We have a bottle of Rum Fire, and we haven’t used it in a while!
Tasting Notes
Rory: The Rum Fire works really well with the pineapple! (I mixed this. There is no pineapple. I’m just tasting the rum fire.)
There’s no straight syrup in here, but a bunch of the ingredients are sweet (chartreuse, falernum, orgeat), so it’s actually on the sweet side. The chartreuse complicates things in a way that complements the rum fire, so despite it being an aggressively funky jamaican rum with lime again, it feels different. I really like the pairing - they’re both very loud. I’m pretty sure this is one of the places where genepy wouldn’t work as a substitution.
I’ve been on a kick of eating trashy overly-sweet things for a few days - cereal, blo-pops - and this feels like something in that vein. I’m getting a note like bubblegum, synth-pop, wayne coyne falling onto the crowd in the space bubble.
All the weirdness in the Rum Fire has been tamped down a bit, but it’s still very present; it just seems to make sense here. I’m getting fruit and candy and weird, but not so much of the gasoline that sometimes shows up with it.
Out of all the Mai Tais we’ve had in the last few weeks, this might be my favorite? It feels better balanced than the Hamilton-based Mai Tais, and I weirdly wasn’t a huge fan of the Denizen Mai Tai. It’s unfair to compare them, because chartreuse?, but the base recipes are still pretty close.
Ryan: My last memory of Rum Fire was pretty mediocre. I can’t quite remember what we had it in, but it didn’t really work. I think that drink also had Uruapan charanda, so there was a lot of funkiness going on. In this, however, the Rum Fire works really well. It has a very … round, or full flavor profile, and while it is definitely the most powerful element of the drink, the other notes are present and play well with it. There’s definitely some herbal notes from the chartreuse, and a strong amount of citrus from the curacao, the falernum, and the lime. And everything has a really funky, weird, fruity smell due to the Rum Fire as well, of course.
Taking another sip, now that I have some expectations about the drink, I can detect a few more subtle notes. there’s a note which feels like raw sugar or demerara syrup or something (not present in the drink), presumably related to the rum. I think I can detect a bit of nuttiness from the orgeat as well? Or something that plays like nuttiness.
Overall, despite being strong with the overproof rum, and strongly flavored with a number of components, the drink is very drinkable and pleasant all the way through.
After a while, we’re both wondering what would happen if we replaced the velvet falernum with Giffard pineapple.
Recipe
- 1 oz Rum Fire Overproof White Rum
- 1⁄2 oz Green Chartreuse
- 1⁄2 oz John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum
- 1⁄2 oz Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao
- 1⁄2 oz Small hands Orgeat
- 1 oz Lime Juice
Shake and strain into a rocks glass over crushed ice. Garnish with a spent lime shell and mint.
Source: cocktail virgin slut