Rum Swizzle - Other Swizzles

Other Swizzles

Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide presents several variant swizzle recipes including the Kingston Swizzle (made with Jamaican rum and hot water), the Kona Swizzle (incorporating almond syrup), and the Martinique Swizzle (flavored with Herbsaint, Pernod or anisette). According to that guide:

Swizzles originated in the West Indies, where everything, including hot chocolate, is swizzled. A swizzle stick is the branch of a tropical bush with three to five forked branches on the end. You insert this in the glass or pitcher and twirl the stem rapidly between the palms of your hands. By rapid swizzling with fine ice, you'll get a good outside frost such as on a Julep. Of course you won't get this frost if you haven't used enough liquor; a generous amount of liquor is important...Most true Swizzles, because of their origin, call for rum; but nearly all punches can be swizzled. Punches for three or four people can be mixed in a pitcher with fine ice and swizzled until the pitcher frosts, and then poured into tall glasses...Simple, good, really a good drink. —

The Spirit of Bermuda cookbook says that the "Bermuda swizzle stick" with which this drink is traditionally stirred and garnished is a three-pronged stick often cut from an allspice bush. The Green Swizzle, a drink for which the recipe "has been lost in history" (if it ever existed) is mentioned by Bertie Wooster in "The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy" by P. G. Wodehouse:

I have never been in the West Indies, but I am in a position to state that in certain of the fundamentals of life they are streets ahead of our European civilization...A planter, apparently, does not consider he has had a drink unless it contains at least seven ingredients, and I'm not saying, mind you, that he isn't right. The man behind the bar told us the things were called Green Swizzles; and, if ever I marry and have a son, Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down in the register... —

The Trader Vic's guide quoted above also has a recipe for a Green Swizzle (this one incorporating green crème de menthe) but specifies it is "not what Bertie (Wooster) had at Wembley."

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