01 Oct a fabulous twist on a mai tai

Posted at 08:00h in Blog, Cocktail Recipes, Cocktail Recipes: Modern by Roberts & June

My mother. She is my hero for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is times that she is the one to tell us about a new cocktail recipe or lounge. I feel simultaneously grateful (tips are helpful) and further convinced that my mom is a thousand times cooler than I’ll ever be. During a vacay to Hawaii (also, how can that be my life?) she discovered a new mai tai that quickly gained both her and my dad’s approval.

Goals. This summer Brian and I set a number of goals

Move to DC
Visit all of our favorite places in Boston one more time (almost the entire list of 25 involved restaurants we wanted to eat and drink at. It was a bad month for our eating-out budget)
Start liking rum

You might have noticed in our Building the Bar series that rum is not one of the 9 essentials we think you need to have a decent home bar. We somehow never gravitate to it, and whenever we order it out it always comes with 17 too many syrups and juices attached. But we decided we should give rum a fair shot.

The Mai Tai. Thus, my mom’s trip to Hawaii was serendipitous to our rum goals, and we immediately set out to replicate.

Summer. We had come to terms with saying goodbye to summer. But then we planned a last minute trip to the outer banks. So one more week of summer drinks it is!

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A standard mai tai calls for white rum, dark rum, lime juice, orange curacao, and orgeat (a sweet almond syrup).

The 1944 Mai Tai discovered by my mom makes a couple of twists on the standard, calling for aged rum (Rhum Clemente Cuvee Homere 15yr rum, to be exact) instead of white, Koloa dark rum specifically, and velvet falernum (a rum-based, lightly spiced liqueur) instead of orgeat.

Since we’re still getting into the rum thing, we chose not to spring for the specific rums the 1944 calls for, instead using a white rum and a spiced rum we already had on our shelf; so I guess we made more like a standard mai tai with velvet falernum instead of orgeat. Nonetheless, it was delicious change. And it inspired us to buy better rum–speaking of which, we really need to try the 1944 with our new rum.