Funky Hurricane

I wasn't paying much attention as the day started, but apparently it was Mardi Gras today. I don't know a lot about Mardi Gras, other than associating it with New Orleans. Continuing my ignorance, I've never been to New Orleans. Someday I'll have a chance to go and visit Beachbum Berry's Latitude 29 and attend Tales of the Cocktail, not to mention see the rest of that legendary city. Of course New Orleans has its share of cocktails associated with it and one of the more notorious of those cocktails is the Hurricane. 

The Hurricane is reportedly a creation of Pat O'Brien. In it's original formulation, it's not exactly a nuanced cocktail. It's a lot of rum and a lot of juice. The juices themselves vary (maybe some orange or lemon juice, plus something tropical and/or something red), but it's not a particularly subtle drink. The legend is that O'Brien created it as a way to offload the rum he had to buy from his liquor distributors in order to keep the scotch and other whiskeys flowing into his bar.

A few years ago, when Smith & Cross Jamaican rum hit the market, Tiare from A Mountain of Crushed Ice started publishing various recipes featuring that lovely Jamaican rum. Her reinterpretation of a Hurricane using Smith & Cross added a lot of depth to the cocktail while still packing a punch that you'd expect from a Hurricane. I found it a recipe worth coming back to again and again. And so when I was reminded today was Mardi Gras - well that just seemed like a fine reason to reach for my hurricane glass and the bottle of Smith & Cross.

Get the recipe from A Mountain of Crushed Ice.

Where did your ice originate?

I don't mean the beautifully hand-crafted artisanal chunk of frozen water currently residing in your old-fashioned glass. I mean how did ice make it's way into a cocktail glass in the first place? well, the ice chilling and diluting 19th century Caribbean cocktails originally shipped from frozen ponds in the Northeast United States.

Listen to "The Ice King", episode 198 of 99% Invisible, to hear about how the ice trade came to be, how ice was transported to (and stored in) tropical climates like Barbados, and how it eventually faded way as home refrigeration took hold in the 20th century. We take ice for granted now but it wasn't always this way.

If you're not a regular listener to 99% Invisible, you may as well subscribe and make it part of your podcast habit. It's a weekly show (usually about 20 minutes long) ostensibly about architecture and design but more truly it is, as they say "about all the thought that goes into the things we don't think about." Like how ice for cocktails came to our glasses.

Mixing a Lost Lake recipe, part 2

After mixing up Lost Lake's Heaven is a Place/This is the Place I wanted to next try their titular cocktail, the Lost Lake. Frederic Yarm of Cocktail Virgin featured it a couple of weeks back and I finally got around to it this past weekend. Frederic's blog is a inspiring to me for a couple of reasons, not the lead of which is that he has the discipline to post daily and share a wide variety of recipes.

I think the Lost Lake was published in a recent Imbibe issue, which means I need to go back and re-read them and see what else I missed. In any case, I agree with Frederic's assessment that the Lost Lake shares some ancestry with the Jungle Bird (any rum drink with Campari risks that comparison). I found the drink challenging at first and then improving as it diluted. Including both maraschino and Campari really ups the bitter. And the technique listed - shake with crushed ice, strain into a tiki mug, and then fill with more crushed ice, means the dilution happens a bit differently than most recipes I make. Wondering out loud, maybe this gives it a couple of extra minutes of shelf life during service.

Overall I preferred Heaven is a Place/This is the Place, but I'm going to revisit the Lost Lake with a slightly more pungent dark rum and see how it reacts. 

Grab the recipe over at Cocktail Virgin. And bookmark his site if you're not already a regular visitor there.