Occasion
Recipe:
- 45ml medium aged Caribbean rum (preferably Cuban)
- 30ml tawny port (preferably 10 years or older)
- 15ml coffee liqueur
- optional/recommended: 1 dash each of TBT Aromatic Leaf bitters & Dr. Elmegirab's Aphrodite bitters (or substitute with Aromatic/Nut bitters)
Stir everything on ice until sufficiently chilled. Strain into a prechilled snifter glass. Garnish with roasted coffee beans.
One of those classic drinks where after reading the recipe you actually have to explain (almost) nothing about flavors or the idea behind it. The drink calls for an aged rum from the Caribbean, the bartender is from Cuba, immediately reached for the Eminente 7yo bottle often used in recent months. A good drink, very well rounded, nothing revolutionary, but by choosing the perfect ingredients/brands, a lot can be lifted up here into the realm of a really great cocktail. With regard to the tawny port, we would recommend to use one with some ageing, ideally 10 years plus, with good spice, oak and also sweetness.
Additionally adding the two bitters of my choice he jumped a level up again. If you do not have these more special varieties, I would still advise 1-2 dashes aromatic bitters or nut bitters, it does another dimension to the drink with some matching spicyness.
Another exciting idea would be to roast/flame a few coffee beans and to smoke the glass with them before adding the drink. Heavily depending on the coffee liqueur, you can certainly add a barspoon demerara syrup to combine the ingredients better (since the sugar content varies a LOT), but this also depends on the choice of the tawny port, something with more age will need less additional sweetness.
Source: Alejandro Bolivar, El Floridita, Havana, Cuba; created by him for La Casa del Habano, Montreal, Canada
