Tropical Storm of Cocktails: The Hurricane

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Right around Mardi Gras last year we did a brief feature on the New Orleans classic, the Hurricane cocktail. This year, admittedly a little past Fat Tuesday itself, we’d like to revisit that notorious concoction. Interestingly enough, there’s more to its history than we explored last time and there’s also more opportunity to experiment with its build!

It’s widely known that the Hurricane is inexorably linked to Pat O’Brien’s piano bar, right by Preservation Hall on St. Peter Street in NOLA’s French Quarter. The oft repeated story is that whiskey was hard to stock in World War Two era New Orleans, but rum was plentiful and inexpensive. As a port town with close proximity to the Caribbean, and with the incentive for distributors to move this according abundance of rum, it was plausible for New Orleans bars of the time to have more rum on hand than expected. This confluence of factors led to the Hurricane becoming a staple at Pat O’Brien’s in the 1940s, moving to archetypical status in the decades thereafter. Although no one can refute that Pat O’Brien’s is responsible for the Hurricane’s place in the cocktail public psyche, the bar may not be fully responsible for its inception.

In 1941 Ronrico Corp., the Puerto Rican rum company, published a recipe pamphlet entitled The Rum Connoisseur that featured a recipe for “Hurricane Punch.” This recipe established the basis of 4 oz. or 120ml of rum - a logical, if substantial, amount of rum for a rum company’s mass market publication. Given the wide distribution of this booklet, it stands to reason that the bar team at Pat O’Brien’s would likely have had access. So it’s entirely possible that Louis Culligan, the head bartender at Pat O’Brien’s at the time, worked off of the Ronrico build. His recipe appears in a 1956 edition of Cabaret Quarterly, interestingly enough the same magazine and year in which the Zombie recipe we discussed a few weeks ago was published.

Ultimately, whether Culligan created the drink with no outside influence or if his inspiration came from the Ronrico booklet is solely a historical curiosity. Either way, this rum-passionfruit sour in its characteristic large format glass became a cultural reference point thanks to its place of honor in the French Quarter. The “red passion fruit mix” or fassionola of the recipe is unique within historical Tiki-adjacent drinks in that there is no formal consensus on exactly what it was. Thus, in a break from the purist adherence to historical accuracy common for Tiki recipes, bartenders and enthusiasts can explore the syrup with their own creative license. What’s more, modern mixers also can take full advantage of the lack of specificity on the rum to play with flavors in their blending.

For all the nuances of its history, the Hurricane is essentially a red colored rum-sour flavored with passionfruit. The maker is left with a great deal of liberty in crafting their own spec. Last year, we blended Worthy Park 109 with the same distillery’s Rum Bar Overproof and with Hamilton Demerara River 86 to complete the four ounces required. This year, we stuck to a very similar build, but opted towards Worthy Park’s new Overproof - an outstanding Jamaican overproof, unique in its use of cane juice rather than just molasses for distillation. This fresh profile enlivened the overall drink, especially as we experimented with a new fassionola syrup recipe as well. We went a bit less tropical this time, but more red, as we used strawberries and Luxardo maraschino cherries. Passionfruit is the syrup’s consistent throughline, but beyond that it’s truly up to the maker. With this in mind, the Hurricane is a perfect drink to explore your preferences in rum blending and modifying with different fruit flavors. It’s fun to work with any time of year, but there’s something particularly enjoyable about whipping up one of these rum punches for the Mardi Gras season. So do a little experimenting of your own and laissez les bon temps rouler!

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