Spiced rum death-match

I asked David, who runs the food and drink side of the Candlelight Club, if there was one of our previous Christmas cocktails that we could offer people to make at home, as a sort of vicarious seasonal experience. The cocktail in question was the Spiced Clementine Daiquiri (see below). The base spirit is spiced rum, which got me pondering.

At some point in the past I acquired a bottle of Sailor Jerry’s spiced rum and I found it repellently sickly. I’ve rather avoided spiced rum ever since. But I also remember, at the launch of the Chairman’s Reserve Rum range, that they had an incarnation that I thought was actually not bad. So I did a bit of online research to collate as many “top spiced rums” lists as I could find and, based on these recommendations, ended up with a short list of four. So, in the spirit of scientific rigour for which the Institute for Alcoholic Experimentation is renowned, I bought all four.

The cheapest on the list is Red Leg, which is common in supermarkets and can be had for £15 a bottle. It’s made from “Caribbean” rum, aged in barrels for an unspecified time before being infused with vanilla and ginger. It is named after the Red Legged Hermit Crab native to the Caribbean. It’s a golden colour, with a nose that is a strong, rather cloying, blast of vanilla and caramel or butterscotch. On the palate it is pretty sweet with a flavour of brown sugar and vanilla, with some heat: it’s only 37.5% ABV, so I’m guessing this might be from the ginger, although aside from this the flavour of ginger is not hugely apparent. It’s quite one-dimensional, all about the sugar/vanilla thing.

Next up is Dead Man’s Fingers, created at the Rum and Crab Shack in St Ives, Cornwall. These crazy cats wanted to add some unexpected flavours (I mean, does rum and crab even go together?), citing Cornish saffron cakes, spiced fruit and an ice cream they serve made with sweet, concentrated Pedro Ximenez sherry, plus “nutmeg, vanilla and a hint of orange”. It’s a darker colour than the Red Leg and has a powerful nose with a noticeable ginger element, plus what smells to me like lime. There is also a rather savoury mid-note, almost like onion, and I can get saffron too. After it opens up in the glass a smoky element emerges. On the palate it is less sweet than the Red Leg. There is definitely vanilla (which seems to be the main defining flavour in spiced rum), but a prominent flavour of fresh ginger, giving it a fiery kick, like ginger beer, and a slightly bitter finish. It leaves an aftertaste of Turkish delight, the kind that comes dusted in icing sugar.

Despite the skull on the bottle, Dead Man’s Fingers is not named after anything piratical, but after the local nickname for a crab’s gills (a bit of the crab that is discarded, as it doesn’t taste very nice). So that’s two rums named after crabs. The next up is Foursquare Spiced Rum which, by contrast, is named after the sugar estate, apparently one of the oldest in Barbados, where they’ve been making rum since 1640. The bottle gives nothing much away about its contents, only that the blending recipe is a secret known only to generations of the Seale family. It is very lightly flavoured compared to the others, paler than Dead Man’s Fingers and not really sweetened at all. Many reviewers talk about a primary flavour of cinnamon, but for me the most noticeable element is coconut, with a hint of sherry, which gives it a refined edge, and maybe a whiff of oatmeal. (I don’t know if there is any coconut in it, though I detect a hint of a similar aroma on the next rum and I wonder if it’s an impression created by clove in combination with something else.) On the tongue it is also mostly coconut that I get, plus the dry barkiness of cinnamon. Mind you, perhaps I’m doing it a disservice by tasting it after the gutsy punch of Dead Man’s Fingers, but I’m not really getting much at all from this rum. I try it again the next day, and I would say that it does have a quiet, genteel polish to it, but compared to the others there is not a lot going on.

