Making cocktails from powdered mix makes about as much sense as making soup from a powdered mix. So if you really want to make a great Hurricane, one that you can proudly serve your friends during this festive week, you'll want to focus on using fresh and honest ingredients, as opposed to chemical based imitations.
As the story goes, the Hurricane cocktail was invented by the bartenders at Pat O'Brien's during World War II as a solution to an overstock of rum. It was apparently Scotch whisky that they really wanted to carry, but in those days it was a little hard to come by, and in order to purchase a single case of Scotch, distributors required their customers to order 50 cases of the much more plentiful spirit, rum, and the rum being pushed by the distributors wasn't necessarily anything to write home about. Fortunately, the bartenders at Pat's had previous experience at prohibition era speakeasies; they were well trained in how to present cocktails which might mask any deficiencies that might be in the spirits they were using. Eventually they crafted up with the recipe for the Hurricane, and as they say, the rest was history.
If you look through various cocktail reference, you'll most likely come up with several different recipes for the Hurricane, some rather complex, others rather simple. To try to get to the root of the matter of what the *real* recipe for a Hurricane cocktail should be, I contacted Jeff Berry, author of Beachbum Berry's Grog Log, and Beachbum Berry's Intoxica! Jeff is perhaps the best modern researcher of the Tiki/Polynesian cocktails, and while Pat O'Brien's isn't a Polynesian restaurant, the Hurricane became a common offering the cocktail menus of many Tiki bars. Jeff says that the best recipe is one that uses just rum, passion fruit syrup, and lemon juice.
Hurricane
- 2 ounces dark Jamaican rum
- 1 ounce passion fruit syrup
- 1 ounce lemon juice
Shake with ice, and strain into a glass filled with crushed ice.
Jeff also says that the Passion Fruit Syrup he prefers is the Trader Vic's brand, many of the others, especially ones that are simply called Passion Fruit Mix, aren't anywhere near as good.
If you look at this recipe carefully, you'll notice that it too falls into the sour category just like the Sidecar, Daiquiri, and Margarita: Spirit + sweet + sour. So feel free to experiment a little bit with the ratios I provide above, and see if you can come up with a recipe that provides what you feel is a nice balance of flavors.
