Christmas Spirits
'tis the damn season indeed. Here's a couple Christmas-y tiki drinks to get you through
2020 y’all. It’s been…just a year? Perhaps several? I’ve been told time works no differently this year than the previous ones, but I tell you, it felt like it worked differently. And you probably felt that too. A year ago, I was in the throes of a local election and too busy to hang out with my friends much. Little did I know that I wouldn’t have much of a chance after that election to hang out with my friends. Not that I would have done it any other way. It’s just sometimes what we think we are working towards and what we tell ourselves to get through the day end up shifting dramatically.
You, like me, may have taken up a couple new hobbies in 2020 as our lives (quite literally) turned inward. I used to just count on friends at good bars to make me nice drinks, but without being able to go to those bars, here I am with a bunch of rum and all sorts of tools and well, this is not where I thought I would be last December. Whatever it is that has taken on new significance in your life, you can probably say the same.
Still…I have a lot to be thankful for this year, and I know that. It’s been a hard one, but I have a roof over my head, I have a stable job, I have my health, and none of those are things we can take for granted in 2020. And while a lot of work remains to ensure that more people have those things too…that’s probably for a different Substack :) this, this is a place to forget about that for a couple minutes, this is a place to find a good stiff drink to mix for yourself or your spouse or your roommate if you’ve got people to share with. And with that…well, we deserve Christmas tiki.
Christmas is not a tropical season for someone raised in the mid-Atlantic. So it’s not like I’m naturally reaching for lemons and oranges in December. But in California? You got good winter citrus, you got good summer citrus, you just got good citrus. Not something to take for granted, my friends. So let’s make a couple wintry friends!
It’s not my fault you haven’t had good fruitcake. These are just facts. I know we are all turned off by the brick form some unsuspecting grandparent has tried to serve to us under the claim that it is “dessert”, and perhaps it’s not my job in this world to rescue fruitcake, but damn it, good fruit cake is good. A delicious, moist, rummy cake full of lots of great dried (and also very rummy) fruits? Where can you go wrong?
Obviously, this is ripe for being turned into a tiki drink. You’re basically halfway there with the actual fruitcake itself. With all the ingredients you are basically most of the way there.
Here’s what I settled on after a couple versions:
1 oz orange juice
.5 oz lemon juice
.5 oz orgeat
.25 oz allspice dram
barspoon cinnamon syrup
.25 oz black orchid spices (it’s basically a brown sugar syrup with a touch of molasses. Go buy Minimalist Tiki if you are really curious, otherwise sub with something like a barspoon of rich Demerara syrup and molasses? )
1 oz El Dorado 5
1 oz Denizens Merchant Reserve
.75 oz Lemon Hart 151
2 dashes orange bitters
Put it all in the mixing tin and mix like you’ve never mixed. Strain into a tiki glass or a Hurricane glass, top with fresh crushed ice, garnish with any candied fruit you have handy, and give it a nice dusting of nutmeg. Viola! Fruitcake rescued!
I’ve been having a lot of fun with Jet Pilot variations over the past few months. It’s a dynamite drink with a fun history of experimentation, and it’s ripe for tinkering. But jets aren’t really a Christmas thing. Sleighs, though?
A Jet Pilot naturally has a brownish color, and I wanted to add a dash of red because…you know, we are repping for Santa here. So I pulled out some grenadine (the good stuff, not the neon stuff), and lowered the falernum a bit, but otherwise I kept the basic Jet Pilot formula
I do not have any antlers with which to garnish this, but I do have some Glace cherries (the neon ones). Spear that on a cinnamon stick and you got yourself Santa’s own Jet Pilot, Rudolph.
Here’s what I did:
.5 oz lime juice
.5 oz grapefruit juice
.5 oz cinnamon syrup
.25 oz falernum
.5 oz grenadine
1 oz Goslings Black Seal Rum
.75 oz El Dorado 5
.75 oz Lemon Hart 151
Shake shake shake, strain into a double rocks glass (unless you have a sleigh, I guess?), top with fresh crushed ice, garnish with a glace cherry speared onto a cinnamon stick. May it help you find your way this holiday season.
This is Trader Jane’s, a periodic newsletter about drinks (mostly tiki) and other fun writing. Follow me on Substack for something once or twice a week (that’s the goal for now at least), and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more timely updates on my beverages (and for lots of other things of course!)
And, as with any good drink, feel free to share (responsibly, of course)