Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Silly Wabbit!

This just in: Tricks are no longer just for kids.

Sometimes, you write a cocktail because you’re trying to find a vehicle for a clever flavor combination that you’ve just discovered. Sometimes you want to try a recipe you’ve read on social media and end up riffing on it to create a brand-new cocktail. Sometimes you write a crowd-pleaser to welcome the start of a new season.

And sometimes you write a cocktail because one of the owners of Hemingway’s drops a bottle of carrot juice in front of you at the beginning of a shift and says, “Make a cocktail out of this.”

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Well, like they say, necessity is a mother. Let’s make a Silly Wabbit. Here’s the recipe.

Silly Wabbit

1 1/2 oz Planteray 3 Star Rum

1 oz pineapple juice

1 oz carrot juice

1/2 oz maple syrup

1/2 oz lemon juice

1/4 oz Planteray Cut and Dried Coconut Rum

1/4 oz Leblon Cachaca

Shake all ingredients and strain into a Collins glass. Garnish with 4-5 parsley stems.

I don’t hate carrot juice. I can’t recall ever having tasted it on its own before this; most of the time I’ve had it in a nine-ingredient juice cocktail from a “healthy” smoothie bar. That’s pretty much consistent with its history. Carrot juice was first promoted as a health food by Norman Walker in 1936 at the dawn of the fresh juice movement. Ever since, carrot juice has been recommended as a natural, healthy beverage that promotes well-being. No one has ever claimed that it’s tasty.

It’s not bad. Honest. Sweet, a little creamy, vegetal, but not “green” tasting. My first impulse was to lean into the vegetable flavors and make something with a mezcal base. A little genepy, some lemon, and some other odds and ends, and I had … something. I offered it to the hostess and owner for tasting. They nodded, smiled, and said it tasted “nice.” Not what I was hoping for.

I called my wife and asked her to pull one of my reference books off the shelves — The Flavor Bible (Wonkette cut link) by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. This book is worth its weight in gold when dealing with a new ingredient. It’s a “cookbook” with no recipes; just a list of what flavors go well with specific ingredients, an endless list of flavor pairings and inspiration. According to Karen and Andrew, carrots have a cooling flavor that pairs well with soft, round flavors like butter and cream. Lemon was a solid pick. So was maple. I kept looking.

I stumbled across a recipe from Robbie Dow from Bespoke in Wilmington, North Carolina. He’d written a version of the Surfer on Acid — a banging ‘90s cocktail featuring Jaegermeister, rum, and pineapple — and elevated it using some broad rum choices and lime juice to balance things. A splash of coconut rum intrigued me. Carrot and coconut had great potential. The idea of building a shell of a tiki drink, with multiple rums, pineapple, and citrus, to surround and elevate a problematic ingredient had potential. Could I use the core of this drink to make something special?

The answer was a resounding “yes.” When I offered a “carrot and coconut” drink to my audience, there were a lot of oohs and ahs over the notion. The final flavor profile was rich, smooth, comforting, and funky all at once. A parsley garnish for brightness and color completed the drink. Who says carrots have to be good for you?

Let’s talk ingredients:

Planteray 3 Star: This clear rum doesn’t taste a thing like Bacardi. Not all clear rums taste the same, or are made the same. Bacardi is an aged rum; it’s filtered for clarity, sort of like cristallino tequila. Planteray 3 Star is an unaged rum with mildly funky Jamaican notes. Find this rum and try it. It’s a real eye-opener.

Pineapple Juice: Pineapple and rum provide a stable base for this drink, a platform to tame and smooth out unfamiliar flavors. It worked for Jaegermeister in the original Surfer on Acid, and it works here. I use canned pineapple juice; fresh pineapple is too acidic.

Carrot Juice: All-natural, obviously. If you can juice your own, more power to you.

Maple Syurp: Carrot and maple play together wonderfully. I tried a turmeric syrup out of curiosity, but it didn’t add much to the cocktail.

Lemon Juice: Some acid to brighten the drink. Always use fresh.

Planteray Cut and Dried Coconut Rum: One of the advantages of working in a craft bar is that I’ve got access to wonderful, pricey ingredients like this. It’s an indulgence. Use coconut syrup at home; be ready to add more lemon juice to balance the cocktail.

Leblon Cachaca: Wray and Nephew would be even better here, if you’ve got some lying around.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by, and I’ll make a drink for you… or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette. We’ll make it through this together.

OPEN THREAD!