This Is Not a Painkiller
Replace rum with mezcal for a smoky, earthy take on the tropical standard.
One of the many great things about home bartending is that you can make drinks any way you want. You can play with base spirits, modifiers, add-ons, bitters, and so forth. You can fuss over your drinks — or make them a little carelessly.
You want a plum brandy Negroni topped with diet orange soda?1 At home, no one is going to refuse you service. The only standards you have to live up to are your own.
This freedom extends to naming as well. You can also call drinks whatever you want to call them. Rum, lime, and sugar — but you say it’s an Old Fashioned? Well, personally, I don’t think I agree with you. Actually, you’re just wrong. But it’s your house and your drink. Freedom means being allowed to be wrong.
This is not always true, however, in a bar setting. For one thing, there are house rules. In the same way that magazines and newspapers have style guides that dictate punctuation requirements and how specific words and names and phrases are rendered — and incredibly valuable copy desk enforcers who make sure these rules are, in fact, followed — bars have internal standards for drink-making and service.
Partly, this is to establish a house character, a particular aesthetic, but it’s also to maintain consistency. When there are multiple bartenders making drinks at an establishment — often the same drinks — part of the challenge is ensuring that the cocktails taste the same each night no matter who is behind the stick.
And of course, this extends to names as well: Bars often have house versions of classics that depart very slightly from the standard, easily Google-able recipes. At Death & Co., for example, when you order an Old Fashioned — just an Old Fashioned, not a twist or a riff — you don’t get just any fits-the-bill-combo of whiskey, sugar, and bitters: you get an Old Fashioned made with Elijah Craig bourbon, two types of bitters, and Demerara syrup. Within the walls of a high-quality bar operation, drink names have very specific meanings.
And then there are exogenous factors, like trademark law.
Cocktail names and recipes are typically not protected. A bar can serve a modern classic like the Penicillin (scotch, more scotch, lemon, honey, and ginger) and just call it a Whiskey Sour. Or the bar can give it a very specific, very unique name — a joke or a pun or something ripped from the headlines. If the Olympics are on, and Snoop Dogg is making amusing faces from the bleachers, you can serve a Penicillin — or, for that matter, an Old Fashioned or a Daiquiri or a Naked and Famous — and call it the Snoop Dogg Reaction GIF. Or the Natural Shooter.2
But there is at least one cocktail where bars don’t have this flexibility: The Painkiller, an orange-y Piña Colada variation that in the early 1980s was trademarked by Pusser’s Rum, in what the folks at Liquor.com call “an enterprising feat of marketing.”
In practice, what this means is that if you put a drink called a Painkiller on the menu at a real, actual, licensed bar, you’re supposed to make it with Pusser’s rum. And although it’s common for bars to name themselves after famous cocktails, you can’t, for example, call your unaffiliated-with-Pusser’s bar “Painkiller.” At least not without some legal pushback.
Is Pusser’s sending field inspectors to personally check the ingredients of every cocktail bar in the country? No, of course not.
But the company is known to be somewhat litigious, defending its trademark in court and famously forcing the well-regarded New York cocktail bar Painkiller to change its name, much to the chagrin of many bartenders.
The legal drama surrounding the Painkiller is perhaps less exciting than the drugs-and-nightclubs saga of Florida’s Bushwacker, another Piña Colada-esque drink. But the fact that both drinks have been the subjects of long-running trademark disputes suggests that perhaps there’s something in these drinks that makes people just a little bit, well, nuts.
Coco…nuts?
In any case, the legal ins and outs don’t really apply when you’re making this drink at home.
Sure, you can make a perfectly good Painkiller with Pusser’s, which is inexpensive, reliable, and easy to find all over the country. But at your own bar, you can also make this class of drink with any kind of rum you want.
In fact, you don’t even have to use rum at all. For example, you can use mezcal, for a smoky, earthy, take on the drink. And this week, that’s what we’re going to do. This is a Painkiller, if you want it to be.
But for our purposes: This is not a Painkiller.
My Prediction? Pain(killers)
Perhaps the most amusing thing about the Painkiller trademark saga is that the drink predates the association with Pusser’s by about a decade. This concoction was created in the early 1970s, and it hails from the Soggy Dollar Bar in the British Virgin Islands, which got its name because patrons had to swim to shore, getting their money wet in the process.
The basic idea is to take the Piña Colada format — rum, Coco Lopez, and pineapple — and add orange juice to the mix. Sometimes other fruits or fruit juices are added as well, but the key element is orange.
The key insight here is that there are many, many good ways to modify a Piña Colada: You can make one with absinthe, or with sherry, or even with Cynar in the base-booze slot. But you can also add to the drink’s core rum-pineapple-coconut structure, by layering on another fruit juice.
Like most Piña Colada variations, it’s rich, creamy, caloric, and enjoyably decadent.
A basic version looks something like this: