MxMonday: Hula Hula Cocktail

It’s been a difficult week here at Casa Dave. First, I managed to catch a ‘flu (in August for crying out loud!), and have been on medication for a few days. This has cramped my cocktail style like nobody’s business. If you add to this the descent of my in-laws over our previously peaceful abode, then you’ll be able to appreciate my predicament of wanting to contribute to this round of Mixology Monday without actually being able to get in the mixin’ and drinkin’ mood.

However, I’ve managed to eke out a swift half-hour, from 23:30 to 00:00 on Monday actually, to perform a quick experiment and report back on the results. Ironically, since I’ve been unable to actually try any drinks, I’ve been thinking about this month’s theme quite a lot. The theme is Orange, which is so broad as to be infuriating. What am I after here? A cocktail made of only orange-based ingredients? Any cocktail that has any orange in it? An orange-coloured drink?

I was baffled. Then, while reading my new copy of Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari, I saw just the drink I was after.

The Hula Hula Cocktail is unusually rum-free for a tiki-style drink. It is also fairly traditional in structure. Created in 1934, this drink comes from Ray Buhen, one of Don the Beachcomber’s original cocktail mixers. The three ingredients are gin, curaçao and orange juice, making this drink the perfect subject for a quick-and-dirty post.

I’ll admit I used blue curaçao in mixing it up, since it’s the only one I have at the moment (hey, the only difference is the food colouring — check out my curaçao page) and it ended up looking very modern and blue. Unfortunately, it was pretty dire. Equal amounts of everything made it taste kind of sludgy, and I had my brain on overdrive thinking of how to save it given that I only had about 10 minutes of my allotted time left.

I had done everything right — a decent gin, Marie Brizard curaçao and fresh orange juice — and still, it wasn’t even an O.K. drink. My first reaction was to add another ounce of orange juice, to try and clear up the mess it left on the palate. It was an improvement, but still too similar to the original. In a flash of inspiration, I added a couple of dashes of bitters and yet another ounce of OJ (hell, the theme is orange, isn’t it?).

That seemed to do the trick. If you ignored the swamp-green colour in the glass, the drink was pretty nice. There was a certain clarity to the flavours that wasn’t there before, and it was distinctively orangey without tasting of oranges. On its own I don’t think it has much future, but as a base for further explorations I think it shows promise.

Sorry to Mr. Buhen, since I know I’ve probably picked a drink he never meant anyone else to taste (the Bum mentions it’s from his personal notebook). Still, I’m happy just to play around with drinks. I’m a bit of a geek that way…

Oh, and it’s a little past midnight here in Spain, but there are still a few more hours of Monday left elsewhere in the world, so I’ll take the leeway and run with it.

Recipe:

1 oz. Gin
1 oz. Curaçao
3 oz. Orange juice (1 oz. in the original)
2 dashes Angostura Bitters (none in the original)

Shake everything together and serve in a (large) cocktail glass.

Notes:

There isn’t much else to say that I haven’t mentioned already in my account above. Maybe with a gin that differs significantly from the “standard”, like Plymouth or maybe even Genever, it might have been different.

Rating:

- Not great on its own, but useful as a base for further experimentation.

Check out the rest of the Mixology Monday entries at Intoxicated Zodiac.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 12:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.