Shaken, not stirred
Here at the Haggin Institute for Advanced Mixology, we've been working on tropical drinks lately, so that we can have a little taste of summer come January. :)
I made myself a Singapore Sling on Saturday night, and found it wanting; it tasted like pineapple juice with the barest, barest hint of gin. (I also didn't want to blow $33 on a full bottle of Benedictine, and so I bought a half bottle of Benedictine & Brandy, which, it turns out, is not interchangeable with straight Benedictine in cocktails.) Being fond of the original-recipe Mai Tai, I decided to shake things up a bit (pun very much intended) and see what could be done by substituting other spirits I had on hand. The result is:
2 oz Appleton Estate V/X rum
1/2 oz Cherry Heering
1/4 oz Cointreau
1/4 oz green Chartreuse
1/3 oz grenadine
2 oz pineapple juice
1/2 oz lime juice
1 dash Angostura bitters
The pineapple no longer overwhelms the other flavors, and between them the Jamaican rum and Chartreuse compensate for the missing botanical profile of the gin, although they taste nothing like it. The other fruit flavors, though, suffer; if I concentrate I can barely detect a hint of cherry. One can argue that a good cocktail is less about the individual ingredients and more about how they merge into a seamless whole, and perhaps that indicates I have a good thing on my hands; still, I feel uncomfortable adding this to my repertoire as-is. If anyone has ideas or wishes to try a variant, please comment below.
I made myself a Singapore Sling on Saturday night, and found it wanting; it tasted like pineapple juice with the barest, barest hint of gin. (I also didn't want to blow $33 on a full bottle of Benedictine, and so I bought a half bottle of Benedictine & Brandy, which, it turns out, is not interchangeable with straight Benedictine in cocktails.) Being fond of the original-recipe Mai Tai, I decided to shake things up a bit (pun very much intended) and see what could be done by substituting other spirits I had on hand. The result is:
2 oz Appleton Estate V/X rum
1/2 oz Cherry Heering
1/4 oz Cointreau
1/4 oz green Chartreuse
1/3 oz grenadine
2 oz pineapple juice
1/2 oz lime juice
1 dash Angostura bitters
The pineapple no longer overwhelms the other flavors, and between them the Jamaican rum and Chartreuse compensate for the missing botanical profile of the gin, although they taste nothing like it. The other fruit flavors, though, suffer; if I concentrate I can barely detect a hint of cherry. One can argue that a good cocktail is less about the individual ingredients and more about how they merge into a seamless whole, and perhaps that indicates I have a good thing on my hands; still, I feel uncomfortable adding this to my repertoire as-is. If anyone has ideas or wishes to try a variant, please comment below.