The Foursquare is about £26 a bottle, and my final sample creeps up to £32—the Chairman’s Spiced Rum. It’s also 40% ABV, while all the others are just 37.5%. The label admits to “Caribbean fruits, bark and spice”, naming cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg, clove and bitter orange specifically. The nose is buttery, with a strong waft of orange peel and some cocoa. It’s a bit like smelling a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. There is also a strong note of raisins, plus cinnamon and clove. The palate is led by the orange note again. They talk about “bitter” orange, but the result is rich and smooth, a bit like eating a liqueur-filled chocolate—though not particularly sweet as such.* This rum is the one that I would choose to drink neat, smooth but not too sweet, rich but subtle, detailed and not overblown. As you dig in new flavours emerge, all deftly blended. Going back to the Foursquare, the latter is certainly cultured enough to drink on its own, but it does seem thin and dry by comparison with the Chairman’s.

But let’s not forget that the starting point for all of this was a cocktail. How do these rums perform when mixed? Here is the recipe:

Spiced Rum Daiquiri
50 ml spiced rum
75 ml clementine juice
10 ml vanilla syrup
10 ml lime juice (optional)
3 good dashes of Angostura bitters

Shake all the ingredients together with ice in a cocktail shaker and strain into a (largish) cocktail glass. Garnish with a strip of clementine or satsuma zest.

Clementine juice is something that most supermarkets seem to sell at Christmas, though perhaps not at other times. It’s actually strikingly different from orange juice, sharper with more or a rindy pep, almost as if it already has a little lime in it. In any case, for my palate the added lime juice is needed to balance the syrup, but if you have a sweet tooth you may wish to leave it out. With spiced rum’s typical flavours of vanilla, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, orange peel and clove, plus the clementine juice (and Angostura has quite a cinnamon stripe to it) you've basically got Christmas in a glass. (I also tried it with a bitters that David had made a previous Christmas, which is heavy on clove, and this really boosted the Christmasy combination.)

Although I found the Red Leg rum a bit sickly on its own, it works fine in this cocktail, and it was Mrs H.’s favourite out of the lot, though she has a sweeter tooth than me. Dead Man’s Fingers benefits from its strong flavouring and punchy profile, easily making its presence felt against the other ingredients. For me this was probably the best choice for the drink, though Mrs H. didn’t like it so much—I think the edge of bitterness it brought wasn’t to her taste. The Foursquare was the least successful here: it’s too delicate to make much of an impression, and if you try to adjust this by adding more of the rum, it just unbalances the cocktail. Finally, the Chairman’s Spiced Rum certainly does work well in this drink, though I would argue that its leading flavour of orange might get a bit lost against the other citrus in the drink—and to be honest I’d rather save it to drink neat.

I also tried these rums with Fentiman’s ginger beer, with and without a squeeze of lime (so a Dark and Stormy cocktail). For me the Red Leg is just too sweet without a hefty dose of lime juice, and again the Foursquare got lost, but the other two worked well. You might think that the Dead Man’s Fingers with its strong peppery ginger character would be overkill with the ginger in the mixer, but it seemed to work OK. Again, I think the vividness of this rum makes it good with mixers in general.

But for me the star of the show was the Chairman’s Spiced Rum. It’s the only one I would choose to drink neat, and that is indeed what I was doing with it over Christmas. In a way it’s the first spiced rum I’ve tasted that, for me, justifies the existence of spiced rum as a concept—they are generally too sweet, crude and overblown for me, but this example is complex and poised. Whether you’d want to mix with it, given the price, is another question. If you specifically want a spiced rum for mixing, at £18 the Dead Man’s Fingers is a good bet.**

* I have a distant recollection that the Greek spiced fortified wine Metaxa tastes a bit like this, with an orange thrust. I’ve got some Metaxa in the cellar so I go and check: the dusty bottle is 95% empty, so probably not at its best, but in fact it has a floral nose and a muscaty taste, so nothing like the rum at all. Forget I ever mentioned it. And I can report that the Chairman’s Spiced Rum is a far superior drink in any case.

** The Kraken is another popular spiced rum, but I didn’t include it in this experiment as it didn’t really feature in my initial trawl of other people’s top-spiced-rum lists, but I have tried it at a trade show once and I don’t recall being terribly impressed. I think was was probably too sweet, and the underlying rum a bit rough.

