the West Indian Punch (though there are apparently a couple of those, in addition to the old-timey one from Jerry Thomas, so as with the rest of the world of drinks, confusion reigns), and the mix of orange, pineapple and banana is one of those classic (and overdone) tropical combinations that has the potential to be banal; toss some strong-flavored rum in the mix, however, and this flavor grows up very nicely.

I’m imagining that the 3/4 ounce of crème de banana that the recipe calls for would give the drink an identity that rests squarely on BANANA (flavored), but the Giffard banana liqueur is a much more nuanced thing. Tasting very much like fresh (or, more accurately, cooked) bananas with a little vanilla and ginger in the mix, the liqueur is lovely on its own, but when mixed with other ingredients its flavor is somewhat subdued; fortunately the liqueur is also not oppressively sugary, so it’s easy enough to remedy the issue by simply increasing the size of the pour to a full ounce.

Planet of the Apes
From Beachbum Berry Remixed

• 1 ounce dark Jamaican rum (I used Appleton Extra)
• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1 ounce pineapple juice
• 1 ounce orange juice
• 3/4 ounce banana liqueur
• 1/2 ounce amber 151-proof rum (I’m unfortunately out of Cruzan, so I used Lemon Hart demerara rum. Don’t tell Jeff I messed with his recipe)

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake well, and pour – unstrained – into a tall glass. Garnish with a slice of banana speared to a cherry.

Okay, so I talked more about the liqueur and not so much about the lime. But c’mon — in this drink the lime is there more for function than flavor, providing a little extra acidity so everything else hangs in balance. Lime’s flavor is excellent, but it’s also a great workhorse of the bar — in other words, perfectly suited for this month’s Mixology Monday. Now head on over to Doug’s place to see what everyone else has been mixing this month.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday, Rum, Tiki by Paul
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This week was the start of school here in Seattle, which means that promptly at 9:15 Wednesday morning I hustled my offspring through the doors of their elementary school and — while their new shoes were still squeaking in the hallways and before they’d had a chance to lose a backpack or a lunch box — I was on my way back home to enjoy the first uninterrupted work week (a three-day one, at that) I’ve had since June. So of course, I’m spending part of it blogging.

I guess “of course” isn’t entirely correct, considering how little attention I’ve given this site of late. But while my recent days have been filled more with driving my kids to play dates than with tinkering with cocktail ingredients, it hasn’t been a dry summer. And on the days that passed for sweltering here in the Pacific Northwest, more often than not I’d find my thoughts drifting in the direction of punch.

Part of this desire for tall, frosty glasses of drinks both potent and voluptuous could be due to the impending release of David Wondrich’s new book that covers the topic in depth — a priming of the palate, as it were, in anticipation of the rigorous experimentation the book will no doubt incite — but there’s more to it than that.

Y’see, in case you haven’t noticed in this whole cocktail renaissance that’s been under way for some time, there’s been a great deal of emphasis placed on precision, nuance and the ideal of esoteric ingredients. God knows I’ve done my part to push this whole thing along, but recently — and I’m certainly not alone in this — it’s all begun to seem a bit much. While I can still bore a bystander to tears when chatting with another cocktail geek, I’ve been at the point for a while where I honestly don’t give a shit about all the dogma and detail anymore. For all the heated debate about historical ingredients and the true origins of certain old classics, ultimately these are just drinks we’re talking about — they’re just fucking drinks. By getting too caught up in rigid formulae and absolute rules, we as a generation of drinkers are at risk of missing the most essential point: a drink is made for simple enjoyment, and different drinks please the drinker in different ways. And for me, with the whole sloughing off of rigidity and relaxing with things that simply taste good, few drinks fit the bill better than old-fashioned punches.

When you look at some of the old punch recipes — and here I’m talking about the single-serving punches of the sort that populate the old tomes of mixology, most notably Jerry Thomas’ book — there’s a certain “oh, what the hell” nature to them. Sure, they’re compounds of spirits, juices and other ingredients that all taste good together; but there’s also a carefree aspect to them. The Brandy Punch is a fine thing, but if you’re not in the mood for a cognac-heavy mix redolent of raspberries? No problem — Thomas has got you covered, and you can mix-and-match other ingredients to find a drink that does suit the bill. Punch is also forgiving, and for someone fatigued with the precision required for many high-falutin’ cocktails, this is a good thing; a splash this way or that of syrup or citrus won’t damage the drink, just give it more personality once it’s in the context of all the other ingredients.

Anyway — while this summer I worked my way through various manifestations of Gin Punch, Whiskey Punch and Brandy Punch, it was in the offshoots where I found my happiness; here’s one drink I came to enjoy: West Indian Punch.

The recipe is from Jerry Thomas, though it first came to my attention in Wondrich’s Imbibe! The punch starts with the formula for a Brandy Punch, but has a couple of diversions that attracted my interest. First, the cognac is knocked down from 3 to 2 ounces, and an ounce of rum (I used a buttery Cockspur, from Barbados) is substituted; as a longtime sucker for drinks mixing cognac and rum, I couldn’t resist this version. Additionally, the raspberry syrup that sweetens the Brandy Punch is eliminated; instead, the sugar is bumped up a tad and additional sweetness, and a dose of spice, comes with a scoop of preserved ginger in syrup – and since I’m also a sucker for the bite of ginger, this drink had my name written all over it.

A couple of points on preparation: Wondrich notes that shaking the drink (with the bits of orange and pineapple involved) can result in a mushy mess. Agreed – I followed his suggestion of preparing the drink with crushed ice and then rolling the mix between the halves of a shaker, which keeps the fruit more-or-less intact. Also, for a good delivery of pineapple-ey goodness, I’ve substituted pineapple gomme for the simple syrup when the mood has hit. And since preserved ginger doesn’t have quite the intensity of bite I’d like, I’ve taken to supplementing it with a few slices of fresh ginger, just tossed into the mix (and why do I continue to use the preserved ginger, then, if I find it lacking? Because I bought the whole damn jar and I’ve got to use it somehow). Finally, Thomas calls for two ounces of water in the mix, to soften the drink from sour to punch territory; I add this at the end, in the form of chilled club soda, just because I like bubbles.

Garnished with a few blackberries picked last month and kept whole in the freezer, this is my closing drink of summer.

West Indian Punch
(adapted from Jerry Thomas’ How to Mix Drinks, with suggestions from David Wondrich’s Imbibe!)

• 2 ounces cognac
• 1 ounce rum (something with some age to it)
• Juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 1/4 – 1/2 ounce simple syrup, to taste
• Several chunks preserved ginger with a spoonful of syrup
• A few chunks of pineapple
• 1 slice of orange, cut in half
• Chilled club soda

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass, stirring the syrups with the citrus and booze until well mixed. Add about a half-cup of crushed ice and roll between the glass and a mixing tin several times. Pour unstrained into a tall glass; add about 2 ounces chilled club soda and additional ice to fill. Garnish with an orange slice, berries in season, a pineapple stick or whatever the hell you want. Straws, gentlemen.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Rum by Paul
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