Welcome to Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Cruel Summer!

A quick dash of tropical paradise to help kick-start the summer.

Plantain chips added for visual interest.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. I’ve been making some fancy pants cocktails for the past few weeks. This time around, I decided to make something a bit more down-to-earth. And something very, very crushable, please. The news cycle isn’t getting any prettier. Let’s drink to better days. Time to make a Cruel Summer. Here’s the recipe:

Cruel Summer

4 oz. organic coconut water

1 ½ oz. Del Maguey Vida Single Village Mezcal

1 oz. lime juice

½ oz. Mai Tai syrup

½ oz. 99 Bananas Liqueur

Shake all ingredients over ice. Strain into an iced rocks glass. Garnish with sea salt and grated lime zest.

Mai Tai Syrup

2 cups demerara sugar

1 cup water

¼ t sea salt

¼ t vanilla extract

Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan. Heat until the sugar dissolves. Store in a covered container. Keeps in the fridge for six months or more.

My inspiration for this drink started with a Caribbean highball of blended Scotch and coconut water, a combo that didn’t seem appealing on paper. Blended Scotch isn’t my thing. It tastes too muddy and unfocused when compared to bourbon or Irish whiskey. But I’m a sucker for novel taste combinations. Put something I’ve never heard of on the menu and I’m all for it. So I picked up some Johnny Walker Red and coconut water and gave it a go.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t like it. Maybe really fresh coconut water or a smokier Scotch would do the trick, but I had another idea. Robby Dow and Ally Marrone at the Grand Army Bar in NYC came up with a version of this drink using my beloved mezcal instead of Scotch. Their cocktail, the Snake Eyes, added a few odds and ends to make the drink more tropical. Their focus was still on smoky liquor and rich, clean coconut water, the combo that I couldn’t quite find in the original Caribbean highball. And there was one ingredient in their recipe that I’ve wanted to play with for a while.

Banana flavoring – liquor, candy, whatever – is fascinating culinary archeology. As it turns out, banana candy simulates the flavor of the Gros Michel banana. That fruit has been extinct for decades. When you bite into a banana Laffy Taffy, you’re tasting the chemical approximation of a fruit that no one now alive has tasted. It’s like relying on a cartoon to describe an animal that went extinct before you were born. I have to wonder what the real thing was like.

Banana candy seems to have run its course; I couldn’t find anything banana flavored in the grocery store for my photo shoot. But banana liqueur has been having a bit of a heyday in the mixology set. I’ve had a coffee and banana cocktail at Tiki Underground that was great, and Bryan Tetorakis at the Spotted Owl worked it into some of his best drinks. (I need to check the Banana Daiquiri at his new joint, Bad Medicine.) 99 Bananas is, undoubtedly, the worst banana liqueur on the market. But it’s cheap, easy to find, and gets the job done. And it works great in this cocktail, providing a touch of sweet funkiness that complements the coconut and contrasts with the smoke of mezcal.

Robby and Ally used an imported cane syrup in their cocktail, but my house-made Mai Tai syrup works just as well. This drink is, fundamentally, a “daisy” – the same family of cocktails as the margarita. Like a margarita, the Cruel Summer benefits from a touch of salt. A salt rim was too much, and pico fruta would bring an unwanted spice element to the party. A touch of sea salt and lime zest was all that was needed.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot. I forgot to take a picture of the coconut water, sorry.

Organic Coconut Water: I’m using Vita Coco for this recipe, which should be available everywhere. Use your favorite brand. Skip Goya, for obvious reasons.

Del Maguey Vida Single Village Mezcal: A fairly inexpensive bottle, with some tart notes in addition to the smoke and agave that I look for in a mezcal. Too many mezcals are all about smoke and iodine; this one cooperates with the rest of the ingredients nicely.

Lime Juice: Always fresh, especially here. Plastic limes produce plastic juice.

Mai Tai Syrup: A little salt and vanilla make sugar taste even sweeter.

99 Bananas Liqueur: There are many, many banana liqueurs out there that are better than this. But my liquor cabinet is littered with bottles that I’ve only used once, and I’m not a big enough fan of banana that I’d want to spring $30 or so for something I’d only use once. A little plastic airline bottle of this stuff will make at least four cocktails.

In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below!

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We aren’t linking to Amazon anymore, because fuck that coward Bezos with a rusty bar spoon. Go read Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, by Dan Koeppel, instead. Lord knows, we should all be learning more about what made “banana republics” what they were right about now.

You can find me on Bluesky at @samuraigrog!

OPEN THREAD! DRINK!

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