Merser rum: reviving a London tradition

To Temple, by the river, for the launch of a new rum. It’s the brainchild of Hayman’s, whom you probably know as a gin distiller. Hayman’s present themselves as a family firm (I chatted to both Miranda and James Hayman, fifth generation in the business), though in fact Hayman’s gin only dates back to the 1980s. Miranda’s and James’s father Christopher, head honcho, is the son of Marjorie Burrough, of the Burroughs family behind Beefeater Gin, a family gin brand that dates back to 1863.

This sense of history is actually what lies behind the new product. Apparently back in the day the Thames was lined with rum blending houses, importing source rums from around the Caribbean and practising the art of skilful blending to create a perfect balanced product. Industrialisation and cost-cutting later drove this trade elsewhere, and Hayman’s are hoping to bring the old skills back to life.

The whole brand, called Charles Merser & Co., is steeped in this olde worlde image. The launch took place in a four-storey Georgian merchant’s house a couple of streets off the Strand, which they have named At the Sign of the Post and Hound. Charles Merser is actually a family ancestor, James tells me, but they are not reviving an old rum-blending business—they simply picked his name, not least because it has a City-of-London mercantile sort of ring to it. The Post and Hound name is a reference to the fact that in the old days pubs were identified by the imagery on their signs, rather than a written name, because most of their clientele couldn’t read. (The post refers to the wooden posts that Thames barges full of rum barrels would tie up at; the dog is a greyhound, apparently a London connection.) I asked if this meant their plan was to turn the building into a rum bar, which seems the obvious way to go, but apparently that sort of decision is a long way off. For now the high narrow building just seems to be a visitor’s centre.

At the launch the ground floor had shelves of bottles, plus some branded enamelled mugs, in one of which I was served a simple hot rum punch, essentially rum, hot water, sugar and spices (cloves and, I think, star anise). I think this room is intended as a shop front. Up on the first floor was a tasting room where we sampled the rum and on the top floor was a bar where vintage cocktails were being dispensed. Down in the cellar was their blending room. The idea is that the blending really will take place here, although it is no longer permissible to store barrels of rum in a London town house, for fire safety reasons, so all the storage will go on at the Hayman’s distillery plant in Balham. At the time of my visit there were only some empty barrels plus some pieces of barrel to show how they are made.

It was in this room that I learned a bit about how the new rum was concocted. It is made from three existing blends, in turn composed of some ten source spirits. The three component blends are imported, blended here then left in barrels for a number of months. Whereas the aged rums in the blend have matured in tropical conditions, which accelerates the interaction with the wood, the final ageing takes place in the temperate British climate, using barrels already used first for bourbon and then for whisky, so there is far less flavour imparted from this process. It is more about allowing the blend of blends to settle and marry. Given that so many different rums go into the mix, I asked if it was expected that as time went by different source spirits would be used, with the blending process used to adjust the recipe to ensure a consistent final flavour was maintained, and this does indeed seem to be the plan. Up in the top-floor bar there were rows of the source rums on display (not for tasting!), ranging in colour from completely colourless to dark brown.

Source rums for blending

The product we were tasting was to be their signature “Double Barrel” blend, though it is envisaged that other products may join the stable, such as limited edition blends. The bottle is striking, with a dimpled surface. I’m not quite sure what this is meant to suggest—to me it looked a little like the straw or wicker protective jacket you sometimes see on a glass carboy used to transport wine or spirits, but I was given no encouragement that this is in fact the intention. The three component blends are: 19% (A) a mix of 3-year-old Barbadian rum, 3-year-old Dominican rum and unaged Jamaican rum; 47% (B) a mix of 8-year-old Barbadian rum, 8-year-old Dominican rum and 6-year-old Panamanian rum; and 34% (C) a mix of 5-year-old Barbadian rum, 8-year-old Dominican rum, 3-year-old Guatemalan rum and unaged Jamaican rum. Blend A is said to add a fresh pine-like element, blend B the warming, rich, dark-sugar notes and blend C bright tropical fruit and toasty oak.

