Advocate Cocktail Series #3: The Ashby Swizzle (Pirates Make Bad Record Keepers)
The history of cocktails is not surprisingly an oral tradition as it’s hard to find someone to take good notes in a bar. Stories are told, and then retold over a few Mai Tais, and undoubtedly multiple versions surface over the years. The first time I had a rum swizzle I asked my colleague as to its origin and was told: “It’s a tiki drink on crushed ice with rum and citrus, I think they stir it with a tree branch.” Good enough for me, no need to fact check.
After serving various iterations of the drink for 6 years, I finally got curious enough to ask Google and was instantly comforted in the sheer vagueness of its history - the only commonalities amongst the stories were rum, lime, sugar, ice and the swizzle stick. This is exactly why I like ramen, it’s a basic platform for endless creativity - and the base is delicious. Swizzles have become my avenue for guilty pleasure ingredients and substitute for a frozen daiquiri machine, so it was hard to envision an opening cocktail menu for the Advocate without including our take on an island favorite.
The Ashby Swizzle is one of the few drinks we’ve come up with that had a name before a recipe; all that had been decided on was ice and glassware. In thinking about how the Comal Swizzle had become so popular, it was clear that enough tropical fruit and crushed ice makes for an instant beach vacation, and people like vacations. That formula, however, seemed better suited for a sunny day on the back patio at Comal than inside what was once an auto body shop. Rather than concocting a tropical fruit smoothie, we chose to highlight the spirits and provide tiki accents without a lot of filler. I had used Banks’ 5-island Rum years earlier in a drink and remembered it having a distinct rosemary quality I thought would pair well with gin. When Anchor distillery brought us a sample of their sweeter-style Old Tom Gin I realized the connection and went to work creating a backbone. Lime, grapefruit and some spiced nut combination was a way to avoid tropical fruit while still conveying those flavors, the last proving the most difficult. After multiple failures at making pistachio orgeat we decided an about face was necessary and chose to infuse the toasted pistachios into Falernum, a liquor from Barbados made of sugar cane and clove.
It’s usually at this point in a drink’s development that I retreat back to Google and ask if it’s been done before. Upon entering ‘old tom swizzle’, up popped the Press Gang, circa 1838, from the good folks at Imbibe. The commonalities between the two recipes were eerie, but we had taken a different direction in both our choice of rum and ineptitude at making really good orgeat. The most interesting detail gleaned in my attempt to avoid plagiarism is the origin of the drink’s name: a press gang was a term for a captured sailor forced to work on a pirate ship - which sounds like the worst way to end your Carnival cruise to the Bahamas, unless they pay you in swizzles.
Matthew McKinley Campbell