Golden Glow

Golden Glow belongs to a semi-tropical series of "Glow" drinks that seem more about the color and enjoying your whiskey or gin than drinking Caribbean rum. They are nice, if slightly sweet, cocktails that will please many punch drinkers offended by a heavy liquor presence like those in Manhattans.

Golden Glow is juicy and fruity, and it relies on dark liquors for their vanilla character that might otherwise be provided by almond extracts, should you want to make this non-alcoholic. But lets try not to offend serious drinkers either and make it with the full liquor portion for now.

• 2 oz. bourbon
• 1 oz. dark rum
• 2 oz. orange juice
• 1 tbsp. lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp sugar syrup
• dash grenadine

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. 

Ocho Rios (Revisited)

I wanted to return to the Ocho Rios because I didn't have falernum the first time I made it. I wanted to try it as it was intended and not bastardized and dumbed down like so many tiki drinks often are over time. My own falernum is key here, as is guava nectar. I recommend blending all ingredients except the cream first, then adding the cream and blending again to combine.

• 2 oz. dark rum (Lyon rum used)
• 1 oz. guava nectar
• 1 oz. lime juice
• 1 tsp. falernum
• 1 oz. half-and-half

Combine all ingredients in a blender with ice and blend on mix until smooth. Pour into a wine glass.

Jamaica Glow

This is not a Caribbean cocktail. It comes across more as a colonial style cocktail that makes use of liquors on hand in order to create a tropical experience. You don't taste the gin much in this drink, which I think is the point. Rather you get a grape-like full-bodied wine flavor backed up by molasses from the rum.

I had an open bottle of Wild horse pinot noir on hand, and it is dry enough to qualify for the recipe. This cocktail feels as if it is trying to fortify wine and juice for those for whom wine itself isn't strong enough.

• 2 oz. gin (Sunset Hills used)
• 1/2 oz. dry red wine (pinot noir used)
• 1/2 oz. orange juice
• 1 tbsp. dark rum (Lyon used)

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. 

Free Silver

The Free Silver is part of a series of (usually gin) drinks that achieves an off-white color with either milk or eggs or both. This is a cream drink, but the amount of cream is slight enough that it doesn't add texture, only color. That is a good thing, because cream and lemon juice tend to curdle quickly. There is a method to making this drink that prevents some of that unpleasantness; when done correctly you have a fizzy and tart drink with an opaque off-white color.

For this I used Lyon dark rum and Bombay Sapphire gin, which was a good call. You can really taste the spiciness of dry Bombay Sapphire rising over the sweetness of dark rum. It is not at all disconcerting that the drink has white bubbles.

• 2 oz. gin (Bombay Sapphire used)
• 1 oz. dark rum (Lyon Bijou Batch used)
• 1 oz. lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp. sugar
• 1 tbsp. milk
• sparkling water

Combine gin, rum lemon juice and sugar in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a chilled highball glass full of ice. Add sparkling water and milk at the same time and stir.

Rum Punch (Tiki version)

This is another blended rum punch drink that's pretty strong. Unusually, it is also a very sugary cocktail with so much brown sugar, white sugar and grenadine. With a sweet and caramel flavored dark rum, it is enough to rot your teeth. I recommend dropping one tablespoon in the brown sugar proportions just to keep it from getting syrupy. If you are using a dry dark rum like El Dorado, though, you might want the sugar.

Again, this is an ugly drink by itself. It needs dressing up. A chill tiki mug like this one, mint and orange slice make the drink look as special on the outside as it is on the inside.

• 3 oz. dark rum (Lyon Biju Batch used)
• 2 tbsp. brown sugar
• 1 tbsp. sugar
• 1 tsp. grenadine
• 1 1/2 oz. lime juice

Combine all ingredients in a blender with ice. Blend until smooth and pour into a highball glass. Alternatively, go all out with a tiki mug and random garnishes. 