On the nose there are hints of the pungent Jamaican pot-still character (which pokes you in the eye when you open a bottle or Wray & Nephew), but these are well controlled within a soft and smooth aroma, with distinct notes of pineapple and mango, a bit of banana, plus caramel and for me a sweet sherry aroma. On the palate it is smooth and subtle, fruity and chocolatey. It is very easy to drink neat, elegant and refined. It’s more like an old-school butler than a hipster flairtender. It doesn’t scream one particular flavour, but dignifiedly suggests one nuance after another with a discreet cough. Add a little water and the chocolate and pineapple seem to come out more on the nose, and for the first time I notice the wood, while the palate takes on a creamy quality.

At £38 a bottle the Double Barrel is not cheap, but at the same time it seems good value to me. My immediate impression is that this is not a rum you would smother with mixer, but Hayman’s are keen to showcase some cocktails with it. The Hot Spiced Rum that I was served when I arrived was a bit sweet for me—I found myself wanting to add a squeeze of lemon juice. Up in the top floor bar I got to try a Polo, two parts rum, one part orange juice and one part lemon juice. It’s nice enough and you are aware of the rum, but having recently sampled it neat I now find myself wishing I could taste more of it in the mix.

A row of Palmettos being rustled up

I’m keen to try the Palmetto, combining rum with red vermouth and a dash of orange bitters. It’s nice, but again I instinctively feel there should be a bit more of an emphasis on the rum. The next day, at home, I make my own. I can see that the recipe in the booklet handed out at the launch gives equal parts rum and vermouth: by analogy with a Manhattan or a Rob Roy, this is a bit vermouth-heavy, so I try one that uses two parts rum to one part Antica Formula red vermouth, plus a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters. It’s bloody fantastic, with lots of toasty caramel flavour hitting you up front and a Christmasy cinnamon flavour (I think the Angostura is partly responsible for this).

Palmetto
50ml Merser Double Barrel
50ml or 25ml red vermouth
Dash of orange (or Angostura) bitters
Stir over ice

Another cocktail that catches my eye in the booklet is the Flapper, made with rum and dry white vermouth, plus a dash of Angostura. The stated proportions are 1:1 again, and again I am cautious about overwhelming the rum, but in fact in this mix the rum holds its own easily. In fact at equal parts the vermouth is hard to pin down, yet clearly affects the overall flavour: I’m using Belsazar Dry and it seems to add a saline finish, creating a pronounced note of salted caramel. It’s a good, subtle, complex drink. I also try making a Small Dinger, a recipe I found in Bar Florida Cocktails (1935) which no one else seems to have heard of or make, but despite the unlikely wheeze of combining rum and gin, I think it really works. Again it performs well with Double Barrel, with the rum showing its character and cozying up comfortably with the gin in the way that it mysteriously does in this cocktail.

Flapper
50ml Merser Double Barrel
50ml dry white vermouth
Two dashes of Angostura
Stir over ice and garnish with a maraschino cherry and a slice of orange (though I drink mine straight up with a lemon peel garnish)*

As you can tell, I’m much taken by Merser Double Barrel. It’s complex but approachable, easy to drink on its own and working well in certain classic style cocktails where it retains its character. In longer drinks I think it gets a bit lost, but there are plenty of short drinks to experiment with, until you suddenly find you’ve reached the end of the bottle…

*I take a fairly dim view of garnishes in general—sometimes their big fresh flavours can ride roughshod over subtleties of the cocktail ingredients; with some Martinis I regularly put a bit of lemon peel in then instantly regret it, as the vigorous rind oils steamroller the gin’s aromas. And when gin brands recommend you garnish their G&T with a kumquat, I find myself thinking, “So why didn’t you just put more kumquat in the botanical mix?” (Though I concede that some things taste quite different fresh from the way they do when infused then redistilled.) But in this case the lemon rind really complements the cocktail.

