Hurricane

Taste

On the nose you get the Jamaican rum first, funky and a bit grassy, with the dark rum sitting heavier underneath it. On tasting, the two rums are doing genuinely different jobs, one bringing the fruit and the other the molasses weight. Real passion fruit syrup is tart as well as sweet, and the lemon keeps the whole thing upright. Hurricanes have a rotten reputation and honestly it's fair enough, most of them are sugar and red dye. Make it properly and it's a punchy, well-balanced rum sour. Ours has never been near a slush machine.

Origin

The Hurricane was invented at Pat O'Brien's in New Orleans's French Quarter in the 1940s, and the reason for its existence is pure wartime logistics rather than inspiration. During World War Two, whisky and other popular spirits were in short supply, but rum was plentiful thanks to Caribbean imports, so distributors required bars to buy large quantities of it to get their hands on anything else. Pat O'Brien, business partner Charlie Cantrell and general manager George Oechsner Jr. needed a way to move all that surplus rum fast, so they built a fruity, batchable drink around it: rum, passion fruit syrup and lemon juice. It's named for the glass it was served in, shaped like a hurricane lamp, not the storm. Unexpectedly, it became the bar's calling card and, eventually, New Orleans's unofficial drink.