Last summer, when attending my daughter’s graduation in San Francisco, we took a side trip to a fantastic tiki bar called Smuggler's Cove. One my daughter's favorite bars, it was ranked The Best Bar in San Francisco (SF Weekly Readers Poll) and included in Best Bars in America (Esquire Magazine), and exceeded even my expectations; it was a well concocted mix of everything nautical and tiki-themed, with artifacts stuffed into every nook and cranny that one writer described as “folding up a whole rum-soaked sailing ship so that it would fit into a not-very-large San Francisco storefront.’ The romance of swashbuckling pirates and fabled rum blended well with the good company of our group and vast (500+) offerings of rum.
After COVID-19 hit, my daughter and boyfriend, (FSIL - 'future son-in-law') mandated to work from home, drove down to stay with us and ended up staying 3 weeks. Early on I mentioned the tragedy of Smuggler’s Cove being temporarily shut down because of the pandemic, and we put a visit upon its reopening at the top of our list.
The next day, FSIL, still in his 20’s, walked in the door with several shopping bags full of goodies. He had gone to several large liquor stores with the intent of replicating some of the drinks at the Smuggler’s Cove, and with one glance, I could tell he spared no expense. As it turns out, Smuggler’s Cove has a book about the bar, which FSIL had brought along, already thoroughly studied and littered with colored sticky note tabs. While it has barrels full of lore about tiki artifacts and rum history, it also contains over 70 recipes, a number of which he had planned to blend up over the course of his stay. He even whipped up a spreadsheet of drinks from the book that included the recipe, ingredients and slots for us to rate our favorites on a scale of 1-100. He insisted on using only the specific brand of ingredients called for in the recipe, but I quickly figured out he had waited to test out the recipes here because he knew he would have someone to drink them with
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With only minor experience at drinking rum, (I’ve learned more on HD about rum than in real life) I was not prepared for the sheer number of ingredients that can go into crafting a rum cocktail beyond a pina colada or mai tai. Onto the table came Bermuda black rum, Jamaican pot stilled Blonde, Barbados XO Rum aged in cognac casks, a 12-year old sipping rum from Nicaragua. There was a barrel aged Cachaca, bottles of liqueurs (orange, pear, anise, apricot, cherry, banana, almond/clove), a handful of different bitters, and of course he had to pick up whole nutmeg, cinnamon, coconut, vanilla bean and demerara sugar (from Mauritius) which he used in making simple syrups on the stovetop and age overnight. He used fresh pineapple, grapefruit, limes (from the backyard), banana and lastly, Kahlua, heavy cream, agave syrup, gin and bourbon.
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One notable (for me) item of the book is The Rumbustion Society, a Smuggler’s Cove rum ‘club’ now over several hundred strong. There are several levels of distinction between club members, based on the number of rums each member has personally sampled. To be able to say one has tried 200 rums is impressive, but 500 or more is astronomical.
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Another notable item is that the book mentions a tiki-themed restaurant with a Polynesian band and grass-skirted Hawaiian dancers. I happened to work there through college and is where I met the girl that I married (20% waiters to 80% waitresses!) and still happy, doing it after 30 years.
The drinks FSIL made were delicious, surprisingly complex, and satisfying. All in, he stirred, blended, and shook 25 different drinks from the book. In addition to popular drinks like Zombie and Hurricane, he ended up making drinks with names like Expedition, Formidable Dragon and Suffering Bastard. Over the course of the next few days, I learned that there is a whole different world to rum drinks that no doubt many here are already intimate with. It made me think that I was pretty one-dimensional, drinking most of my liquor barrel-aged and neat. I gained a new respect for the diligence that had to go into refining the rum cocktail profile over many, many years. I also learned that the use of spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom) and syrups can elevate a non-sipping rum into an intriguing drink that begs for more but can definitely sneak up on you. I can only take so many sweet, fruit-laden drinks, but with so many out there, and a soon-to-be son-in-law around to help make and drink them, there’s plenty of chances (knock on wood) to change that.
Cheers,
Twisted Brick
but we didn't do anything adventurous with it. Maybe we should have?