Rum Fix

Good rum doesn't need much to fix it. What I had to fix was the fact that I had no gold rum. But since gold rum is just white and dark rum that's blended together. So I went half-and-half with Plantation 3-Stars white rum and Lyon Dark Rum. This was a good choice and one that made a richly sugary and caramel rum drink served long and cold.

Not much lemon juice or sugar is used to balance the drink, so it relies on water and lots of ice to swizzle the three ounces of liquor, chilling and diluting the cocktail. And like a swizzle this is done by stirring. Here's how.

• 2 oz. gold rum
• 1 oz. lemon juice
• 1 tsp. sugar
• 1/2 oz. water
• maraschino cherry
• lemon slice

Combine rum, lemon juice and sugar in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a highball glass full of fresh ice. Add rum and stir well until chilled. Garnish with cherry and lemon slice.  

Independence Swizzle

I really enjoy a good swizzle, and this is one of the best ones. I chose (because I had a choice today) Lyon dark rum to represent the colony of Maryland for the American independence and three patriotic swizzle sticks, which are a must when serving a swizzle.

Among other adjustments to the drink, I crushed ice by hand in my shaker using a muddler, which gives you large and small ice chunks to mix the drink with. You can see how the small crushed flakes float to the top. These hold the flavor of the bitters very well, though you can't see that because I used Hella Aromatic Bitters. These have no obvious pink color like Angostura bitters do. The do go very well with rum, though, with their clove spice that makes the rum taste like a spiced rum.

• 2 oz. dark rum
• 1 1/2 oz. lime juice
• 1 tsp. honey
• 3-5 dashes Angostura bitters
• lime slice

Dissolve honey in a Collins glass with a splash of warm water by stirring until the honey and water are evenly mixed. Fill the glass with liquid ingredients and crushed ice and stir quickly until glass frosts over. Add more ice and stir briefly before garnishing with a lime slice.

Morro

The Morro is deliciously rich and well-balanced. I appreciate the idea of glazing the rim of the glass with sugar, because there isn't much in the drink itself to balance the citrus. But there's not much citrus and a lot of rum, which loves sugar too. I chose Bluecoat Barrel Reserve gin for this drink because it is a "dark" gin to go with a dark rum.

• 2 oz. gin (Bluecoat Barrel Reserve used)
• 1 oz. dark rum (Lyon dark rum used)
• 1/2 oz. lime juice
• 1/2 oz. pineapple juice
• 1/2 tsp. sugar

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into an Old Fashioned glass with a sugar coated rim. Add ice, or a large ice ball as shown.

Mister Pip's St. Thomas Special

So the verdict is still out on whether Mister Pip was a real person. My guess is that he was a St. Thomas island inkeeper or bartender and had this recipe to his name. And I must say it is a really good drink to be associated with for perpetuity. There's a lot of colonial trappings in this drink. Dark rum, nutmeg, and tropical fruit, to name a few. Lyon rum really shines with the nutmeg dusting on top. I was very impressed with how well the flavors tied together to make one solid, if a little dessert-like, drink.

• 2 oz. dark rum
• orange juice to top
• 1 tbsp. passion fruit syrup
• ground nutmeg

Combine rum and syrup with ice in a mixing glass. Stir and strain into a Collins glass over ice (or crushed ice in a tiki). Fill with orange juice. Sprinkle nutmeg on top.

Fern Gully

The Fern Gully is a fanciful drink that seems to recall European romance of the tropics. Here Italian amaretto and rums from the Caribbean and American colonies are combined for an exotic experience. There is an immistakable nuttiness to the drink that comes from amaretto and coconut cream, that when put in a tiki mug like this one, evokes a shady place to rest and contemplate romantic notions. If you have amaretto, don't rule out going the tropical route with this ordinarily continental liqueur.