Introducing the Sloppy Giuseppe cocktail

In our ceaseless quest for interesting corners of the Prohibition world around which to theme Candlelight Club parties, we have twice taken advantage of Cuba’s romantic and exotic place in booze history. When alcohol was banned in the States, it didn’t take long for Americans to notice that Cuba was jolly close indeed and was untouched by the Volstead Act. Before long Havana became one big party, filled with neon-signed jazz clubs and cocktail bars. Bacardi teamed up with Pan Am to lay on boat plane flights from Key West right into Havana Harbour so no drinking time could be lost, inviting holidayers to come and "bathe in Bacardi rum". "I have seen people leaving incoming ships," commented US Consul Hurst, "who have stopped at bars on their way to the hotel… By the time they reached the hotel they could scarcely ask the reception clerk for a room."

Rum was the national drink, thanks to a climate ideal for growing sugar cane, and some of the best-loved rum cocktails came out of this era. The Mojito (rum, fresh mint, lime juice, sugar and usually a splash of soda) derived from an ancient drink originally made on the island from a pre-rum sugar alcohol. The Daiquiri (rum, lime juice, sugar) is said to have been developed by American mining engineers in 1898 fed up with drinking Planter’s Punch, who named it after the village where they were stationed. The Cuba Libre (rum, lime juice, cola) is named after the battle cry of the rebels fighting to escape Spanish rule—although this conflict ended in 1898 and Coca Cola did not reach the island till 1900.

The reopened Sloppy Joe's today

There was also a drink named El Presidente which was apparently very popular both in Cuba and back in the US (illicitly during Prohibition and legally afterwards). Named after President Mario Garcia Menocal, it consists of equal parts Bacardi rum and French (i.e. dry white) vermouth, plus a bar spoon of grenadine. Perhaps it was inevitable that someone would try to create a “Cuban Martini”, a sophisticated drink for classy clientele. So I was keen to try it out as a possible drink for the menu at our event. The only problem was that it isn’t very nice: I made myself one as an experiment and it was thin and astringent. Adding more grenadine didn’t help either, just created a clash of flavours.

Fans of Cuban cocktail history will no doubt have been pleased to hear that Sloppy Joe’s, one of the most popular Havana bars from the era, reopened in March after some 57 years. (I’d like to take this opportunity to plug a 1933 Warner Bros movie called Havana Widows, starring Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell, which I discovered in my researches; it’s full of outrageous wise-cracking dialogue and features a drunk lawyer who can usually be found in a bar called Sloppy Moe’s, which goes to show how famous Sloppy Joe’s was in its day.) In a news item on the subject, Imbibe included a recipe for a Sloppy Joe’s Cocktail,* which combined rum and French vermouth with dashes of grenadine and curaçao, plus lime juice. Most Cuban cocktails seem to come back to lime juice, and there’s no denying that the union of rum, lime and sugar in a Daiquiri is a perfect thing. I made myself a Sloppy Joe’s Cocktail and it does hold together—you can taste all the elements, the underlying rum, the fruitiness from the grenadine and curacao, and their sweetness balancing the sour element of the lime, plus a gentle bitterness rising up from the vermouth. But Mrs H was unmoved by it, and I can’t see myself making one very often. It’s one of those recipes where you feel the grenadine and curacao have been stapled on in an attempt to fix an underlying problem.

A Sloppy Joe cocktail

However, when I first attempted to make one of these cocktails I looked in the fridge and realized that I didn’t actually have any dry white vermouth (Noilly Prat is my normal choice). What I did have was a bottle of China Martini, a strongly flavoured vermouth with, as its name suggests, a strong dose of quinine. Derived from the bark of the South American quina tree (China Calissaia), quinine was used by locals to combat fever and it came to international recognition when it saved the life of the wife of the Spanish Viceroy in Peru in 1638. It became a staple part of life in the Raj where, made into “tonic water”, it was soon found to go well with gin. As with many alcoholic infusions and distillations, what started out as a way of preserving something with medicinal qualities was soon being consumed for purely aesthetic reasons. Likewise the pleasing bitterness of quinine is a key part in the flavour of quinated wines like China Martini,** and there is a long Italian tradition of making such infusions. Likewise, the word “vermouth” derives from the German Wermut, which is wormwood—for this bitter herb, famously a defining ingredient in absinthe, is also to be found in vermouth.

