Next into the torture chamber er, behind the bar is Humuhumu Trott, Bay Area tiki goddess who maintains the tiki bar/restaurant review site Critiki and tiki news site HumuKonTiki, among others. I thought Humuhumu was just her nickname, of course, and that her “real” name is Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. (Wesly can actually say that, having practiced incessantly whilst in Hawai’i.) I stand corrected, however — Humuhumu informs me that I got it wrong, and that I’m not the first one: “Humuhumu is the Hawaiian word for sewing. My first home tiki bar was also my sewing room, so I named it The Humuhumu Room.” D’oh. (Well, I must confess that Humuhumunukunukuapua’a is a lot of fun to say. After a little practice with Wes, I can now say it like a pro.)

She looked like she had a great time, and fortunately Jim didn’t break her. (“She’s tiny! She’s Li’l Bak!”) Behind the stick at San Francisco’s Cantina, Humuhumu acquitted herself quite well for her barthoritarians. (It’s Neologism Thursday, apparently.)

Today’s featured drink is very refreshing, savory with a touch of sweetness and fruit from the St. Germain. This is something you could easily put down on a summer’s day while reading out in the hammock. You can use whatever gin you prefer, but Jim used Hendrick’s here — its own cucumber notes capture those of the fresh cucumber quite nicely.

CUCUMBER LIME SWIZZLE
(from Vessel in Seattle, 2008)

1-1/2 ounces Hendrick’s Gin
1 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce Lillet
1/4 ounce St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
1/4 ounce simple syrup
3 cucumber slices
Soda

Vigorously shake all the ingredients with ice (the ice and shaking will muddle the cucumbers for you). Double strain into a tall glass, fill with crushed ice, top with soda water and stir gently. Garnish with a cucumber slice, lime wedge or both.

Jim and Rocky’s next victim — Quinn Sweeney of Libation Lab. Described as “under the weather and not sure of what he got himself into,” Quinn holds his own under the onslaught of his cruel taskmasters.

Today’s drink is a riff on the simple but lovely Alaska cocktail, which is gin and yellow Chartreuse, 3:1. It makes a great basis for a sour, and is an excellent example of building on an old drink to get a new one.

ALASKAN SOUR
by Charlotte Voisey, bartender and
portfolio ambassador for Hendrick’s Gin

1-1/2 ounce Hendrick’s Gin
1/2 ounce yellow Chartreuse
3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce simple syrup
2 dashes orange bitters
1 dash egg white

Combine all the ingredients in a shaker WITHOUT ICE and vigorously dry shake for at least 20 seconds. Add ice, and shake until cold. Strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon twist.

(Catching up yet again with stragglers that never made it into the big Cocktail Index …)

I first tried this cocktail in September of 1999 on our first visit to Absinthe Brasserie & Bar in San Francisco. I liked it a lot, and came across the original recipe somewhere (now apparently lost in the depths of the web).

It was fairly typical of the type of cocktail I was drinking at the time (vodka-based, oy) but a pretty good use of vodka. As much as we may deride vodka in cocktails, it has its place and uses, one of which is to smooth out and extend the flavor of a sweet liqueur while cutting the sweetness (such as in the Gypsy cocktail), or in this case taking a strong fruit brandy and maintaining that flavor while lightening and extending it somewhat. A bit of lime juice for tartness, a touch of orange juice for smoothness and a bit of sugar to sweeten it up. Nice cocktail. In fact, at a cocktail party Wes and I threw the following year, this was one of the most popular drinks we made all night, and even then I was tweaking the recipe. “More pear brandy!” cried my friend René.

I put this cocktail aside for years, and as I was going through my old Gumbo Pages cocktail and beverages page looking for stray recipes that hadn’t gotten integrated into the Looka! cocktail index I came across this one. I do love pear brandy (or eau-de-vie; these are the clear, dry fruit brandies, not super-sweet liqueurs that are called “brandy” as a misnomer), and I love the crisp flavor of pears in the fall. I also wondered what I could do to bring this drink up a bit, more in line with my current tastes.

Well, first thing — replace the vodka with gin. Guh. That always works.

Except … it doesn’t. Not always.

