The Original Brown Derby Cocktail Is Better Than The "Classic"
Photo by me. I have a cool kitchen backsplash, no?
Not long ago, I had a grapefruit in the house — an all-too-rare occurrence around my home, since nobody in the house eats grapefruit. As a result, we don’t drink enough Hemingway daiquiris and I don’t make enough grapefruit oleo saccharum. But grapefruits are big and contain far more juice than we need, and in this Covid-era, guest-free situation, it seems wasteful to have them around.
But for whatever reason, the grapefruit was here, so I decided to make a cocktail I’ve consumed on a number of occasions but had never made — a Brown Derby. I’m not the world’s most advanced bartender, so the simple combo of bourbon, grapefruit juice and honey appealed to me. Plus it’s a retro cocktail, having had its heyday, as far as I knew, at the famed Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles in the decade or two after Prohibition. I went to one of my go-to cocktail books for vintage recipes, the Esquire Drink Book, published in 1956. I mean, if you’re gonna go retro, you might as well go all the way, right?
Much to my surprise, Esquire’s Brown Derby recipe was:
4 ounces dark rum
1 teaspoon maple sugar
Juice of one lime
Shake well and serve
Hmmm. Here was a recipe utilizing a grand total of zero ingredients that I thought it contained. What the heck?! When in doubt, Google “[name of cocktail]” and “David Wondrich” and you’ll likely get the straight poop (asking him on Twitter also works). Of course Wondrich wrote about it, back in 2007, discounting the bourbon-grapefruit-honey version almost entirely in favor of the rummy version. I also found some corroboration from food/drinks writer Robert Moss, who fleshed out the story a bit. Seems the West Coast Brown Derby with the bourbon, grapefruit juice and honey was never a thing and its “rediscovery” in the past few decades was actually the first go-round for a roundly ignored (but still delicious) cocktail.
The East Coast Brown Derby, with rum, was apparently popular for a brief time in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and as I found out, still made its way into bar books in the ‘50s, though the recipe calling for 4 ounces of rum seems a little off. If you’re planning on having more than one cocktail (or if you’re planning on staying awake after the first), cutting the amount of rum in half seems like the logical option — as does Mr. Wondrich, who calls for two ounces in his Esquire recipe. (He also calls for maple syrup rather than maple sugar, which makes sense because most people have the former while I doubt too many people have the latter sitting around.)
Now, as for the rum, the old-school recipes call for Medford rum. Medford rum was a brand, but also a style of rum, kind of like Plymouth gin, and like Plymouth it referred to a geographical location, namely New England. What exactly was it? Well, it was distilled from high-grade molasses, and… it was very good. That’s about all the information I can find about it. Medford-style rum, or at least brands that called themselves Medford or “Old Medford,” were around into the mid-20th century, though it seems like few of them were actually from New England or had any distinct style.
For my Brown Derby-making session, I just happened to have the perfect rum on hand. Not a vintage bottle of Medford rum, sadly, but possibly the next best thing. Mad River, a Vermont-based distillery, makes a terrific rum from Demerara sugar, the only New England distillery I know of that does so. They have a few different expressions, but my favorite is their Maple Cask Rum. It’s their standard Demerara rum finished in new oak barrels that are then sent to a neighboring maple syrup company, which ages the syrup in the rum-soaked barrels. Those barrels are then sent BACK to Mad River, which finishes the rum in the same barrels, now infused with maple syrup goodness. So it’s not a maple-flavored rum but something much more organic and natural. And it doesn’t even taste all that much like maple — it comes off with a kind of amaro feel to it more than anything.
Needless to say, I tried Mad River Maple Cask in a Brown Derby, and it was spectacular. I have since tried it with other New England rums, as well as Jamaican bottlings, and it’s a pretty great drink. In fact, I never did wind up making the bourbon-grapefruit-honey version. And I need to get around to it pronto, because I’ve got a grapefruit in the fridge that’s going to go bad pretty soon if I don’t.
BROWN DERBY COCKTAIL (THE RUMMY ONE):
2 oz. rum (Mad River Maple Cask if you can find it, otherwise a good New England or Jamaican rum will do)
1 oz. fresh squeezed lime juice
1/4 oz. maple syrup
Shake all ingredients in an ice-filled shaker, strain into a chilled coupe glass. I haven’t seen a designated garnish, so leave it naked or go for what you know.