• 2 oz. dark rum (Lyon Bijou Batch used)
• 1 1/2 oz. light rum (Plantion 3 Stars used)
• 1 oz. amaretto (Lazzeroni used) 
• 1/2 oz. coconut cream
• 1 oz. orange juice 
• 1 oz. lime juice

Combine all ingredients in a blender with ice and blend until smooth. Pour into a grim-faced tiki and garnish at will, or just put it in a chilled wine goblet.

Happy Apple

This drink is happily refreshing and one of the better cider cocktails out there. Of course the original recipe was intended to fortify cloudy farm squeezed cider. I changed it up and used Angry Orchard's crisp apple cider. It is hard cider with a nice sweet sparkle. The presence of Lyon rum in my version means that there is a caramel aspect that also fits with cider.

Incidentally, this is the first drink made at my new condo, so there's a new background and drinking. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more drinks at my new home.

• 2 oz. gold rum (combined Lyon dark rum with equal parts light rum)
• 3 oz. cider (Angry Orchard Crisp Apple used)
• 1/2 oz. lemon juice
• lime peel

Build drink in an Old Fashioned glass with ice and liquid ingredients. Stir gently and garnish with lime peel.

Belmont Stakes

I can't explain how long I've been preparing to make this cocktail and thinking about it: how to display it, how to acquire the spirits, which spirits to use... It's been about a month of ruminating; meanwhile the Preakness and Kentucky Derby have already been held. I am excited that the Belmont Stakes (the drink) is a rum cocktail, so it has little to do with southern whiskey.

The Belmont Stakes (the race) is held outside New York at the Belmont racetrack for almost a century. The cocktail that has its namesake is like most other New York cocktails in that it is pink or red. (See Cosmopolitan, Manhattan, New York Sour, New York Cocktail or, The New Yorker) The pink color comes from strawberry syrup and grenadine. For this cocktail I chose to make my own strawberry liqueur: the recipe follows below.

Boil 8-10 large cored and sliced strawberries in a cup of water until the berries are soft and the water has cooked down (about 5 minutes.) Cut heat and add 1/2 cup of fine white sugar and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Using a potato ricer, mash the strawberries until they are pulverized and their juice is extracted. Allow the mixture to cool. Add 1 cup of 100-proof vodka or light rum and stir until evenly combined. Using a fine strainer, remove the strawberry pulp and preserve the liquor and sugar mixture in a clean saleable bottle.

Now the recipe for the cocktail:

• 2 oz. vodka 
• 1 oz. gold rum (Lyon Bijou Batch used)
• 1/2 oz. strawberry liqueur (homemade liqueur used)
• 1/2 oz. lime juice
• 1/2 tsp. grenadine 
• orange slice
• lime wedge
• strawberry

Combine liquid ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with fruit.

Rum Swizzle

Rum Swizzle: Is there any other kind? This was one drink in which the caramel sweetness of Lyon dark rum is well balanced with a lot of lime juice acidity. A swizzle requires a decent amount of stirring. Unlike other swizzles I've made, though, this one has club soda, which means you don't want to stir the finished product too much or you will lose carbonation and make the drink flat. You do want to serve it with a swizzle stick shown above as a garnish that gives the drinker something to play with.

• 2 oz. dark rum (Lyon Bijou Batch used)
• 1 1/2 oz. lime juice
• several dashes Angostura bitters
• 1 tsp. sugar
• club soda
• lime slice
• swizzle stick 

Combine rum, lime juice, sugar and bitters in a highball glass with ice. Stir quickly with the swizzle stick and add ice while drink chills. Top with soda and garnish with lime slice and leave swizzle stick in the glass. 

Barrow Blues

This must be a reference to Barrow Island off the coast of New Zealand. That funky industrial place where workers had to fly to and home from on commute. There's even a Paul Hunt song called Barrow Island Blues. This is a simple drink, a dive bar special, that I spruced up a bit to make more attractive and to connect it with tiki style drinks of Pacific islands.

