The Spirits #33: The Jet Pilot

~ Testing Testing ~ Falernum Dreams ~ Amelia It Was Just a False Alarm ~ The Household Waste Recycling Centre ~

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~ THE JET PILOT ~

60ml dark rum
30ml (white) grapefruit juice
20ml lime juice
20ml cinnamon-infused sugar syrup (see below)
Dash Angostura bitters
Dash absinthe/pastis
Crushed ice
(~20ml water)

Put everything into a shaker with a big old scoop of crushed ice. Give it a big old sloppy shake and then pour unstrained into a glass and top up with more ice. You might use cinnamon sticks to garnish? I used mint. More rum to taste.

CINNAMON SYRUP

You know the sugar syrup drill by now, right? Two parts golden caster sugar to one part water, warmed in a pan until the sugar dissolves. Only this time, you’re going to add three or four crushed cinnamon sticks to the mix. Bring the mixture to the boil, lower the heat, cover and let it simmer for a while… and turn off the heat and let the whole thing cool for a couple of hours. Strain and decant. You will find this amazingly useful and delicious in all manner of drinks.

Some Jet Pilot notes:

1) My Nutribullet gave up the ghost recently, otherwise I would have blended this, as per the original specs. If a recipe demands a blender and you have no blender, just shake it up a longish time and add a shot or so of water to taste.

2) I discovered only after setting up the fetching photo above that actually, this should be served in an Old Fashioned glass. Sorry.

3) This is a simplified version of the original recipe (a Trainee Pilot?). For the nerds: 30ml dark Jamaican rum, 20ml golden Spanish-style rum, 20ml dark overproof rum, deep breath, 15ml falernum, 15ml lime juice, 15ml grapefruit juice, 15ml cinnamon syrup and then your Angostura/absinthe one-two dash. Blend with 120ml crushed ice for five seconds.

GOOD AFTERNOON! Some soaring MUSIC… and oooh. Lovely stuff.

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Hi, I’m Richard, I’m a British journalist for various places with a sideline in cocktails. You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, orgeat, ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some recommendations for a starter cabinet here - these are the bottles we’ll be basing our drinks on, just a handful to start! - and this here is the full archive of drinks that we’ve covered so far. Do please share the Spirits with all of your most interesting friends and feel free to say “hello” on  Instagram or Twitter. (Those please note: I don’t understand how to reply to Instagram stories). Also scroll to the bottom for what to get in for next week! 👇

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I HOPE you used your week off The Spirits productively. I certainly did. I have been working hard and should hopefully (🤞) have some exciting Spirits news to share before long. And in those moments inbetween, I have had, I know not why, an irresistible compulsion to make slightly too-sweet mid-century rum drinks with kitsch names and baroque lists of ingredients.

Actually, I think I know where this alarming trend began: with the Mai Tai a few weeks back. That was when I encouraged you to make your own orgeat syrup, if you recall. And once a person has a bottle of delicious, artisanal orgeat sitting in their frigidaire, that person is apt to start wondering what else they can make with it. And once that person has combed through a few vintage recipes, he is prone to start thinking… hmmm, maybe I should get in some falernum too? Take it up a notch? And once he has put the falernum in his shopping basket, he might just throw in some overproof rum too… and then he might start to develop a slightly alarming habit of trying out old tiki recipes in his kitchen at random midweek moments. (If you type in THESPIRITS10 at the Drop Store checkout, by the way, you still get 10% off… No postage either!).

So: I’ve done a bit of shopping - Spirits subscribers will soon be party to the results of these next-level experiments. But in the meantime, here is my Trainee Pilot, a simplified version of a classic tiki drink called the Jet Pilot, invented by Steve Crane at the Beverly Hills Luau circa 1958 as a take off (ha ha) of a 1941 Don the Beachcomber drink called the Test Pilot. Back in the high days of Polynesian theme bars, Don’s rivals tended to copy his drinks - so the original Test Pilot spawned the Space Pilot, the Astro Pilot and so on. But the Jet Pilot sort of eclipsed the earlier drink. You might say it made it look like a test run.

🍹🛩🌴

What’s odd is, if you placed the two recipes side by side, you’d assume that the Jet Pilot was Don’s recipe as it contains not one but three of his signature cockail tricks. The first is the use of overproof rum (that’s rum bottled at 75.5% ABV) to impart a deep funk. The second is the peculiar but UNBELIEVABLY DELICIOUS combination of white grapefruit juice and cinnamon syrup (this was the ‘secret ingredient’ known as Don’s Mix #2 that took cocktail archaeologists DECADES to decipher. I recommend you try it simply topped up with fizzy water.) And the third is the combination of a dash of Angostura and (to be extremely precise) six drop of pastis to finish it off.

If you have a bottle of overproof rum, I recommend you use it for at least half of the quantity of rum demanded above. And if you have more than one rum, do try mixing them here. And hey if you happen to have falernum lob in a bit of that too. But even if you don’t, I think you’ll find the combination of bitter grapefruit, sweet cinnamon, tangy lime plus the spice of angostura and anise sets off even the most basic liquor. Hell, after a couple, you might even find yourself sprouting wings.

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PLAYLIST

Aviation! And the dream of flying far away… Here are some songs about aeroplanes, helicopters, aviatrixes, police helicopters, air crashes, space men, pleasant dreams in mid air, the F-15 (“Better than sex and mom’s apple pie”) and six fighter pilots making hexagrams in the sky.

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. Here is an ongoing archive of past songs.

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WHAT I’M READING

I wrote about how much I love going to the dump. (Observer)

The psychoanalyst Adam Philips on FOMO (LRB)

Check out this incredible piece of interactive journalism, recreating the thriving black neighbourhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma - the “black Wall Street” - before it was burned to the ground by a white supremacist mob in 1921. (New York Times)

On the history of basketball in Lithuania (Tortoise)

Here’s Amelia Tait with a shocking investigation into the Scrappy-Doo Wikipedia page (The Waiting Room)

Johanna on Deborah Levy (New Statesman)

I also wrote about that thing people do where they pretend to be much less privileged than they actually are (Elle)

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SHOPPING LIST

Campari and the best oranges you can find.

🍊💋🍊💋🍊💋🍊💋🍊💋🍊