It’s true, there are myriad vodka cocktails that can be vastly improved by replacing the vodka with gin, and I do it all the time. It’s bitten me in the ass on a couple of occasions, though. I recall a dinner at MiLa in New Orleans a few years ago in which I read the ingredients of a particular drink on their cocktail menu and instantly knew that it would be much better with gin than vodka, and I ordered it with that substitution.

Guess what. It wasn’t that good.

I finished it and asked for another, this time made by the original recipe. It was a lot better.

Given that experience I approached a vodka-to-gin tweak of the Perfect Pear with an arched eyebrow. So the other night I substituted Plymouth gin, a wonderful English gin with a lighter profile than a London Dry, and sipped the result.

Holy hell. That was really, really good.

This cocktail has been on the menu at Absinthe for many years, but a check of the current cocktail menu on their website shows that it’s dropped off. I suspect that this is because they have a new bar manager, now that longtime Absinthe bartenders Jeff Hollinger and Jonny Raglin have moved over to the restaurant’s new venue, the Comstock Saloon. (I’ll bet they’ll still make it for you if you as, though.) If you want to make this cocktail at home the way it was originally done at the restaurant, use vodka … and lemon juice instead of lime.

(Note on the vodka: Don’t spend a fortune on something like Grey Goose or any of those so-called “premium vodkas” if you’re just going to mix it in a cocktail. If you’re a vodka connoisseur and you drink it chilled and neat, that’s one thing. If you’re going to mix it, I guarantee that you won’t be able to tell the difference between a fifty dollar premium vodka and a good quality vodka almost a fifth its price. For the money and the quality I highly recommend Sobieski vodka from Poland.)

The Perfect Pear
(adapted from Absinthe Brasserie & Bar, San Francisco, c. 2000)

1-1/2 ounces Plymouth gin.
3/4 ounce pear eau-de-vie (I used Purkhart).
2 teaspoons fresh lime juice.
2 teaspoons orange juice.
1 teaspoon simple syrup.

Combine with ice in a shaker and shake for 10-12 seconds. Strain into chilled cocktail glass.

My friend Zane Harris is the co-owner of the outstanding neighborhood bar Rob Roy in Seattle. Besides being a great guy, he’s a constant source of inspiration on cocktails, spirits and hospitality. (Incidentally, of all the Seattle bars I love, and that’s a lot of ‘em, Rob Roy is probably the one I wish were in my neighborhood, within walking distance of my house.)

Zane is always challenging my expectations, and did so again with a recent visit to Los Angeles and a guest turn behind the stick at The Varnish, one of the L.A. bars I love. (I still enjoy quoting my friend Chris from Denver, after I brought him to that bar for the first time: “I wish that I had a wardrobe in my bedroom which, Narnia-like, would transport me to The Varnish on demand.”) Unfortunately the only recipe I remember from that night (when you’re drinking, write recipes down à la minute, you idiot, or you’ll forget them!) is this one, which Zane was kind enough to share with me.

Using Chartreuse as a base spirit isn’t something you come across all that often. It’s certainly powerful enough — 40% alcohol for the yellow variety, and a whopping 55% for the green — although most of the time it’s used in smaller quantities as an accent, given its even more powerful, even pungent herbal flavor.

One of my favorite cocktails is the Chartreuse Swizzle, a magnificent creation by Marco Dionysos with a whopping two ounces of green Chartreuse as its base. Zane’s drink uses the same concept — a tall, Chartreuse-based swizzle — but it’s the first time in my life I’d ever had a drink with yellow Chartreuse as its base. An additional boost to the spice is from a spicy peppercorn syrup, which would be pretty versatile once you’ve got it on hand.

Yellow With Envy
(by Zane Harris, Rob Roy, Seattle)

1-1/2 ounces (45 ml) yellow Chartreuse.
1 ounce (30 ml) fresh lime juice.
1 ounce (30 ml) fresh grapefruit juice.
1/2 ounce (15 ml) black peppercorn syrup (see below).

Shake vigorously with cracked ice until the shaker is too cold to hold (12 seconds or so). Strain into a tall glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with a sprig of mint.

