The Dark & Stormy

Sunday of MDW (em-dee-dubs) ‘09 weekend and just about decompressed (finally) from the work week enough to consider consider spending a few minutes online here at the beach. My homeboy B-mac has done so much work on the site this weekend, that I owe it to him to at least get one post up this weekend. Thanks Brandon!

The clouds and wind have been in and out all day, so no better time to fire up some Dark and Stormies for our MDW party. This is of course a classic island drink (and perhaps a bit of an acquired taste) consisting of just a few but specific essentials:

- Gosling’s Black Seal Bermuda Dark Rum

- A few cans/bottles of ginger beer, preferably Barrett’s if you can find it (I struck out today on the island, but had some left over from Labor Day)

- Lots of fresh lime

- A bottle of Angostura bitters.

Directions are simple. Highball glass or just your simple Solo cup will suffice, packed with ice. Fill the cup up to about 3/4 of the way to the top of the ice with Ginger Beer, squeeze in the juice from a generously sized lime wedge and top with the Goslings to your liking and penchant for hard-drinking. The more rum the spicier the drink will be. Add about 2 -3 dashes of bitters. If you’re serving in a clear glass, you can serve unstirred, as the dark rum on the ginger beer makes for a nice effect similar to a mai tai. Give ‘er a stir.

I’d been introduced to Dark and Stormies by a friend down here a few years ago, and it wasn’t until my honeymoon visiting Jost Van Dyke in the BVI at a famous place called the Soggy Dollar Bar that  I’d been seen the addition of bitters to top the drink off. The bitters aren’t an essential, necessarily, but they add a nice bite to this spicy and sweet cocktail. It it, interestingly, one of those drinks where you simply cannot make a substitution on the booze — it’s gotta be Goslings.

Another deviation of this drink was inspired a place I’d been to in San Francisco recently called Bourbon and Branch — one of these newfangled, speakeasy-like mixology craft drink bars, of which I think this would could simply not have enough of. Especially since Bourbon and Branch make homemade ginger beer!

In this variation, you replace the rum with a high-quality Tequila — a Don Julio or a Tres Generaciones, preferably of the gold ‘reposado’ variety. Take your drinking glass and pack with ice, two shots/fingers of tequila, fresh squeezed juice from a whole lime and top with Ginger Beer. Put the concoction in a drink shaker and shake vigorously to get a nice frothy effect on the head.

This is a drink that you may have a hard time convincing your friends to try (especially the Tequila version), but once they do, they’ll be hooked. Enjoy!