jungle hotel bird

1 oz Cuban-Style White Rum (Angostura White Oak)
1/2 oz Dark or Aged Jamaican Rum (Smith & Cross)
1/2 oz Blackstrap Rum (Cruzan)
2 oz Pineapple Juice
1/2 oz Lime Juice
1/2 oz Apricot Liqueur (Rothman & Winter)
1/2 oz Campari

Shake with ice, strain into a Tiki mug, fill with crushed ice, and garnish with mint sprigs (chocolate mint).

When looking up the story of the Mojito in Beachbum Berry's Potions of the Caribbean, I spotted the Hotel Nacional and noticed how close it was to the Jungle Bird. The major differences were the rum, and the presence of simple syrup to balance the lime in the Campari-based one (but not in the apricot liqueur-based one). Since Campari and apricot have proven to be synergistic flavor pairings in drinks like the Intercept, I wondered how a mash up of the Cuban-derived Hotel Nacional and the Indonesian-born Jungle Bird would do. The Jungle Bird was also fresh on my mind since someone on Instagram had made my Yucatan Bird earlier that evening. For a name, I went with the concept of the charismatic talking parrot found in hotel lobbies across the tropics, and I dubbed this one the Jungle Hotel Bird.
In terms of rums, I went with a trio here, and I started by having half the drink being the white Cuban-style rum that would have been found in the Hotel Nacional. For the other half, I split the spirit between the dark Jamaican rum called for in the original Jungle Bird and the black strap rum that Giuseppe Gonzalez discovered to work superbly to tie together the flavors. Once prepared, the drink presented a chocolate mint aroma to the nose from my choice of garnish. Next, pineapple, lime, and caramel on the sip led into rums, pineapple, and bitter apricot notes on the swallow with a bitter molasses finish. Overall, the apricot worked well to round out the Campari, and the two functioned to make a slightly bitter orchard fruit flavor.