benton park swizzle

2 oz Gold Rum (Don Q Gold)
1 oz Simple Syrup (Jaggery)
3/4 oz Lime Juice
8-10 Mint Leaves

Muddle the mint leaves with lime juice and syrup in a mixing glass. Add rum and pour into a Highball glass. Fill with crushed ice and swizzle to mix and chill. Float a 1/2 oz of Fernet Branca, garnish with a mint sprig, and add a straw.

Two Saturdays ago, we decided to make good use of our mint patch by making Ted Kilgore's Benton Park Swizzle that appeared in the supplementary recipes to Imbibe Magazine. Ted created this variation of the Queen's Park Swizzle at Niche in St. Louis, Missouri, and named it after the restaurant's neighborhood, Benton Park. The two differences are that the recipe does not call for Guyana rum, and the original's float of Angostura Bitters was swapped for Fernet Branca.
The aroma of the Benton Park Swizzle's mint garnish combined with the floated Fernet Branca's menthol note. The drink was a simple but refreshing combination of a lime sip and a rum and mint swallow; that is until the end, when Fernet Branca's bitter notes entered the picture and rather dried out the balance.