Back in the day there was a French vermouth-style drink called Kina Lillet, which appeared in famous cocktails from the Corpse Reviver No.2 to Ian Fleming’s Vesper Martini, which James Bond creates in 1953’s Casino Royale. This drink was discontinued in 1986, and the manufacturers today produce Lillet Blanc, a sweet, orange-flavoured wine-based blend, which is rather pleasant but with a delicate flavour that is easily swamped in a cocktail, in my opinion. I’ve never been able to taste Kina Lillet but it is generally considered to have been more bitter,*** more along the lines of Italian products like China Martini and Cocchi Americano. (For some reason I had got the idea that some of these were developed recently to fill the gap left by Kina Lillet, but in fact Cocchi Americano has been in production since 1891. It’s hard to find out much about China Martini, and Martini’s own website doesn’t mention it, but it also clearly has a heritage, as this bizarre TV advert, from 1958, attests.)

A Sloppy Giuseppe cocktail

So I tried knocking up a cocktail using China Martini, rum and lime juice. China Martini is pretty sweet so I left out the grenadine and curacao. And it is something of a revelation. Essentially it is a Daiquiri that uses the vermouth for sweetness rather than sugar, with the added herbal notes and piquant bitterness too. Unlike the Sloppy Joe it is pleasingly simple, with just the three ingredients, and is resilient when it comes to proportions: it works with one shot of each, though I think it’s best with the rum increased to 1½ or 2 shots, depending on how strong you want the sweet and sour elements. Perhaps the only downside is that China Martini is not an attractive colour and the resulting cocktail is a sludge brown.

Sloppy Giuseppe
1½–2 shots rum
1 shot China Martini
1 shot lime juice

Shake ingredients together with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. If you prefer it sweeter, you could reduce the amount of lime juice, or perhaps add a dash of grenadine.

It also works with Cocchi Americano, though not as well: Cocchi Americano always seems to me to have quite a ginger flavour to it which sits comfortably with things like whisky, but I’m not so convinced here. I can also confirm that the recipe works well with Americano Gancia (less so with Martini Rosato, which is not sweet enough) and it would presumably work with a number of the many bitter-sweet vermouths out there.

By chance I stumbled across an article that David Wondrich wrote about the El Presidente. Like me he was never won over by it and couldn’t see why it had been so popular—until he noticed that a number of the early Cuban recipes specified “Vermouth de Chambery”. He writes that Dolin is the only remaining Chambery style vermouth and that, in addition to dry white and sweet red, they also make a semi-dry blanc (as indeed producers such as Martini and Cinzano make a pale but sweeter bianco). As soon as he tried the cocktail using that, the whole thing came together.

Which is similar to my own experiences with the Sloppy Joe—or Sloppy Giuseppe, as I have christened my new version (with apologies to Pizza Express who have a meaty pizza bearing the same name).

China Martini is available from the Whiskey Exchange priced at £23.25. Which is a lot for a vermouth, I know.

* I have the 2008 reprint of the Sloppy Joe's Cocktails Manual from 1931, and the only cocktail in it named Sloppy Joe's actually contains cognac. pineapple juice, port, grenadine and curaçao. The recipe described in Imbibe appears as an American President cocktail, while the El Presidente recipe, with the addition of curaçao, is actually called a Cuban President.

** See also Cocchi's wonderful Barolo Chinato which I mentioned before as a good accompaniment to chocolate.

*** I’m sure I’ve read a claim from the manufacturers that Lillet Blanc is little different from Kina Lillet, insisting, oddly, that the latter actually had less quinine in it, though don’t bother looking at their website today as it has been a just a holding page for some time. I’ve seen two quotes from Lillet at the time saying that the new version is “fresher, fruitier and less bitter”, but the only link I’ve found in relation takes you to Lillet’s French site which seems to be dead. 

One small dinger for mankind

A Small Dinger

I have a troubled relationship with grenadine.

