Original Cocktail: Cold Summer Sun
“Original” here should be in quotes. I borrow heavily for this one, but I have it on good authority that every cocktail is basically a reimagining of another cocktail.
Nothing new under the sun, I guess.
Get it? GET IT? It’s called… oh, never mind.
My recipe is a play on the very excellent Donn Day Afternoon. This modern tiki drink was created by Martin Cate, owner and properietor of the preeminent tiki bar in the United States, San Francisco’s Smuggler’s Cove. The drink borrows Don Beach’s classic flavor combo of grapefruit and cinnamon (featured prominently in Don’s Mix #2, which was used to make the original Zombie). The fresh grapefruit is replaced here with a grapefruit radler, but the flavor combination is classic. The cocktail is named for the classic movie Dog Day Afternoon, a slow-paced Al Pacino thriller from 1975. The movie is set during a sweltering day in the dog days of summer, exactly the kind of day that this cocktail was designed to bust.
I’ve rambled enough about my inspiration. If you’re really interested in the original, Distinguished Spirits on Youtube does an excellent video breaking down the construction, history, and etymology. I recommend it. Meantime, I did something else. (Click here to skip ahead if you don’t like how long-winded I am.)
This is like the dramatis personae of this blog post.
The Syrups
I wanted the sweetness in this drink to embrace those complex tiki flavors that I love, but they had to also complement the mango in the beer. I played around with ginger, cinnamon, even Falernum (we'll talk about that one another time), but ultimately I landed on passion fruit.
Passion fruit has a wonderfully tropical sweet-tart flavor that ended up going so well with the mango in the beer. My original recipe involved me buying fresh passion fruit (eight of them ran me $20), letting them ripen for a few days in a paper bag, and cutting them open, scooping out the pulp, simmering that in sugar syrup….
Leandro of Educated Barfly had a different suggestion, which was easier, cheaper, and faster. If you go into the frozen section of your local superstore, you may be lucky enough to find frozen passion fruit pulp (or puree). Combine this in equal parts with a rich simple syrup (2:1 sugar to water), and you have a delicious, tangy, tropical fruit syrup.
I had all the fruit I could hope for in this now, but it needed some roundness. I tried a few other ingredients with sort of a savory or spicy bent, before making some homemade orgeat on a whim. Orgeat is an almond syrup commonly found in tiki drinks; its sweet savory, rounded, and smells a bit like marzipan to me. You can buy it pre-made, you can make it yourself by soaking, steeping, blitzing, straining, and sweetening almonds… or you can do what I did and cheat.
Steve the Bartender introduced me to a really cheaty way to make orgeat at home - just buy plain almond milk, simmer 1 cup of that with 2 cups of sugar, and pump it up with orange flower water, almond extract, and brandy. Boom.
The combination of the two syrups helped create a drink that was fruity, rounded, complex, and coated the mouth with flavor. But all of this would be lost without the right rums.
The Rum
Rum is far from the only spirit used in tiki, but it is arguably the most synonymous with tiki drinks. When I started exploring tums, I was blown away by the sheer scope and variety of rums - different flavors, unique profiles specific to specific islands or single distillers, different methods of aging….
I played with a lot of different rum blends, but in playing around, I discovered that I definitely wanted to get some Smith & Cross in there. Smith & Cross is a Jamaican rum (or English rum, as they are otherwise known), with a very tropical funk-forward flavor. The flavor profile is kind of banana and papaya forward, but it is also navy strength (in this case, 57% alcohol), so it has plenty of heat and spice to carry it. Smith & Cross in particular is very funky, so too much of it could make that hogo (that funky smell) quite overpowering. It needs balance!
The white Rhum JM here is very important. Martinique rum like this has a very different flavor to traditional rums. Most rums are made from molasses, a byproduct of sugar production. It makes good sense — take byproducts and turn them into a much more profitable product! Rhum agricole (as it is otherwise known) was produced at a time when the French colonies of Martinique were producing more sugar cane than the French could reliably move, so they would distill the whole sugar cane juice. The result is a rum that’s significantly more vegetal, herbal, and grassy than your average rum. An unaged rhum agricole like this will present the wildest, untamed elements of those grassy notes — perfect for bringing an extra dimension to this drink.
Wow. I’m pretty long-winded. Let’s wrap this up.
The Rest
Lime is lime. It’s delicious. The acid helps balance the sweetness.
The beer is a local (ish) beer produced by Souther Tier Brewing, a massive power in the craft brewing market. Their Mango Crush is a session ale (low ABV) that’s lacto-fermented (the ale yeast is bolstered by lactobacillus bacteria, providing a buttery mouthfeel) and contains milk sugars (this makes it creamier) and mango (this makes it taste like mango). Did you get all that? It’s a great beer and there’s a lot going on. This is what really inspired me to make this drink - this beer is very good and I wanted to try and build on the flavor profile of it.
The addition of Bittermen’s Elemakule Tiki bitters was whimsical at best. I threw it in to the last iteration of the recipe and loved the results. The bitters are heavy on cinnamon and allspice flavors which pair so well with the Jamaican rum and the tropical fruits, and tamp down a little bit more on that sweetness from the syrups. The result is a perfectly balanced drink (if I say so myself) that is as refreshing as an island breeze. Or something. God, I’m sorry, I sound like a travel brochure. On with the recipe!
The Good Part (The Recipe)
1/2 oz freshly squeezed lime juice
3/8 oz passion fruit syrup
3/8 oz orgeat
1 oz Jamaican rum (e.g. Smith & Cross)
1 oz white rhum agricole (e.g. Rhum JM)
8 drops Bittermen’s Elemakule Tiki bitters
4 oz Southern Tier Mango Crush sour ale (or similar)
Garnish: mango wedge and lime wheel
Combine first six ingredients in a shaker tin with ice. Shake for 8-10 seconds, then double strain into a glass with ice.
Top with beer. Garnish with mango and lime (optionally on a pick).
This is the same picture as above. I have very few pictures of this process but I thought this half of the recipe was bland.
I sincerely hope you can find a way to try this recipe, even if it’s coming to my house and having me make it for you (you know who you are).
As always, please leave a comment and talk to us on social media. We’re looking forward to your feedback and challenges!
