painkiller

2 oz Rum Blend (*)
1 oz Pineapple Juice
1 oz Orange Juice
1 oz Coconut Cream

Shake with ice and strain into a snifter glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg and add two straws.
(*) A combination of Bacardi Gold, Appleton Reserve, Cruzan Blackstrap, and Lemon Hart 151.

On Monday after I DJ'd down the street, Andrea and I went to Eastern Standard for dinner and drinks. Of all the drinks on their Tiki-isms section of the cocktail menu, the only one I had not tried was the Painkiller. While I have read the recipe several times at home in Beachbum Berry's and other books, I was always deterred by the size of the drink; perhaps it was also the call for Pusser's Rum which I lack and coconut cream which I often do not stock at home. Berry's recipe is as follows:

Painkiller
• 2 1/2 oz Pusser's Navy-Strength (or dark Jamaican) Rum
• 4 oz Pineapple Juice
• 1 oz Orange Juice
• 1 oz Coconut Cream
Shake with crushed ice and pour into a tall glass or Tiki mug. Garnish with cinnamon, nutmeg, a pineapple stick, a cinnamon stick, and an orange wheel.

Eastern Standard's version greatly decreases the pineapple juice quotient and alters the rum content and volume slightly (besides toning town the garnish list). While Pusser's trademarked the Painkiller in 1989, according to Berry, when the drink was created in 1971 at the Soggy Dollar Bar in the British Virgin Islands, they used a combination of Mount Gay and Cruzan dark rums. Therefore, Eastern Standard's mix pays a bit of tribute to the original, pre-trademarked version (the trademark apparently only extends to the sale of bottled beverage and not the recipe itself). And yes, according to bartender Kevin Martin, Eastern Standard did buy up as much of the remaining Lemon Hart 151 stock in the area as they could after the company stopped producing it, and they freely use it in their house rum blend.
Initially the drink's nose was dominated by the nutmeg garnish, but after a while, a bit of the pineapple aroma crept in. On the sip, a smooth coconut flavor gently played on the tongue, while the swallow contained the pineapple and the rums' heat and richness. Indeed, the rums added some zing to the pineapple juice's sharp notes. The orange juice, however, was not very detectable in the flavor profile and could have melded with the more dominant pineapple juice.