Classic cocktails, the good ones, have legacies. And quite often, the originals are not as good as the ones they spawn. This is simple evolution. Cocktails, in this case, are like cars. The next year’s model always an improvement. Case in point: The Last Word. In my opinion about as so-so a cocktail as one can drink but if you follow the legacy, from The Last Word to The Final Ward to the Paper Plane to the Naked and Famous you can see and taste that they continue to get better and better.

If you are lost, have no fear. An explanation follows…

…The Last Word, equal parts gin, green chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice was discovered during the cocktail revival era of the early 2000s and resurrected. According to Wikipedia (yes, I know, I know) The Last Word was invented sometime in the 1910s way before Prohibition and found in an old cocktail book by a man named Murray Stenson (cool name never actually met a Murray), a bartender at the Zig Zag Club in Seattle, WA in the early 2000s. Gee, thanks Wikipedia for being so vague. I guess I will have to dig a bit on my own here. Lets see…Ok, looks like the drink originated at The Detroit Athletic Club, unknown actual timeline, but before 1920 and unknown inventor. The first mention of the drink’s specs was in a 1951 tome, Bottoms Up! by Ted Saucier (another cool name). It was in 2003 that the Murray dude found it and put it on his menu and, adding a touch of my own hyperbole here, the drink caught fire across the country. Equal parts being great, and of course, the reintroduction of green chartreuse to everyone’s collective minds and livers.

So along comes Mr. Phil Ward of Death and Co. in New York City, circa 2007. He switches out the gin and lime for rye and lemon. Boom. The Final Ward.

The coolest story with the coolest dudes with the coolest names belongs to the Paper Plane. Specs: Equal parts bourbon, Aperol, lemon, and Amaro Nonino. So tasty! This was back in 2008 at Milk and Honey in New York. Three dudes this time. Sam Ross (inventor of the Penicillin cocktail) and the legendary Sasha Petraske. Now, this modern classic came into being with another great bartender, Toby Maloney, who asked these two guys for a summer cocktail out at his bar, The Violet Hour, in Chicago. And so the story goes. The two got drunk and there was R&D completed. A beautiful dance. The first specs, however, were with Campari, not Aperol, and apparently Maloney switched it because the Campari was too bitter for the punters. So keep the whiskey, lemon, and switch out the green chartreuse and maraschino for Aperol and the Amaro Nonino.

Then along comes this other dude in 2011 with maybe the coolest name, Joaquin Simo, also a Death and Co. alum with one of my favorites, the Naked and Famous. Equal parts mezcal, lime, Aperol, and Yellow Chartreuse.

See how it works?

Jesus, sweet, sweet Jesus, so where am I going with this? I guess it is just a long winded and borderline pedantic cocktail nerd explanation of how drinks become different, better drinks. I’m setting it all up here because the Timmy Bird, my friends, follows the same sort of progression and if you stomached the first tedious part of this blog post, you may as well finish.

It becomes a little trickier when the drink is not equal parts, but you have to also respect the original and what it is trying to do. Use the same flavor profiles but switch certain ingredients. At Rustic we only use seasonal fruits, so this makes it a fun challenge.

Lets set the stage. Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. the cocktail: The Jungle Bird. An important tiki classic because, lets face it, although we all love tiki cocktails, they often are too sweet and all taste the same. This was also the 70s, an era when the great cocktails had mostly been forgotten unless you wanted a delicious Tom Collins. But there was not much going on in terms of innovation. Anyway, if you have never heard of a Jungle Bird, you should drink one as soon as possible.

Jungle Bird (original specs)

1.5 oz. Dark Rum

1.5 oz. Pineapple Juice

.75. oz. Campari

.5 oz. Lime Juice

.5 oz. Simple Syrup

Why is it so groundbreaking? Well, adding that much Campari to anything changes the flavor profile to extremely bitter. The modern punter’s cocktail palate has shifted from sweet to sour but still has not fully accepted bitter.

Any cocktail aficionado will notice right away the original specs do not include blackstrap rum. This addition came later, in 2010 by a dude named Giuseppe Gonzalez (why do they all have such cool names?).

The Jungle Bird Gonzalez specs are simply adding blackstrap rum instead of dark rum. If you’re curious, blackstrap rum is not, in fact rum, well, it is, but it also is not. Yes, quite confusing. Ok, it is rum with all sorts of weird shit added to it. Food coloring, flavoring, etc. Yeah, not usually our bag, but this is tiki and without blackstrap rum, the world would be a worse place.

Sometimes you have to accept the bad when it is good. That makes no sense but we shall continue with style.

Part of the fun with tiki is taking a recipe and switching it out for a different rum. Not all rum is created equally and they are all different in some way, much more so than other spirits. This is why with tiki drinks the specific rum brand is included alongside the recipe whereas with other types of drinks the spirit brand is important but not as life changing. Make sense?

Keep reading and we will follow my own Jungle Bird progression together.

Hummingbird

1 oz. Hamilton Demerara Rum

1 oz. Cruzan Blackstrap Rum

1 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

1 oz. Fresh Grapefruit Juice

.75 oz. Cara Cara Sherbet

.5 oz. Brovo Aperitivo

The Hummingbird came into my brain out of pure luck. One and done which coincidentally almost never happens except for drinks like these. The Brovo Aperitivo was just not working with anything else and I needed a way to get rid of it. Voila. More on this a bit later.

Incantation

1 oz. Demerara Rum

1 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.75 oz. RC Passionfruit Liqueur

.5 oz. Braulio

.5 oz. Bananum

.5 oz. Fresh Grapefruit Juice

The Incantation is, in my own opinion, my best cocktail ever and I want it inscribed on my tombstone. It requires little if any weird ingredients (the RC housemade passionfruit liqueur can be substituted with something store bought). It also includes another of my favorite inventions: Bananum.

Back to the whole point of this post. The Timmy Bird is named after one of my favorite regulars and an actual reader of this blog. A rabid consumer of cocktail and cooking culture alike. Note: He does not like being called Timmy but allowed it for this cocktail name. Anyway, he owns a wealth of cocktail knowledge for a civilian, more so than anyone I have ever seen on the other side of the bar. At any rate, he deserves to have a drink named after him and most people do not.

Timmy Bird

1 oz. Hamilton Demerara Rum

.5 oz. Cruzan Blackstrap Rum

.5 oz. Hamilton Jamaican Pot Still Black

1 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.5 oz. Kumquat Vanilla Syrup

.5 oz. Brovo Aperitivo

4 Dashes RC Hopped Grapefruit Bitters

This one is a banger. The flavor lingers, it is strong as hell, and the rum shines through alongside the aperitivo. All without adding dairy which tends to be a crutch we lean on from time to time.

Thats all she wrote, folks. The Jungle Bird progression is quite easy as you can see. The components require dark rum in some form, a bittering agent such as amaro or an aperitivo, and fresh juice.

Your AI generated image for this post, #428, June 4, 2025.