Here I am knocking out (almost) the last of the tropical drinks on my list, all featuring pineapple juice. 

The Singapore Sling

This thing has just too many ingredients but DAMN it is tasty. Don’t make this if you are thirsty because after one sip you’ll be rummaging through your kitchen drawer of soy sauce packets and take-out menus searching for one of those huge boba straws. 

What, no kitchen sink?

And it doesn’t just taste like pineapple juice. The smokiness of the Benedictine is there. The bitter-sweetness of the Cointreau and the Cherry Heering peeps through. And though I wouldn’t say that you can taste the gin, you somehow feel it’s comforting and junipery presence. I feel like this is a famous drink so I would whole-heartedly recommend you order one in a bar…on second thought, you surely wouldn’t get it made with all of these proper ingredients. Tell you what to do, take a cheat sheet to the bar and ask the bartender what is in a Singapore Sling. If she gets it right and has them on hand, order one. There isn’t anything I had to buy special for this drink so maybe I protest too much on the complexity front. Anything that helps rid my bar of Benedictine and Heering, albeit a splash at a time, is worth a more than occasional try for me. 

The Bahama Mama

Is this called a Bahama Mama because you are certain to conceive if you drink one? It’s got even measures of light rum, añejo rum, and dark rum, with a little bit less of coconut rum. Then you hit it with 3 ounces of pineapple juice and 2 ounces of orange juice. Shake that up with ice and strain it into a goblet with ice. Whack in a cherry and an orange slice and wave goodbye. 

Well now I’m really going to get hammered. I don’t know if this needs four different rums but I am not going to care by the time I get to the bottom of this glass. You’d think this would be really fruity but it’s not. It’s sweet what with all the rums, but the scant 1/2 ounce of coconut rum really takes the fruitiness to a much sexier place. I read that everyone visiting an all-inclusive resort in the Bahamas automatically receives a lifetime supply of drink tickets for these kind of rum drinks as soon as they step down on the gangplank. I wish I had the Excedrin concession there. It’s tasty, it’s tropical, it’s fantastic but with all the sugar you are guaranteed a crushing headache in the morning if you overdo it. Drink water, kids. 

Sometimes you find a drink that you can abuse and not feel too bad the next day. I remember how delighted I was to find that Finlandia vodka seemed to be more forgiving in the morning. Stoli made me feel like I had had my innards scrubbed with a giant steel pipecleaner. Smirnoff gave me the yurps just looking at the label. But with Finlandia I could achieve such perverse acts of bodily whangle and dangle and still feel at most a simple and clean pain the next day, just enough to regret the evening’s haps and mishaps…but with a chuckle. 

Dead Flamingo? Brown Flamingo?

The Flamingo

It’s interesting because the lime juice is pretty sour. There isn’t too much pineapple and even after adding the optional splash of simple syrup, the drink is NOT sweet. All in all, I’d rather have a daiquiri. I can’t really write more about this drink. I’m so fed up with the grenadine bullshit I could just spit. Those of you who were with me for the “Pink” Lady and other drinks calling for grenadine know how I feel. Several recipes in The Essential Cocktail call for grenadine and not just for the sweet pomegranate flavor but for the red color it imparts. Well DeGroff insists on pure and fresh ingredients so I have used Stirrings brand grenadine: All natural, no fake-ass colors or flavors added. It’s still red though. Unfortunately the food stylist that the publisher hired took irresponsible liberties to achieve pretty pictures.
That results in an incongruous image in the book. The Flamingo is worse because DeGroff himself writes that the drink features a pink foam…hence the name Flamingo. I challenge you to combine 1 1/2 ounces of añejo rum (brown), 1 ounce of pineapple juice (yellow-ish), 1/2 ounce of lime juice (opaque white), and two DASHES of grenadine and come up with a product that is anything but yellowish-brown. Remember, a DASH in The Essential Cocktail is defined as 6 DROPS. Okay, I’ll stop there. Nobody likes an angry drunk.

New Word All The Kids Are Using To Describe A Debilitating Nausea: Yurps. Part “yack”, part “burp”. That first gulp you take trying to keep your gorge from being disgorged. Used in a sentence: “I tried to talk her into making out but then I got a bad case of gin yurps.”