Let’s get tropical: A guide to alcoholic island-hopping
A few great drinks to help you wile away the rest of the summer
Bahama mama
Rum-based cocktails can be just the thing to make the summer shimmer. Drawn from Hawaiian, Polynesian, and Caribbean cultures, tropical drinks are sugary fruit-infused drinks meant to be enjoyed slowly over a lazy afternoon. The A.V. Club hunted down some summer standbys that will feel terrifically liberating during another unbearably humid Chicago August, whether you’re at home or perusing the drink menus at local cocktail-lounge favorites like the Whistler, Violet Hour, and Matchbox.
Caipirinha
A well-mixed caipirinha tastes like a very sweet limeade and goes down easy, but the high sugar content will chemically destroy your brain, creating an epic hangover that can only be cured by another caipirinha. This is the cycle of success for the national cocktail of the ultimate party nation, Brazil. Once impossible to obtain outside Brazil, the key ingredient of cachaça (a popular distilled booze down there) can be found in the Windy City at Binny’s.
Ingredients: cachaça, sugar, and lime.
Bahama mama
The Bahama mama can be prepared with orange, pineapple, and mango juices or syrups, but at the core, it’s just a lot of rum. Notes of fruit and citrus will temper that powerful rum taste when mixed properly, but if you can’t taste the alcohol, your mama was too watered-down—this is a traditionally a very potent brew.
Ingredients: Light rum, gold rum, dark rum, Malibu rum, and fruit juices or syrups.
Mai tai
This sinister-sounding concoction was either dreamed up by outrageous culture-sacker Don The Beachcomber after accurately sussing the Hawaiian zeitgeist in 1933, or invented by sleazy Horatio Alger type “Trader” Vic J. Bergeron in 1944. (It’s kind of awesome that this is disputed, incidentally—the world was smaller then.) When this drink is correctly prepared, the rum content will be balanced by the sourness of the limes and the sweetness of the syrups. The mint garnish provides a critical olfactory element that gives the drink freshness and zing.
Ingredients: Rum, lime juice, curaçao, rock candy syrup, Garnier Orgeat syrup, and fresh mint.
