Horsefeathers
Recipe:
- 30ml dark rum
- 30ml cognac
- 15ml Bénédictine D.O.M.
- 15ml maraschino liqueur
Stir everything on ice, strain into an prechilled OF glass over a large ice cube, garnish with an orange zest.
Again such a difficult, imprecise spirit-classification one should not use nowadays ("dark rum") in a professional bar book. As I always like to do then, 50:50 split to decide from there in which direction I would tend to go a possible second time.
So for the "dark rum" 15ml Botran 15 and 15ml El Dorado 15 were split, Cognac in 15ml Hennessy VSOP and 15ml a nice Frapin VSOP from the 1980s. Here I already had a good result and drink. In the nose fresh orange, grape, toffee, a bit of dried fruits. In the mouth apricot, oak, almonds, orange peel, cinnamon, fennel, some cocoa and nice grapes soaked in honey. Overall in this combination 45% sweet, 30% dry and 25% herbaceous. For the modern taste preferences maybe a tad too sweet and by the way, the cognac came through surprisingly strong (the 80s Frapin has a body for 40%, my goodness), on a blind tasting I would have probably bet on a pure cognac cocktail. So in the end I’ve decided to push it a bit and indeed, I would recommend 20ml "normal dark rum" as mentioned above and 10ml one rather in the direction of dry and dark blackstrap rum, Cruzan Single Barrel, Plantation OFTD, etc.. Then you have very nice notes of toasted oak and slightly burnt sugar, completely without overpowering it or taking anything from the drink, on the contrary.
Source: "Speakeasy" by Benny Roff, p. 133
