Ungarnished: Beachcomber’s Gold

I often dispense with garnish in food and drinks. In the case of a little parsley sprig on my steak, it's a matter of no significance whether it's there or not. In drinks circles, especially among the tiki crowd, some regard omitting garnish as heretical. For them, the garnish is itself part of the point of the drink. Those tropical drinks in particular can take on such decorative excess that they bring to mind birds of paradise, a Wal*Mart dressing room disaster, or Carmen Miranda's botanical headgear.

Beachcomber’s Gold with ice shell

Sometimes garnish — say, freshly spanked leaves in a mint julep — does make a real difference to the drink. When you bury your nose into a bunch of mint leaves, the aroma of mint is unmistakable. And pleasant, as long as you like mint. But so often, chunks of fruit are merely dropped in the glass with no thought of what they're supposed to do. Pineapple and maraschino cherry on a toothpick? Gives you something to munch on, but doesn't have much impact on the drink itself. Likewise, the unsqueezed lime wedges slipped into undistinguished rum-and-Cokes don't contribute to the taste of the drink. Squeezed, though, to get that lime juice and all-important lime oils in the glass, and now you've got a nice Cuba Libre. I don't drink rum-and-Coke, but I do like a Cuba Libre now and then.

To my mind, garnishes look pretty but ingredients actually contribute to the taste and smell of a drink. Consequently, visitors find very little garnish around at the Whiskey Forge; no Thai orchids, no spears of pretty but practically odorless pineapple leaves, no little fez-wearing plastic monkeys capering on the edge of their glasses.

Beachcomber's Gold sans ice shell

So when I saw the recipes for Beachcomber’s Gold in the Tiki+ app calling for re-frozen crushed ice formed into a sort of shell-like overhang, I knew I wouldn't be doing that. I'm not saying I'd never make one — just not for the first time I'm taking a new drink out for a spin. The Beachcomber’s Gold can be made a few different ways depending on which recipe you follow, but the one below is my favorite. The bitter Pernod and unmistakable almond extract with a trio of rums make it a complex mix of homey and exotic tastes. Now that we've made it once and I know it's worth adding to the Whiskey Forge drinks opus, I'll give it a shot with the ice shell.

The original 1937 Don The Beachcomber recipe from Jeff Berry's Tiki+ app follows. To make it my way, eliminate the pre-formed shell and blend it a bit longer.

Beachcomber’s Gold

1 oz gold Puerto Rican rum
¼ oz gold Jamaican rum
¼ oz dark Jamaican rum
½ oz fresh lime juice
½ oz sugar syrup
6 drops Pernod
4 drops almond extract
2 oz (¼ cup) crushed ice

Put everything in a blender. Blend at high speed for no more than 5 seconds. Strain through a fine-mesh wire sieve into a saucer champagne glass lined with an “ice shell” forming a hood over the glass. Serve with short straws.

ICE SHELL: Place a generous amount of finely shaved ice in the center of a chilled glass. With the back of a spoon, slowly press the ice up the sides of the glass, forming a hood that projects over the glass. Freeze glass overnight.

Did I type out that recipe? I did not: I emailed it to myself directly from the iPhone application. Nice feature. The illustration is a screen grab from the app that I cropped on the phone with Photoshop. And for the record, I actually love little fez-wearing monkeys. Just not so much in my whiskey.

Goes well with:
I talk smack about garnish, it's true, but that doesn't mean I hate it and turn my nose up at drinks that have...decorative touches. Some blogs where the writers aren't afraid to spend a little time purdying up their dranks that are definitely worth checking out:

• A Mountain of Crushed Ice
• Kaiser Penguin
• Sloshed!
• RumDood

See if any of them will do that monkey thing for you.