It’s an age-old cocktail ingredient, a syrup or cordial traditionally made from pomegranate (it’s name coming from grenade, French for pomegranate), sometimes slightly alcoholic. But modern grenadine is berry-based, mostly blackcurrant. Syrup merchants Monin acknowledge this shift by producing both a “grenadine” and a “pomegranate syrup”. I don’t know why this change happened—perhaps because traditional grenadine is both sweet and tart, and modern palates maybe hanker after something less edgy.

In any case, I find all commercial grenadines have a bubblegum confectionary flavour that, even in small quantities, ruins most cocktails. (Monin’s pomegranate syrup is better, but still a bit synthetic.) So nowadays I make my own, very simply, by mixing equal parts POM Wonderful pomegranate juice (it comes in a dopey-looking segmented bottle but it is 100% pomegranate, apparently) with granulated sugar, heated in a pan until it all dissolves then allowed to cool. (Normal cocktail syrup I make with a ratio of two parts sugar by volume to one part water, but when I tried that with pomegranate juice I discovered that it set into a jelly at room temperature. Something like pectin in the juice? Who knows. But at 1:1 it stays liquid and, kept in the fridge, it seems to avoid going mouldy for a surprisingly long time.)

Anyway, I mention all this because I’d like to introduce you to a cocktail that, for my money, makes grenadine taste good. It’s called a Small Dinger* and I noticed it printed on the frontispiece of the 1935 reprint of Bar Florida Cocktails, in the 2008 facsimile edition produced by Ross Bolton. Its appeal lay in its simplicity and, at the same time, its oddness, mixing rum and gin, augmented only with the straightforward sweet-and-sour combo of grenadine and lemon juice.**

Small Dinger
1 shot gin
1 shot rum
½ shot grenadine
½ lemon juice
Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

But the really odd thing about the Small Dinger is that it really works. For me this is what cocktails are all about—you can pick out the contributions of all the ingredients, but the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. On the nose you notice the fruitiness of the grenadine, then on the tongue you get a clear warmth from the rum, with the sugar spirit flavour coming through, plus the high juniper notes and dry spice complexity of the gin. And the sweet/tart of the grenadine fruit marries well: this is actually quite a high proportion of grenadine (many recipes call for just a dash) but it does not seem cloying as it both has a clear space for itself in the mix and is balanced by the sourness of the lemon juice. (You may need to juggle the exact proportions depending on the sweetness of the grenadine.)

The original recipe for the Small Dinger. Click to enlarge

I first tried this cocktail with Botran Reserva rum—I am, as you know, a fan of the whole Botran range. I’ve also tried it with Havana Club 7-year-old. But, as you can see, the original recipe specifies Bacardi rum (back in those days Bacardi was still made in Cuba, rather than Puerto Rico, Spain and other places, as it is now), a white rum, I assume; so I also tried it with Botran Reserva Blanca and Brugal Blanco. Frankly it works with all of them, though my personal preference would be the darker Botran Reserva, where the complex mid-range notes of dried fruit, vanilla an chocolate slot nicely in with the fresh fruit flavours and the high spice notes of the gin (I’ve been using Tanqueray as a typical, classic style for this experiment).

All I can really say is: try it. It needs no special ingredients (well, I would advise making your own grenadine, though it may work with commercial stuff) but represents that sort of mixological earth magic that we all have easy access to.

* You will find some suggestions online that the name is lewd, but so far as I can tell a dinger is just a contraction of 19th-century humdinger—a thing that is an excellent example of its kind.

** It’s not a common cocktail but some recipes you’ll find actually specify lime juice. It’s a bit of a controversy because some of these early Cuban books talk about limón verde, meaning lime, but which was sloppily translated just as “lemon”. Yet this recipe, as you can see, specifies simply jugo limon, so I assume we’re on fairly safe ground using lemon juice. It works nicely with lime too.

Botran Reserva Blanca

Francis from Distillnation came round the other day to drop off some absinthe and he presented me also with a handsome bottle of Botran’s new Blanca Reserva. It doesn’t officially launch in the UK till later this year, but when it does it will retail for about £22.

