Some cocktails should come with warning signs.
You know, like the “Fasten Your Seatbelts” icon on the airplane. Or even better, the shrill piercing, unignorable beep-beep-beep when you don’t buckle up in your car. The Red Cap at the Rum Club should have flashing lights and beeps, just to let you know that you’re ordering a big, hearty mouthful of spirited flavor.
This one is not for the frozen daiquiri set. It’s big and brawny, chunky with black molasses rum, and spiced and spliced with lashings of agreeable flavors. It’s a heady brew of global ingredients that come together as a little bit tiki, but way more.
Katie the bartender began with a healthy pour of Rum Club’s signature Black Barrel rum (molasses, coffee, toffee and chocolate), an addition of Cocchi Americano, Swedish Punsch (yes, I spelled it correctly and that’s not a typo: it’s Swedish Punsch, not punch.), Génépy des Alpes and ginger bitters sharing the glass with a very large single cube of hard ice.
That giant rock of hard ice gives you the first clue. It is there because you have a sizable amount of alcohol in the glass and the big block slows down the melting and dilution of the drink so you get the full effect, sip after sip. Best to make this one last as long as possible.
The other clue is the amazing complexity of the various ingredients. There’s a tremendous amount going on in this drink. The black rum is deep, and dark, and brooding, grudgingly yielding itself up and revealing its secrets. The Cocchi Americano--no, it’s not diluted espresso; it is an aromatized wine with delicious fruit suffused with a lively snap and a bitter bite---adds an entirely different dimension.
Then there’s Swedish Punsch. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry, because most people don’t. Swedish Punsch was a high-spirited and high-spiced concoction popular in Sweden that gained some notoriety during the Golden Age of Cocktails of the Fin de Siecle years. During Prohibition it ceased being imported, and when Prohibition ended it had been forgotten. Eric Seed, of Haus Alpenz, the Indiana Jones of the spirit world, adept at ferreting out lost spirits and, if necessary re-creating them from archives, revived Swedish Punsch, and now imports it, to the delight of craft bartenders everywhere, as Kronan Swedish Punsch.
The recreation of Punsch was probably inevitable, or at the very least, quite fitting, since the core ingredient that gives Punsch its characteristic aromatic punch (see what I did there?) comes from Batavian Arrack---which Seed sourced from the wilds of Indonesia, and imported at the start of his curious career. Batavian Arrack is like no other spirit you can think of. Somewhat rum like from the sugar cane base, it goes far, far beyond that with the inclusion of a savory aromatic red rice in the fermentation and distillation.
The next exotic, and to Americans totally obscure, ingredient is Dolin Véritable Génépy des Alpes, a minty-herbaceous-bitter-spicy-anise liqueur that exists somewhere between Absinthe and Chartreuse. The botanicals are harvested from the same alpines slopes of the French Savoy from whence Chartreuse, Dolin Vermouth de Chambéry and Bonal bitter aperitif are derived. Those botanicals add a light, aromatically lifted tease of herbal and floral notes that give the drink even more resonance and complexity.
As if that were not enough, more snap is added with a dash of ginger bitters, Mix, seriously stirred for total blending of all these volatile elements, and pour over the giant block of hard ice, and you have the Red Cap at the Rum Club.
This is where you should fasten your seatbelts.
Approach this cocktail with caution and respect. It is booze-forward, but so redolent of lavish spice it’s hard to restrain yourself when your taste buds say “Gulp” and “More, please!”
Best to linger long over this one, measuring out the mellow, rounded, heady mixture, rolling it on your tongue, relishing the interplay of bitter and sweet and herb and spice, with that dense, dark black rum as the base of it all.
The magic, if magic there is, in any great cocktail, is the achievement of balance, of harmony, the ability to make one out of many, losing nothing in the process but gaining something that was not there beforehand. And that’s the magic of the Red Cap, a thoroughly satisfying and totally rewarding cocktail form the wizards at the Rum Club.