Welcome to Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The King Kong!

Yes, I know the news is stressful. No, you may not climb the Empire State Building. Drink this instead.

A wonderful June shift drink.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. Old Fashioneds will always be one of the top-selling cocktails at Hemingways. Many of our regulars are veterans of the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky; we go through a ton of Buffalo Trace behind the bar. But in the depths of summer, Old Fashioneds aren’t quite as appetizing. No worries. With a few tropical ingredients, the Old Fashioned can become a great summer sipper. Let’s make a King Kong. Here’s the recipe.

King Kong

2 oz. Sazerac Rye

½ oz. Appleton Estate

½ oz. Creme De Banane

3-4 dashes tiki bitters

Add all ingredients to a cocktail vessel. Stir with ice until the outside of the vessel is cold. Strain into a rocks glass over a large ice cube. Garnish with an orange twist.

Sam Ross, one of the legendary mixologists of New York, first created the King Kong at Attaboy in 2015. Sam is the genius who gave us the Penicillin and the Paper Plane; when one of his cocktails crosses my feed, I pay attention. Sam’s taken a smidge of my favorite tiki ingredients and slotted them into the classic Old Fashioned formula to create this particular drink. It’s a testament to the versatility of the Old Fashioned that this cocktail works so well.

The Old Fashioned is a “mother sauce” of cocktail recipes. Old Fashioneds aren’t just tasty; they’re foundational, a core blueprint that can be endlessly tweaked, rearranged, and reassembled to create something new. I’ve written scores of Old Fashioneds during my time behind the stick, from the blockbuster Ranger to the classic Maple Bacon Old Fashioned. But an Old Fashioned doesn’t need to be a bourbon drink. Tequila Old Fashioneds are totally a thing. You can go totally off the rails and make a Champagne Cocktail or Sherry Cobbler if you want a low-proof option. Booze+sugar+bitters is an Old Fashioned. The details are irrelevant. Taste is everything. Drink what you like.

---

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

---

With that injunction in mind, there’s no reason not to unload with some hardcore tropical flavors and tiki ingredients to make this Old Fashioned into a summer cocktail. I originally used Buffalo Trace as the core spirit in this drink, but it was too smooth and mellow to stand up to the other ingredients. Dark, peppery rye provides a much better contrast to the sweeter tropical flavors in the glass. Appleton Estate is a smooth Jamaican rum that’s easy to find at most liquor stores. The Jamaican flavors of ripe tropical fruit nicely support the banana. The crème de banane is present in small enough amounts that it reads as “gently tropical” rather than “this is a banana drink”. The tiki bitters are tricky to acquire for your home bar, but they’re worth ordering. I find that they do all the work of falernum, but in a balanced, concentrated format. They’re turning into a “secret sauce” for a lot of my cocktails. Easily worth the investment.

Let’s talk ingredients:

The cocktail in the act of creation. Maybe it’s time to talk about garnish cutting.

Sazerac Rye: This cocktail taught me why rye whiskey is used in the Sazerac cocktail. A dark, peppery rye whiskey will provide backbone against sweet, flavorful ingredients. Bourbon just isn’t flavorful enough to make this cocktail work. Rittenhouse Rye is a perfectly acceptable substitute. Old Grand Dad Bottled-in-Bond will also work. Both of those are 100 proof, so don’t mix up this cocktail with substitutions unless you’re done with the weekend.

Appleton Estate: I’m pretty sure Sam Ross had something ferocious like Wray & Nephew in mind when he wrote the original King Kong. Wray & Nephew is 126 proof. It tastes of overripe bananas and feet. I love it in small doses, but it’s overkill in this cocktail. Appleton Estate works fine here. If you have any Smith & Cross lying around the house, use that, and God bless you for having more self-control than me in not consuming it all immediately.

Creme de Banane: Giffard is the gold standard for flavored liqueurs behind the bar. It’s delicious and refined, but a touch pricey. If you want to break down and buy a 50ml mini of 99 Bananas to make this cocktail, I won’t stop you.

Tiki Bitters: Use orange bitters if you want to make this cocktail right now and you don’t have any tiki bitters. But go ahead and order those tiki bitters if you love summer cocktails. You won’t be disappointed.

I’m going on a new adventure! I’m attending Tales of the Cocktail, a national bartender’s convention, from July 19-24. The classes will be amazing. The drinking will be astonishing. The heat will be brutal. The stories will be epic. If you’re willing to chip in to help defray my costs, I’ve got a link set up - check my Substack thread for details.

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!