Botran are a Guatemalan family firm who have been making rum since 1939. Originally sugar cane planters, they still make all their rum with virgin cane juice from their own family estate in Retalhuleu, in the south of the country, using their own strain of yeast taken from pineapple, before ageing it slowly in the cool mountain town of Quetzaltenango. They use a mixture of bourbon (sometimes re-charred), sherry and port barrels and practise a “solera” system, more usually found in sherry production, where rums of different ages are constantly blended. To get an idea of just how elaborate this is, have a look at the flow chart below. Their current range consists of the Reserva, containing rums aged 5–14 years, and the Solera 1893, a drier, more profound blend of rums aged 5–18 years.

Click on the image to see a larger version

Their new white rum is not quite what it seems: for it too has been barrel aged using the solera technique; the current bottling contains rums aged 3–5 years and is made in the same way as the Reserva, except that there is no port barrel ageing. It is then charcoal filtered to remove the colour. Whereas most white rums are intended as mixers, Botran say theirs can be enjoyed both in cocktails and simply on the rocks.

Straightaway I can tell you that this Blanca makes a cracking Daiquiri,* with the rum coming through as tight and fruity, with a petrolly spirit thrust that pokes through the lime and sugar, yet bonds smoothly and perfectly with those flavours too. I try a Mary Pickford,** and again the rum lends an elegant power to this frothy, fruity number.

Neat, the Reserva Blanca has a juicy nose with elements of marzipan and cherry Bakewell. The palate is very soft and smooth for a white rum, and maintains the marzipan flavours. I have bottles of Bacardi and Havana Club 3-year-old to hand so I try them alongside: the Bacardi has a dry, sour nose by comparison, whereas the Botran is mellow and inviting with hints of chocolate. Likewise the Bacardi is thin and sharp on the palate, with a hint of blue cheese and seemingly a bit watery (though it is 37.5% ABV compared to the Botran’s 40%).

A Daiquiri made with Botran Reserva Blanca

The Havana Club has, unsurprisingly, a strong wood element on the nose and a tequila-like sourness. The palate likewise has a sawmill wood character plus a crude banana fruit. It somehow reminds me of the inside of a rubber balloon, and is quite tough to drink on its own. All of which goes to show how sophisticated the Botran is for a white rum, and how it is indeed a white rum you can enjoy neat.

OK, so the Botran Reserva Blanca will retail for almost double what you can find the Bacardi and Havana Club rums for in supermarket offers, but inevitably that careful ageing and filtering is going to come at a price. But how does the Blanca compare with the standard Botran Reserva? The Reserva has more obvious wood, plus dried fruit like figs, orange and raisins. I have a bottle of Havana Club 7-year-old knocking around so I do a comparison: this is dry, appley like Calvados and has a more stern, single-minded balance. By comparison the Botran Reserva is wreathed in sweet sugar and almond softness and smooth, smoky wood.

A Mary Pickford made with the Botran Blanca

Side by side, the Blanca has a much quieter nose than the Reserva, delicate, clean with a hint of a vodka-like medicinal note. The Reserva on the other hand immediately hits you with strong sherry notes, plus all that dried fruit. On the palate the Blanca channels more of the underlying sugar spirit character, a fuel for cocktails, but so much smoother than a typical white rum. The Reserva, by comparison, has a distinct oak wood character, which carries an acidity on the tongue that makes it in some ways less smooth than the Blanca.

This comparison helps me understand where the Blanca fits into the range. Whereas the Reserva (and more so the Solera 1893) is about in-your-face character and complexity, the Blanca is more about smoothness. I can see why they might encourage consumers to drink it neat, perhaps not as a profound character study, but as a clean, classy shot like premium vodka.

With this thought in mind I tried the Blanca from the freezer. It works OK, coming across at first with vodka-like medicinal notes, before the fruitiness hits and the sugar. I wouldn’t especially recommend it (but then I’ve never met a decent vodka that I thought was improved by being served frozen), yet it works well enough. For me the Botran Reserva Blanca works best in simple, classic rum cocktails.

* 2½ shots rum, ¾ shot lime juice, ¾ shot sugar syrup

** 2 shots rum, 2 shots pineapple juice, 1 tsp grenadine, dash of maraschino