Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, Old Leviathan #3!

Arr, me hearties.

My pirate hat, my trusty dagger, a comfortable sash, and a rum that will make your toes curl. All a freebooter needs.

Greetings, Wonketeers! As you are reading this, I’m packing frantically for my vacation. It’s time to unveil my annual passion project, a tour de force of my favorite spirit. I fully intend to spend my vacation drinking like a pirate, and you’re all invited to drink with me. Good luck, this requires three full bottles of the good stuff. Let’s lay in a stash of Old Leviathan #3. Here’s the recipe:

Old Leviathan #3

1 bottle (750 ml) Smith and Cross Jamaican Rum

1 bottle (750 ml) Hamilton 151 Demerara Rum

1 bottle (750 ml) Plantation 5 Year Barbados Rum

Pirate’s Syrup

2 t orange bitters

Combine all ingredients. Strain into three empty rum bottles. Let sit in a cool dark place for at least one week. 

Pirate’s Syrup

2 cups demerara sugar

2 cups water

14 black peppercorns

14 allspice berries

1 cinnamon stick, 2-3 inches long 

4-5 dried cherries

½ t vanilla

Heat a dry saucepan over high heat. Add cinnamon stick, allspice berries, and peppercorns to the pan and dry roast until the spices crackle, 10-20 seconds. Add water, sugar, vanilla, and cherries. Reduce heat to low. Stir and let simmer for 20-30 minutes. 

This is my third year undertaking this project. The first two years, I conceived of this as “making a rum that tastes like what you thought rum should taste like when you were reading Treasure Island for the first time.” This year, I set myself a more aggressive goal: Beat Kraken. 

Kraken is bad rum. It comes from Trinidad, which makes some pretty mediocre rum. No one’s quite sure where the black color comes from. It’s nominally spiced with cinnamon, ginger, and clove, but good luck tasting that. It’s tooth-achingly sweet. The bottle is beautiful, but that’s all there is to like about it. 

I can’t really pretend that Kraken is exceptionally bad when it comes to premade spiced rum. Most spiced rum is very sweet and barely spicy. Vanilla and caramel are the predominant flavors in Captain Morgan, and the Captain’s competitors aren’t much better. Greg from How To Drink heroically punished his liver to demonstrate just how bad spiced rum can be. Pour one out for him.  

This rum, however, is much different. I’ve taken a sample of all my favorite rums, tossed them together with a spiced syrup I like, and let them get acquainted for a while. There is no spirit more diverse than rum, hands down. A bottle of rum from one part of the world tastes nothing like a bottle from somewhere else. But with some coaxing, they can all harmonize beautifully. 

Let’s talk ingredients: 

Ingredient shot. Here’s all the bottles you’ll kill making this beauty.

Plantation 5 Year Barbados Rum: I love this as a basis for any rum blend I make. It’s got a huge buttery note to it that reminds me of chardonnay. The oakiness of this rum is a solid foundation for the other flavors I’m working with in this mix. I might use an aged Puerto Rican rum here, like Bacardi Anejo, as an alternative. Bacardi would provide a very classic “rum” flavor, the sort of thing you expect from a rum cake or dessert. 

Smith and Cross Jamaican Rum: This aged rum has all of the earthy Jamaican funk that I look for in a solid cocktail. Overripe bananas and mangos are classic flavors in Jamaican rum. You’ll either love or hate Jamaican rum; there’s no middle ground. Smith and Cross is not as intense as Wray and Nephew, but it’s much more approachable. At 141 proof, it’s a tricky beast to work with alone in a cocktail. 

Hamilton 151 Demerara Rum: Loads of mellow caramel flavor, and a ton of heat. This rum is 75 percent alcohol. Demerara rum is one of my all-time favorites; I love dark caramel flavor. Under normal circumstances I’d show some restraint and use Hamilton 87, but I’m on vacation. 

Pirate’s syrup: This is the easiest possible way to add spiced flavoring to a rum blend. “Blooming” spices by toasting them in a hot dry pan is a trick I learned from watching my wife’s Indian cooking. It’s a simple way to bring the oils from the spices to the fore, decreasing the simmer time needed for the syrup. I made a point of including vanilla and cherry to this flavor mix after watching Greg’s video; most commercial “spiced” rums are predominantly cherry or vanilla flavored. You have total freedom in your spice choices. Cloves would be excellent here. 

Orange Bitters: For a little extra complexity, and to help tie all the rums together. 

This obviously produces a huge amount of rum. You probably don’t need three bottles of rum kicking around your fridge. However, the recipe scales perfectly well; one ounce of each rum, half an ounce of syrup, and a shake of orange bitters will produce a terrific rum old fashioned. 

Letting the rums hang out for a while does harmonize the flavors. When first combined, it’s fairly easy to pick out the Jamaican funk, and then the Demerara caramel, and finally the spice in this glass. After a few days, all of the flavors flow together, mellow, and deepen. Patience is a virtue. 

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