The Cabinet: Falernum

Nec cellis ideo contende Falernis

~ FALERNUM ~
Alcoholic cordial. 11% ABV, ~£15 for 700ml
Friends with: rum, other kinds of rum, more rum, rhum agricole, lime, lemon, tropical fruits and spices of all kinds. Also marries well with gin and green Chartreuse, clashes interestingly with agave spirits, and has a holiday romance w/ Irish whiskey.

Falernum is a lightly alcoholic spiced lime cordial from Barbados. For the most part, it is used as a sweetener in tropical drinks, especially those involving rum and lime. I’ve heard it described as the lime version of curaçao, which might be a useful way of thinking about it. Like (most) orange curaçaos, it’s too sweet for drinking on its own - though if you do, you will find it progresses quite magically on the tongue, like one of Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstopper. Tart citrus is followed by velvety almonds, warming ginger, a peppery after-note of cloves, all within a sweet, rummy embrace. Mmm.

It’s named after falernian wine which, as any reader lucky enough to have visited the late Roman Empire will vouchsafe, was the finest of all wines to emerge from that civilisation. I happened to go on a press trip to the foothills of Mount Falernus in Campania last year and watched the slaves harvesting the emerald green grapes in the antique breeze before repairing to a boutique thermopolium for a dormouse tasting menu washed down with amphora after amphora of the fragrant wine. “There is now no wine known that ranks higher than the Falernian,” said our guide, Pliny the Elder, who pointed out that it was the only wine that takes fire on the application of flame.

Friends! This did not happen! But maybe I’ll write an award-winning Netflix comedy on the theme of a time-travel press trip one day. I did, however, go on an actual trip to Barbados (dreamy enough) and visited the Foursquare distillery, where John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum is produced. Why here it is rolling off the production line:

Over lunch, Richard Seale, the pleasingly no-nonsense head distiller. conjured a time when many of the island’s rum producers made their own falernums (falerna?). There was Doorly’s Falernum, R.L. Seale Falernum, etc; meanwhile John D Taylor himself produced various ages and expressions of rum too. Over time, the island’s many distilleries closed and consolidated and the Seale family came to produce many of the signature products - of which John D. Taylors is the sole survivor, falernum-wise.

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CABINET POSTS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

🌿Green Chartreuse
🍒 Maraschino
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🌷Cynar

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In recent years, a handful of artisanal falerna have popped up, notably the Golden Falernum by the German company Bitter Truth and a non-alcoholic falernum cordial made by the Bristol Syrup Company. A handful of adventurous bartenders make their own. One 1911 recipe asks for nine gallons of rum, three gallons of lime juice, ½ gallon brandy, 56lb sugar, ½ bitter almond, ¼ mace. The mixture is then, apparently, clarified (in the method familiar to Spirits readers) with one gallon of milk. Might falernum have been, at one point, bottled punch? I don’t know. But the food historian Darcy O’Neil went deep into the history here, and you can read more from Mr Seale’s here.

So why am I telling you to get falernum in? Well, if you’re into rum, then it’s probably going to be your single most reliable supporting player. Don the Beachcomber came across it during his Prohibition-era travels around the Caribbean and used it liberally (in Zombies, Three Dots and a Dashes, Port-au-Princes, etc). You can’t make many of the classical roster of “tiki” drinks without it. But it’s worth noting that for many years, it was a house secret; Don poured it into unmarked bottles and gave his bartenders instructions like “2 oz of Don’s Mix #2, 1 oz of Don’s Spices #4, etc” to avoid anyone copying his recipes.

So you might think of falernum as the quintessential secret sauce. A dash of the stuff brings sweetness, sure, but it also brings an ineffable complexity, a strange, mutating flavour on your tongue you can’t quite pin down. What is that? Without further do, here is how you mix it.

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THE COCKTAILS