To that end, I used crushed ice and a few garnishes I had on hand. Strawberry and mint are especially fitting with the color. I thought about serving it in a tiki mug, but the color is too important to hide.

• 1 oz. blue curacao
• 1/2 oz. light rum
• 1/2 oz. dark rum
• 1 1/2 oz. pineapple juice
• 1 tsp. coconut cream
• fruit garnish and mint

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a chilled rocks glass full of crushed ice. Top with more crushed ice and decorate with fruit and mint.

Acapulcoco (Tiki Version)

 

 This is not the Acapulcoco from the New York Bartender's Guide. It is something that came up on an ingredients search I was doing when trying to come up with a flavor combination I was more in the mood for. 

I was just at Archipelago, the tiki bar on U Street, where I had one tiki that combined tequila and dark rum. I wanted to do more of the same and came across this recipe for an "up" drink that would have looked terrible in a cocktail glass.

Tikis, you know, are perfect for disguising brown liquor punch in a fierce visage topped with fruit and crushed ice. I even learned that it is no problem to take a total of three ounces of liquor and top it with ice in a tiki mug. It may seem like you are not getting much of a drink, but tikis are potent and some tiki mugs are so large that filling them to the top with liquid would be like dancing with the devil.

Here's the recipe as I modified it for tiki mode.

• 1 oz. gold tequila
• 3/4 oz. dark rum (Lyon Bijou Batch used)
• 1 oz. coffee liqueur (my homemade coffee liqueur used)
• 1 tsp. cream of coconut

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a grim-faced tiki mug. Top mug with crushed ice and assortment of fruit, stir stick, and straw.

Robson Cocktail

People describe the Lyon dark rum as smokey. I find that it has a very distinctive roasted caramel brûlée flavor. This is not a spiced rum, but there's some vanilla flavor in it. The trick to using it well is to use it sparingly or in sweet drinks where it's sweet and glass-coating caramel does not stick out too much.

Ben Lyon told me that black strap rum is made (like all rum) from fermented molasses. But to get the dark color, molasses is added back to the distillate. Lyon makes his dark rum with caramel, because "most people really don't like molasses in their rum."

The Robson is a rum drink I've been looking forward to making for about as long as the Mandeville, but this is a much more palatable use of Lyon's rum. The flavor is like a rich blood orange with caramel--a real rum cordial of a drink.

• 2 oz. dark rum (Lyon dark rum used)
• 1/2 oz. lemon juice
• 1/2 oz. orange juice
• 1 tbsp. grenadine

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. 

Huntsman Cocktail

The Huntsman Cocktail is a big departure from the cherry brandy and bourbon drinks that make up the Hunter's/ Huntress cocktail group that also includes the Forrester.  

This is one of those interesting combinations of vodka and dark rum drinks that exist, I think, because dark rum tends to dominate a cocktail if used entirely as the spirit base. So vodka is used in the Huntsman Cocktail as a matter of balance of flavor. I used Aylesbury Duck vodka because I had exactly two ounces and because (I discovered when drinking it) of the winter wheat distillate that makes this vodka softer and slightly perfumed.

The rum that dominates the Duck is Lyon Bijou Batch dark rum. I got a bottle of this rum at its local distillery at St. Michaels, Maryland, and talked with the distiller, Ben Lyon. He makes a white lightning, dark rum, 100-proof sailor's reserve rum aged in bourbon barrels, and a corn whiskey. A batch of rye is forthcoming. Lyon says that the dark rum is the most difficult to make. All Lyon spirits are very small batches of about 100 bottles. For the dark rum, Lyon said he colored and flavored the rum by cooking caramel on his stove top to add to the batch.

2 oz. vodka (Aylesbury Duck used)
1 oz. dark rum (Lyon Bijou Batch dark rum used)
1 oz. lime juice
1/2 tsp. bar sugar

Combine all ingredients in a shaker and stir until sugar is dissolved. Add ice and shake. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass (coup glass shown).