Don't call it a comeback
But you know...writing is good for me? And making drinks is fun? So let's work on that
The only thing that gives me more anxiety than writing after a while is not writing at all. So…you know, I should change that. Plus, I’ve been making drinks at home again because…I still got a lot of liquor here and it is most certainly not using itself. So let’s go down a little rabbit hole I went down recently and come out the other side with a drink, shall we?
In the depths of the pandemic, pressure finally built to the point where then Plantation announced that…maybe they should have a different name. And like a lot of things in the fog of that era of COVID, it felt like it might not actually lead to much, a goodwill announcement that just disappeared under the weight of so much else, but it turns out it just takes a real long time to navigate all that when you are selling rum in over a hundred countries. Good on Planteray!
The first bottle they announced with the new branding is also something that is new to their line-up, Cut & Dry Coconut Rum. And reader, it knocks. Forget the cloying weird bad coconut you’ve had in your life (hello Malibu), think something that has the beautiful freshness of actual coconut. Which you can obviously get with coconut creme as well. But sometimes that ain’t the right call for a beverage, you know?
Naturally, I’ve been playing with this bottle quite a bit, because it opens up a lot of fun experimentation. Getting good coconut flavor in up drinks is a challenge because space is always at a premium. Do you really want to use a 1/3rd of your space just to get that beautiful flavor? Of course not. But you are also losing some of the other aspects you get with coconut, the creaminess in particular. So there’s a tradeoff with this.
By now, certainly, you’ve come to realize that I just like tinkering. Sometimes it works really well, and sometimes it doesn’t, but I’ve found combinations that I like. Coffee and pineapple, for example, come together in the classic Mr Bali Hai, which I’ve suggested as a drink before though come to think of it, I’ve never actually written it up. But what about coffee and coconut? They work pretty well together. And let’s bring their old friend coconut along as well, though, what happens if we take this as a launching point but sub in some Cut & Dry.
So we have some Cut & Dry, some fresh pineapple, and some St. George Coffee Liqueur (whatever coffee liqueur you have probably works, but that’s my general go-to at home. As it is in the Mr. Bali Hai, lemon is a good citrus here. So that was the template for the first draft, which went a little something like this:
.5 oz pineapple
.5 oz lemon
1 oz coffee liqueur
1.25 oz Planteray Cut & Dry
And reader, how was it? Not that great! It was just missing…something. And that something was the balance wasn’t quite what I wanted. Not enough of the coconut, too much coffee, nothing to pull back the drink a bit on the bitter/tart front, and certainly nothing to add a bit of body to it.
But hey, we don’t give up here, when I juice a pineapple, it’s not like I ain’t got more around. To answer the coconut? Up the Planteray a bit. To pull back the coffee, I dialed it down a bit. To add something that gave it both a bit more sweetness and a little bit of that creaminess and body? Orgeat is always the answer there. The almond compliments it a bit more than just simple syrup. Which lead to a slightly different second draft
.5 oz pineapple
.5 oz lemon
.25 oz orgeat
.75 oz coffee liqueur
1.5 oz Planteray Cut & Dry
Now we are talking! Sometimes something in minute amounts can make a huge difference. It’s funny how that works. Upping the rum ups the punchiness just a bit, helps with the sweetness, and gives it what I wanted more, a complex blending of the flavors as opposed to a wash of them
So what do we have here? That’s a great question. I haven’t named a drink in a while. Who knows what it should be? But then it hit me. This is Obviously a Tropispresso Martini people. So sayeth we all
I promise not to be a stranger. That promise is more to myself than you. Until next time