Beachbum Berry's Grog Blog

It’s no secret that we like rum. We like it neat, and we like it in mixed drinks. So you have every right to ask, “Bum, why did you serve a vodka drink to 500 people at this year’s Tales Of The Cocktail cocktail hour?” As our role model, Curly of the Three Stooges, used to say: “We’re a victim of circumstance!” The event’s sponsors offered no mixable brand of rum, so we had to switch to another spirit. And from entertaining many a rum-intolerant guest at our Deadbeat Bar, we’d learned a simple trick: when in doubt, substitute vodka. People who tend not to like rum also tend not to like all brown spirits, and gin’s botanical flavor is so singular that it offers a narrow strike zone as a substitute in mixed drinks. Same with tequila. But vodka, a neutral spirit having no flavor of its own, adds nothing to your drink — which can work in your favor if your drink’s other ingredients create an interesting enough taste on their own. Vodka may not add anything, but it won’t ruin anything either.

We based the Lord Jim on a rum drink of ours called the Yellow Submarine, which calls for less of the pineapple and lemon, less of the liqueurs, and a healthy measure of gold rum. The juices and liqueurs were supporting players, choristers providing background music for a rumbustious diva. But by substituting vodka, which has no taste of its own, we had to bring up the liqueurs to compensate for the absence of a base flavor, which in turn meant upping the pineapple so that the liqueurs didn’t take over (the vodka, as neutral as Switzerland, certainly wasn’t going to lift a finger to stop them).

Here, then, is the Lord Jim (recipe above). We offer it so that the next time you spend 20 minutes crafting a spectacular exotic rum drink for your guest, who demurs because rum makes him or her nauseous, you don’t have to get upset — you just have to get tasteless.