I wanted another Isla de Piña and Rory wanted something a bit more challenging. This works for us both!
Tasting Notes
Rory: First whiff: lime, bright?
Sipping: it’s neat that it uses pineapple liqueur, which I’ve been reading as excessively smooth - here it’s pleasantly rough and bumpy in conjunction with the charanda. I think it’s a similar effect to using a smoother blended rum with pineapple juice. I’m getting a faint whiff of gas station at the end of each sip, but more childhood road trips and less global warming.
The dehydrated lime wheels sometimes adds unwanted bitterness to some drinks (we impulsively garnished some Isla de Piñas with them and the last few sips were unhappily bitter) but so far it’s working here—it’s cutting the sweetness just a bit. It helps that the lime wheel is being held above the drink by the big honkin' ice cube, but that’s probably intentional.
I’m digging this; it’s good without caveats.
Soft / velvety / vibrant. A little syrupy.
Ryan: I had a lot of trepidation about this drink going in to it. For some reason, I had some vaguely unpleasant taste associations with the Charanda–not quite sure why, though. Maybe it’s that the other drink I had with it also had Rum Fire?
Here, the first words that came to mind were “creamy”, and Rory suggested “plush” and “velvety”. The charanda here plays very well with the other components and lends a grassy, slightly funky undertone to the drink. There’s 1 1⁄2 ounces of it in here but it doesn’t overwhelm everything with funk. Instead it plays its part really well. The drink is definitely on the sweet side (and that’s a huge contrast to yesterday’s drink!) but it has enough else going on (earthiness from the charanda, tartness from the lime, and a bit of bitterness from the dehydrated lime garnish) that the sweetness isn’t the only note in the drink.
Recipe
- 1 1⁄2 oz Uruapan Charanda
- 1⁄2 oz Giffard Caribbean Pineapple Liqueur
- 1⁄2 oz John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum
- 1⁄2 oz fresh lime juice
Shake and strain into a rocks glass over a large ice cube. Garnish with a dehydrated lime wheel.
Source: Oyamel via Imbibe