 

Black peppercorn syrup

2 cups (400 g) sugar.
1 cup (250 ml) water.
1/4 cup (use a 60 ml measure) cracked black peppercorns.

In a saucepan, heat the peppercorns until they become fragrant. Add the water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to very low, add the sugar and stir until dissolved. Remove from heat and allow to stand for 20 minutes. Strain the syrup through a fine mesh strainer to remove all of the peppercorn particles. Add a splash of vodka as a preservative, bottle and store in the refrigerator.

Yield: About 1-1/2 cups syrup

NOTE: Zane may end up correcting me on the amount of pepper in the syrup, but this is what my pickled brain recalled from the evening.

The legendary Pat O’Brien’s Bar in the French Quarter, New Orleans. Opened its doors on December 3, 1933, two days before the end of Prohibition (well, ya had to have a coupla days to get ready).

As the story goes, back in the 1940s the bar’s partners Benson “Pat” O’Brien and Charlie Cantrell were forced by liquor wholesalers to order as many as 50 cases of rum along with whatever other spirits they wanted, or else no deal. There was a glut of rum post-Prohibition and the dealers wanted to move it. Problem was, Pat and Charlie couldn’t care less about it. What the hell are we going to do with all this rum?! Their solution — create a drink to use up all this rum. After some tinkering they wound up with a powerful mixture of rum, passion fruit syrup and fresh lemon juice and created a taste sensation.

Pat O’Brien’s is quite possibly the most popular bar in the French Quarter, certainly among tourists — (a Times-Picayune article on the history of the place from a couple of years ago said that 95% of all first-time New Orleans tourists go there. You’ll even sometimes see some locals in there, although probably not so much as in older days. The Main Bar and Piano Bar in the front were once popular haunts for locals, and the Courtyard Bar, with its flaming fountain, is one of the most beautiful bar spaces in the city, and you should really go see it if you haven’t … as long as you don’t mind sharing the space with loud tourists and Texas frat boys.

There’s just one little problem — the drinks are pretty terrible.

Oh, you can get some okay mixed drinks there, but … well, Pat O’Brien’s put me off Mint Juleps for years because I made the mistake of ordering my first one there. I got a bright green concoction made with mint syrup and not a speck of fresh mint other than a wilted garnish that looked and tasted like Scope, and the bartender actually mocked me when he served it to me.

Regarding the Hurricane as currently served at Pat O’Brien’s, I have one word for you: sweet sweet sweet Sweet SWEET! (Okay, one word five times.) Rum? Oh yes, and lots of it, four whole ounces per drink. They go through a lot of it; it’s said that Pat O’s is the single largest purveyor of rum in the world. Passion fruit? Um … not so much. I’d say that flavor is undetectable in the drink. Lemon juice? Zilch. There is no balance of tart in this drink. Did I mention that it’s SWEET? Teeth-shatteringly sweet.

“A stealthy drink” is how my friend Chris Clarke once described it, and that it is. It’s like an alcoholic kool-aid in which you cannot taste the alcohol. And you can forget about any fresh ingredients — the recipe at the bar is rum (I don’t know which one they use in their well) plus “Hurricane mix,” which at the bar is a premade, artificially colored, artificially flavored bottled red stuff, which is also available in envelopes in powder form.

If you’re serious about cocktails, this isn’t anything you really want to be drinking.

In fact, in a post from Tales of the Cocktail’s weblog a while back, the Hurricane was listed as one of the worst drinks on Bourbon Street (then again, can you get a good drink on Bourbon Street anywhere past Galatoire’s?). Research for this post resulted in a highly amusing photo of a bunch of cocktail bloggers sucking down their Hurricanes like mother’s milk.

Shamelessly purloined from Trader Tiki

They look thrilled, don't they?

I don’t know when Hurricanes stopped using passion fruit syrup and citrus and when they started being red, but if you look at the list of ingredients — rum, passion fruit syrup and lemon juice — you don’t see anything red in there. Perhaps someone dumped grenadine in it once, and that evolved into the syrup … I really don’t know. If you do, let me know.

