Incantation: A series of words said as a magic spell or charm.

Sometimes you hit the bullseye with only one shot. You sweep the playoffs, you pitch a shut out. In bartending terms it’s when you nail a somewhat difficult cocktail on the first try. Yeah, believe it or not, sometimes the feces touch is strong and no matter what you do, it’s just turd after turd. You’re just throwing one meatball after the other. But then…Something happens…You look over to the bottles on the bar, you remember something…A detail…Yes…the wheels start to turn…The cogs unclog themselves from the decades of wear and tear, the heartache, the disappointments, the long, rocky roads of despair that led to triumph and then more heartache…And through the waning mist of depression there it is! The light! Ah, we strive toward it as the darkness clings to us, weighs us down…We claw and climb toward what is good, what is just, what is right…And the moment we think we’ve found it? Well sometimes it is, other times it’s not what we thought it was…Not sure what any of this has to do with this recent cocktail…

Look Ma, no dairy!

Incantation

1 oz. Demerara Rum

1 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.75 oz. RC Passionfruit Liquor

.5 oz. Bananum

.5 oz. Grapefruit

.5 oz. Braulio

This banger has a Junglebird sort of vibe to it with the bitterness and battery acid quality of the amaro playing with the darkness of the Hamilton demerara rum which is super dank and hard to mix. The grapefruit also lends the Braulio it’s pseudo tropicality that the passionfruit and banana then bolster. It all works nicely. It’s like a band before the egos get in the way. There’s no I in team…Yada, yada…I love drinks like this. For one, no additional sugar in the form of a flavored syrup. Yeah, that’s always fun. For two, it’s loaded to the gills with booze but doesn’t taste that way…It’s like a funk bomb you can’t stop quaffing. The housemade passionfruit liquor is all scrap and clocks in at 96 proof. Braulio is on the lower spectrum in amari terms, and bananum, well, it’s basically syrup with a sprinkle of alcohol.

One cool thing about Braulio is that when you shake it up, it gets real foamy, foamy, foamy! Yeah, we had a rep come in once and tell us to do this. Pretty cool. There must be something in there that helps this along. Foam is neato. Always has been.

Demerara rum isn’t made from demerara sugar. It’s named so because it’s a style hailing from the Demerara River region of Guayana, which means “the land of many waters.” Cool little place just to the east of Venezuela. It’s tiny and often overlooked. They speak english there and they make great rum. I sort of doubt they use any of the water from there. I think it’s more about the style which is dark and aged for a time and tastes a bit like burnt sugar. It’s about as dark and as additive free (they claim) as you can get on the rum side without going too far over to blackstrap which is chock full of all kinds of weird shit.

Man oh man. I put another seasonal tiki lounge section on the menu. Rum.