Episode 261

Featured Cocktail: Navy Grog

This episode’s featured cocktail is Navy Grog. To make it, you’ll need:

3/4 ounce each of:

• fresh lime juice 
• white grapefruit juice
• club soda

1 ounce each:

• gold Demerara rum, 
• dark Jamaican rum,
• White Cuban (or Puerto Rican) rum
• honey mix (1 part honey dissolved in 1 part warm water)

Combine these ingredients in a cocktail shaker with cube ice, give em a good, hard shake, and strain them into a large double rocks glass containing an iconic Navy Grog ice cone.

What’s a Navy Grog ice cone?, you may ask. Well it’s the primary reason we’re featuring this drink in this particular ice-focused episode. According to Beachbum Berry, our world’s most definitive Tiki resource:

During WWII Don The Beachcomber came up with the Navy Grog, one of his most popular — and most copied — faux-Polynesian punches. A large part of the Grog’s appeal was its signature garnish: a cone of ice packed around the straw, which both chilled the drink and transformed it into a “conversation-piece” cocktail. Hundreds of Tiki bars once glammed their grogs this way, but now it’s a lost art.

Over 20 years ago, ex-Beachcomber’s bartender Tony Ramos (who used to make Navy Grogs for Frank Sinatra at the Palm Springs Don The Beachcomber’s) revealed to the Beachbum how Tiki bartenders originally made the cone. The Bum passed this secret along to the folks at Cocktail Kingdom, who have now faithfully re-created the bespoke metal mold and “poking rod” used during Tiki’s 1940s-70s heyday.

Here’s how it works: Tightly pack the metal mold with finely shaved “snow” ice. (You can make snow ice by running crushed ice through a food processor or a Sno-Cone maker.) Next, run the poking rod through the center to make a hole for the straw. Then gently remove your ice cone from the metal mold, and place the ice cone upright in your freezer. Let the cone freeze for a minimum of 4 hours, until it’s frozen solid. When ready to use, remove the hardened cone from the freezer and slide a straw through the hole.

What we love most about the Navy Grog’s signature ice piece is that it’s both functional and whimsical, part ingredient and part utensil. It also operates courtesy of one of water’s most interesting physical properties – its variable surface area. By starting with shaved ice, the Navy Grog ice cone guarantees that those little chips will immediately start melting. Like, RIGHT away – which isn’t generally what you want. But because this all gets packed together in the cone, then re-frozen in the freezer, the portion of the ice that has melted suddenly becomes the “glue” that holds the structure together in the end.

And P.S. – in case you don’t feel like springing for a fancy bar tool from Cocktail Kingdom, you can achieve pretty much the same thing by plugging the bottom of a narrow kitchen funnel and using a chopstick to poke the hole for your straw.