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Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender! I was asked last week to craft a Kamala Harris cocktail, and I’m very happy to report that it wasn’t challenging at all to create something that honors Vice President Harris’s Jamaican and Indian roots (with a little coconut thrown in for good measure). Let’s raise a glass to our new Democratic nominee (officially, even!) and enjoy a Maidstone. Here’s the recipe:
2 oz Smith and Cross Jamaican rum
1 oz lime juice
¾ oz chai syrup
½ oz creme de coconut
½ oz Grand Marnier
2-3 drops saline
Mint sprig, lemon slice, cherry for garnish
Stack the lime juice and creme de coconut in your jigger, stir to combine, and add to a mixing tin. Add remaining ingredients and shake over ice. Pour into a mai tai glass and garnish with a mint sprig, lemon slice and cherry.
½ cup strong chai
¼ cup water
½ cup demerara sugar
Brew two teabags of chai-spiced black tea in ½ cup hot water for 10 minutes. While the tea is brewing, combine the water and sugar in a saucepan and heat until the sugar is melted. Add tea to syrup and bottle. Stores for weeks in the fridge.
The seeds of Kamala Harris’s ancestry go back much further than her parents’ chance meeting at UC Berkeley. There’s a thriving Indo-Jamaican culture on the island of Jamaica, courtesy of wealthy British landowners who needed cheap labor after slavery was inconveniently outlawed. Being an “indentured servant” in Jamaica wasn’t much better than being a slave, but it was an improvement over life in India for some. In 1845, the first British ship bearing Indian immigrants, the Maidstone, arrived in Jamaica. In a story as old as time, desperate poor people dug in, made themselves a better life, were reluctantly accepted by the locals, and eventually became a treasure to the community. Jamaican cuisine is full of Indian-inspired recipes, like goat curry and roti. It is no surprise that the Indian spices in chai cooperate beautifully with the fruity funk of Jamaican rum.
The model for this particular drink is the Mai Tai, which I’m sure you know by now is my favorite drink ever. The cocktail is built to celebrate good rum, and Jamaican rum in particular — Donn Beach created the first Mai Tai as a platform to enjoy 13-year-old Wray and Nephew. If you have never tried Jamaican rum, I urge you to make this cocktail. I’ve described the less-than-pristine conditions that create the unique funkiness of Jamaican rum in titillating terms before. But it isn’t “dirty” or “rotten” any more than cheese is rotten. The leavings from the last batch of rum are cultivated and left to ferment on their own, and then added to the newest distillation. It’s a little like overripe bananas, a little like underripe mangoes, and a flavor entirely all its own. You may not like it. But you should try it at least once.
The spices in chai are the same sort of spices that thrive in rum. Clove, cinnamon, black pepper — they’re all the sort of thing that Captain Morgan aspires to and fails. Use the real stuff. Pre-bottled spiced rum is generally terrible, and you can find decent chai at the grocery store. There isn’t much of an excuse left not to spice your own rum. In this drink, the warming spices take the edge off the building Jamaican rum finish.
Let’s talk ingredients:
Smith and Cross Navy Strength Rum: If drinking a cocktail with a 114 base spirit sounds daunting, try Appleton Estate in this cocktail. It’s an excellent Jamaican rum that clocks in at 80 proof and still gets the job done. But I have plans for this bottle for my vacation next week, and Smith and Cross is a complete delight. Choose your own limits and preferences.
Chai Syrup: This one is going into my rotation for cocktail syrups going forward. The spice is prominent but not overwhelming, and combines with all manner of liquors nicely. It doesn’t have all the spices I want in a rum cocktail, but it comes close, and it is ridiculously easy to make.
Creme de Coconut: Memes aside, creme de coconut is really tasty and is much easier to acquire than orgeat. Creme de coconut is a ferocious emulsifier that holds the various ingredients in the drink together. Don’t use coconut cream or coconut water from the grocery store; they aren’t the same and won’t work well.
Lime juice: Acid is needed to balance out the sugars in the glass. I really like a tart drink, so you might want less lime juice in this cocktail. And as always (sing along, you know the words) — plastic limes make plastic juice. If you “stack” the lime juice and creme de coconut — that is, pour them into your jigger and stir them a bit before pouring them into the mixing tin — the creme de coconut will be thin enough to pour properly.
Grand Marnier: A little curacao adds some herbal and citrus notes to the glass. Triple sec will work too, but the drink needs a little more color from the cognac based curacao to look right. Clear triple sec won’t help. If you’re feeling brave, you might try a splash of banana liqueur here as an alternative.
Saline: I keep an eyedropper of 50/50 saline to water on my bar. Just a few drops won’t make the drink “salty,” but it will tamp down the cloying sweetness of a cocktail and let other flavors present themselves.
In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below!
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You can find me on Threads and Insta at samurai_grog!
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