Let's Riff on the Jungle Bird
A deliciously complex five-part structure turns out to be a useful template for cocktail variations.
Now that you’ve made fresh pineapple juice, I hope you’ve also made time to try a Jungle Bird.
As I have said before, the Jungle Bird is one of my all-time favorite cocktails — a nearly perfect balance of black rum, Campari, pineapple, lime, and sugar syrup, served over a huge hunk of ice in an Old Fashioned glass. It’s a neo-classic quasi-tropical cocktail that drinks sort of like a fuzzy pineapple Negroni. How could I not love it?
One hesitates to declare any single cocktail sufficient in life, especially as the author of a newsletter devoted to cocktail variety and exploration. And yet: This man could indeed live on Jungle Birds alone.
But such narrow single-cocktail devotion isn’t necessary, especially if you have a reasonably well-stocked home bar.
That’s because the Jungle Bird, like virtually all classic cocktails, is not just a recipe. It’s a template — a structure that you can modify and tinker with to make even more delicious drinks. Or that you can use to make a tasty drink when you don’t have all the ingredients for a Jungle Bird.
Longtime readers know I am fond of treating cocktail recipes as modular structures, swapping and substituting and altering them into non-traditional but still tasty alternatives. Every great cocktail should be a franchise, an expanded universe, a family of interlinked drinks with repeated elements and Easter eggs for the fans. Where there’s one good drink, there are many more good drinks.
In the past, I have written about how home bartenders can take recipes that call for obscure ingredients they don’t have access to and use those recipes as templates to build new, interesting cocktails — basically, how to make a cocktail when you don’t have all the inrgedients in a cocktail.
We’re going to return to this exercise with the Jungle Bird. Its relatively unique five-part structure presents a great opportunity for a similar sort of experimentation and iteration. It’s a useful drink for home bartenders to break down and reconstruct in a different form.
So this week, we are going to perform an ingredient and structure analysis of the Jungle Bird, and then we are going to use that analysis to make a couple of tasty Jungle Bird riffs involving both Scotch whisky and mezcal.
Along the way, you’ll learn how to make your own Jungle Bird variation using ingredients you may already have on your own bar cart.
You Are Part of the Jungle Bird Alliance — and Delicious
Let’s start with the classic Jungle Bird recipe, expressed as simply as possible.