This is a drink I came up with while ‘tending at The Lodge (The Mayor of Exotica’s home bar) yesterday night. We were helping send-off the Vibranaut… he’s going on a two-month tour with John Williams and The Star Wars In Concert orchestra before moving down to NYC for grad school. But this recipe is another one meant to appeal to my biggest fans… Anyways, here’s the drink:
La Luna Luna
2.0 oz. white Jamaican rum
0.5 oz. fresh grapefruit juice
0.5 oz. house-made allspice falernum (see below for recipe)
0.25 oz. St. Germain
soda floatServe over crushed ice. Float soda
The centerpiece of this cocktail is an Allspice Falernum I made as an experiment.
To make the Allspice Falernum, first I heat-infused 1/3 cup of whole allspice, half a cinnamon stick, and 1 tbsp. whole cloves in 2 cups of Barbancourt white rum.
I then added this mixture to the remaining rum and let it sit for about 2 months. At that point, I filtered all the solids. Next, I created a rich simple syrup, 1:1:1 demerara sugar, raw cane sugar, and water, and mixed that syrup with the rum mixture in equal parts, storing it in a new bottle. That bottle sat for another few weeks until yesterday night, when I measured out 1 cup of the allspice infusion to take to The Lodge, where I made a lime syrup using equal parts fresh lime juice, water, and sugar. I then combined the lime syrup with the allspice infusion (1:1) and added 2 drops of pure almond extract per each 8 oz. of the combined mixture. The resulting product is a much spicier, thicker, richer one than falernum usually is.
Yeah, I know it sounds like a lot of work, but the result was worth it. Hey, the Allspice Falernum tastes great with soda on the rocks, too…