In case you thought I was doing all this alone, I am not. Like most things, ok everything, I have ever done in my life, these daily cocktail posts are only possible because I have an incredible amount of help and support. Sometimes, it is Liam offering to shake the tins for me, sometimes it is Laura picking up alcohol or making syrups and suggestions. Other times it is my mom or grandma loaning glassware, my brother or dad offering “constructive” criticism, or you, gentle readers, suggesting cocktails. The thing is, without buy in from family and friends this would have been a really short trip. So tonight’s cocktail comes at the request, nay demand of my long suffering wife, my numero uno partner in crime who not only wanted to try, but put in the leg work to bring you the Navy Grog. 

This one sounded good, but it has some additional steps that I decided were too much trouble to bother with. For one, it calls for allspice dram, which was kind of exciting, but it is a pain to make and I’m trying to hold to a policy of not buying any more bottles to make a single drink. The thing is I made some back in the fall after a cocktail class at Corsair Artisan Distillery that I had forgotten about and time had only made it better. Even with that out of the way there was the small matter of the traditional “ice cone” with straw channel it is served with. Undaunted, the wife not only found a suitable mold, but ground ice into snow and packed it in with that sexy straw channel before refreezing it into a beautiful mass of icy goodness. She also talked grandma into donating a goblet to the cause and laid out all my tools and ingredients. So yeah, like a good stage manager, she did all the ground work and made it easy for me to swoop in at the last minute and grab the glory. You know, the usual.

So grab your tins and let’s slap this one together. Like actual Navy grog, this one is rum heavy. Unlike actual navy grog, we are doing this for flavor and not to sorta sanitize and make slightly more palatable, the nasty barrels of open water kept on deck. Coleridge had something to say on the subject, but I digress. Ok, let’s do some juicing, this one calls for equal parts of lime juice and grapefruit juice, 3/4 ounce of each, please and thank you. To that add 1/4 ounce of Demerara syrup and allspice dram, St. Elizabeth’s makes an excellent one, as do I, so I used my own, natch. Next you are going to need 1 ounce each of three different rums, a silver, a gold and a dark Jamaican. We went with Cane Run Estate, Havana Club Especial and Smith + Cross, respectively. 2 drops of 18-21 prohibition aromatic bitters and you are ready to shake. Well, almost ready. First, this one shakes with crushed ice, so get some. Secondly, you are going to want to pour it into your chilled goblet around your fancy ice cone, so, as Jean-Luc would say, make it so. Oh, right, you need to know how to make the ice cone. Gotcha. Best I can tell, you have to marry the right partner, be decent enough, most of the time, to earn their support and if you get it right, the cone just shows up in the freezer drawer, of course, your mileage may vary. With your cone in place, shake your drink fairly quickly over crushed ice. Ten seconds is plenty. Then open pour into the goblet, slip a reusable straw into the ice cone in the channel that miraculously just exists in these, and garnish with some freshly slapped mint, a fuschia flower your grandma donated after virtual church and Sunday dinner and maybe an umbrella, can’t go wrong with an umbrella.

So that’s it, the Navy Grog. It is good, I would totally order this somewhere, I would totally not ever make it without Laura stepping up and handling the hard parts, but then, that’s most of my life isn’t it? Stay safe, stay hydrated and stay sane, my friends.