When I was in college, having just moved to Los Angeles from New Orleans, I was really homesick and didn’t know a damn thing about proper drinking. My homesickness caused me to bring back many envelopes of that awful powder and throw “Hurricane Parties,” the object of which was to socialize and get stinking drunk. (To be honest, we did have a great time, even though after the first round or two I stopped using “the good rum,” i.e. Bacardi, ahem, and started mixing them with plain wrap rum that was probably a step above tiki torch fuel.) If I didn’t have the powder, I used a a “faux-Hurricane” recipe that I found in an old local cookbook called La Belle Créole calling for a mix made with 46 ounces of Fruit Juicy Red Hawaiian Punch (back in the olden days, that was “one large can”), one 12-oz. can of frozen orange juice concentrate, and one 6-oz. can of frozen lime daiquiri mix. Though it didn’t taste all that much like the Hurricanes served at Pat O’s it was fruity, red, and we were too drunk to be able to tell the difference anyway.

A long time ago I found a recipe somewhere — I think it may have been in the Times-Picayune — to make a Hurricane out of all fresh ingredients. It looked pretty good, and I tweaked it to suit my tastes. It didn’t taste much like what was served at Pat O’s, but it was a pretty nice tropical drink and it was still true to the rum-passion fruit-citrus base. (It’s also nothing like the actual Original Hurricane; I’ll teach you how to make that in a bit. Keep reading.)

I had that older recipe up in an previous version of the website for ages, and it ended up in Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology. Here’s that version, slightly adapted; gaz swapped out lemon juice for my lime. If you can find fresh passion fruit juice or purée, use 2 ounces of that plus 1/2 ounce of simple syrup instead of the passion fruit syrup, otherwise mix as below:

Hurricane Cocktail: A Variation
(adapted from my recipe as published in The Joy of Mixology)

1-1/2 ounces light rum
1-1/2 ounces dark rum
1 ounce fresh orange juice
1 ounce fresh lime juice
2 ounces passion fruit syrup
1 teaspoon of real pomegranate grenadine

Shake with ice and strain into an ice-filled Hurricane glass or tiki glass. Garnish with a “flag” made of an orange slice and a cherry on a cocktail pick.

This is still a bit sweet but not nearly as sweet as the Pat O’Brien’s premix Hurricane, and it’s all fresh and not artificial.

Oh, and don’t skimp on the passion fruit syrup, either for the above variation or the real thing below. The go-to passion fruit syrup for years has been Trader Vic’s, but it has been reformulated with artificial ingredients and is no longer acceptable. You can get passion fruit syrup from Monin or Torani, opinions of which range from decent to acceptable to yuck, but you’ll really want to go to Aunty Lilikoi from Hawaii and order the best in the world. Seriously, it’s an order of magnitude or two better than the aforementioned ones.

As I understand it the original drink was made with lemon juice. If you’re a stickler for history and if you prefer it that way, use freshly squeezed lemon juice and you’ll be drinking some true New Orleans history. However, I think that lime works so much better and so perfectly in this drink that at home we make it with lime juice. Try it both ways and see which one you prefer.

For the rum try Appleton V/X from Jamaica, or Old New Orleans Amber Rum for a local touch. Jeff “Beachbum” Berry likes Gosling’s Black Seal, and Matt “Rumdood” Robold prefers Coruba “by a factor of about a billion point seven.”

This is for a reasonably-sized drink, not the super-sized one you typically see; unless I’m seriously getting my tiki on, perhaps quaffing at Tiki Ti when someone else is driving, the original proportions might be a bit much. That proportion called for four ounces of spirit, and two ounces of each of the other ingredients. If you want a big one served in a hurricane glass, just double this recipe, then prepare for blottofication.

The Original HURRICANE COCKTAIL
(adapted from the original recipe as seen in
Beachbum Berry Remixed, by Jeff Berry)

2 ounces dark rum
1 ounce Aunty Lilikoi passion fruit syrup
1 ounce fresh lemon juice (the original recipe) or lime juice (which I prefer)
Orange slice and cherry.

Combine rum, syrup and juice with ice and shake vigorously until the mixing tin frosts. Serve in a double Old Fashioned glass or tiki glass over crushed ice, and garnish with an orange and cherry "flag."

Now THAT’S a Hurricane, brah.