Finding the Right Recipe for a Tiki Classic
There are so many recipes for the Demerara Dry Float. Which one is the best?
One way to think about cocktail recipes is as templates for experimentation. The form or structure is basically set, and then the job is to fill out the structure with the right elements.
Hence last week’s newsletter, in which we broke down the Jungle Bird and used its underlying structure/template to reimagine it as a couple of new drinks with different ingredients. I am quite fond of using this sort of approach — sometimes referred to as the Mr. Potato Head method — to create new drinks, and also to guide home bartenders attempting to adapt difficult recipes.
Another way to think about cocktails, however, is as ingredient groupings with structural flexibility.
In this approach, the idea is to take a roughly standard set of ingredients and find the best way to incorporate them into a drink. Think of the Negroni, which is traditionally made of gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari. You can make an equal parts version with whatever random gin and sweet vermouth you happen to have on hand. Or you can carefully select the gin and sweet vermouth, alter the ratio slightly, and attempt to build a superior drink that expresses the core idea of the Negroni as best possible. Perhaps you’ll even swap out the Campari for another bitter liqueur and argue that your quasi-Negroni is better (or, depending on the circumstance, just the best you can do with what’s already on your bar cart).
The point isn’t to iterate beyond the bounds of the original drink; it’s to experiment within those boundaries in order to find the best possible expression of the original ingredient grouping.
A somewhat simpler way to say this is: Sometimes there are a lot of different recipes for a cocktail, featuring mostly the same ingredients but with different ratios or proportions. In many cases, it’s worth trying a lot of them, and perhaps even experimenting with your own, to figure out which you prefer, because the differences can be huge.
This is obviously true for drinks as elemental as an Old Fashioned: How many dashes of bitters do you like? What syrup do you prefer, and how much? Which whiskey do you use?
But it’s also true for more complex drinks, like those in the classic tiki canon.
Almost every tiki cocktail that predates my birth — I arrived at the cocktail bar called life in 1981 — has multiple recipes associated with it. Some are better than others, and some, especially older recipes, require interpretation and/or ingredient modification.
That brings us to this week’s drink, the Demerara Dry Float. It’s a tiki drink from the Don the Beachcomber era, and you can find any number of recipes for it online and in cocktail books current and historical. Most recipes include roughly the same ingredients — lime, lemon, sugar, maraschino liqueur, some sort of passion fruit, and blended rum (usually demerara rum, given the drink name) plus a bit of some sort of high-proof rum — but the particulars vary quite a bit.
So for this week’s newsletter, we’re going to look at multiple iterations of the drink and attempt to answer the question: What recipe makes the best Demerara Dry Float, and why?
So Take a Look at Me Now…
The Demerara Dry Float makes a great test subject for recipe variations because there are so many different specs in circulation: Looking around my house, I found five different recipes — four in cocktail books, and one, somewhat unexpectedly, on the back of a bottle of booze. Google indicated there were several more.
Every single recipe I encountered was different in some small way. And in some cases, the difference was fairly significant.