Recipe

• 30ml dark rum

• 30ml golden rum

• 30ml lime juice

• 15ml orange liqueur (e.g. triple sec)

• 15ml orgeat syrup

• 7.5ml sugar syrup

Shake everything together with ice, and pour into a rocks glass with fresh ice. To garnish, wrap a twist of lime peel around a spear of pineapple, and skewer them together with a cocktail stick. Add a cherry.

In my recent pineapple juice phase (see Bahama Mama) I was looking through a lot of Tiki cocktail recipes on the internet. A huge number of these call for orgeat syrup, something I'd heard of but never tried, and I decided to get myself a bottle and start experimenting. It's basically an almond syrup, with added flavours of orange flower water and/or rosewater, and overall it seems to bring a really interesting smooth sweet twist to a drink.

Mai Tai is apparently the most famous drink with orgeat syrup (indeed, it's the only IBA recipe that includes it), so I thought I'd give it a try. And I'm very glad that I did. It's delicious, with so many sweet ingredients but somehow enough depth from the rum and sourness from the lime that it balances out and comes together to make a wonderful tropical cocktail. It tastes of summer holidays and exotic travel, two things I could definitely do with more of at the moment.

For reference, a "pineapple spear" is just a chunk of pineapple that's reasonably long. I imagine chunks of any size would work, but might be harder to eat afterwards.