Fall is a weird season. It is both much loved and yet quickly behind us. Whether it’s because you are starting to see the first snow where you live or we have just entered that nebulous post-Halloween period that has become pre-Christmas, there’s still a lot of great autumn things that get short shrift. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some pumpkin, and I welcome peppermint with all my heart, but you gotta gotta save some space in your heart (and stomach) for the later summer/early fall fruits like pears.
In addition to being delicious and suspiciously good in muffins (trust me), that means it’s a nice time to pull out the pear liqueurs. I don’t have a deep, deep selection of pear eau de vie or anything, but I do have a bottle of St. George Spiced Pear Liqueur around and well, who am I to say no to that?
One of my favorite drinks last year in the home edition of the Sippin’ Santa series involved the use of pear liqueur, to which this certainly owes some lineage. However instead of tequila, I wanted to bring rum back into the mix. This is a tiki drink after all, and oddly I’ve found not enough of my original creations seem to feature rum (weird, I know). Now, what else is fun and fall-like?
Well…warming spices, always. I don’t use allspice dram all that much and who doesn’t enjoy a little pimento? As for the rums, I went with El Dorado 5 (for it’s nice molasses-y notes…always makes me think of a nice bread or muffin) and Barbancourt 5 Star (which I also find molasses-y despite a completely different process). Rounding out the liquor, I pulled out a bottle of amontillado sherry, for its nuttiness, and black walnut bitters, well, also for its nuttiness.
For the juice base, this seems like a great time for lemon and orange. The final touch here, something I picked up from Minimalist Tiki, which is basically a brown sugar syrup with a touch of molasses. So…what to do with all of that? Let’s get on with the untitled expeariment.
Here’s how I did it:
1 oz orange
1 oz lemon
.5 black orchid spices
.25 allspice
1 oz El Dorado 5
1 oz Barbancourt 5 Star
.75 oz St George Spiced Pear
A couple dashes of walnut bitters
Sherry float
Take everything but the sherry and throw that in your trusty mixing tin. Grab some ice, and shake, shake, shake. Strain that into a Hurricane glass (or something comparably sized, around 16 ounces). Top with fresh crushed ice. Float a little sherry on top. Finish with some grated nutmeg.
How is it? DRY…which…honestly, I’m here for. That’s the amontillado at work for sure, and the walnut bitters, and the fact that I did not add that much sugar. If your palette is less dry, then maybe add a bit more simple in, but I personally enjoyed it quite a bit. Like a delightful pear muffin, but you know, with alcohol.
Other variations to think about? Might be nice to introduce a little apple brandy into the mix as well. This would also be quite different with other rums. I think these two stand up well, but you could go very molasses-y with an older Demerara like El Dorado 12, pull back for a cleaner flavor with something like Flor de Caña 12, or blow it up entirely with whatever you got around, but I would suggest staying away from funkier things like big bold Jamaican rum as I do not think this is the place you want it.
Anyway, gonna try and keep this rolling even as I travel by catching up with some favorites and perhaps catching Sippin’ Santa a time or two while I’m on the road. But in the meantime, I’m still around for a couple more weeks with my own whole home bar and maybe a time to work out the kinks on a couple more drinks.
This is Trader Jane’s, a periodic newsletter about drinks (mostly tiki) and other fun writing. Follow me on Substack for something every week or two (if we are being honest), and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more timely updates on my beverages (and for lots of other things of course!)
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