Rum Runner
Like many classic cocktails before it, the Rum Runner is said to have been invented by a bartender simply looking to use up extra ingredients. It’s been claimed to have originated in the early 1970s at the Holiday Isle Tiki Bar (now the Tiki Bar at Postcard Inn), located on Islamorada in the Florida Keys. Bar manager John Elber was allegedly clearing out dead stock to make room for fresh inventory when he improvised the drink by throwing the contents of old liquor bottles into a blender.
Elber named the result—a combination of rum, banana liqueur, blackberry liqueur, grenadine, and tropical fruit juices—the Rum Runner, as a nod to the Florida Keys place in history as an important location in the illegal Prohibition-era alcohol-smuggling trade.
Of course, as with most cocktail history, whether or not this story is true is up for debate. In fact, long before Elber’s time at Holiday Isle, the Rum Runner had already been listed as a named cocktail the 1937 cocktail book Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em by Stanley Arthur. However, Arthur’s earlier iteration vastly differs from the modern variation, and is essentially a Daiquiri that includes pineapple juice and Peychaud’s Bitters.
The takeaway? When it comes to classic cocktails, nothing is new but few things stay the same.
Why Does the Rum Runner Still Work?Even if we look only at the more popular Holiday Isle Tiki Bar iteration, it’s easy to find countless differing Rum Runner recipes. This is because the drink suffers the same fate of other historic tropical cocktails. As decades wear on, and variations are adlibbed and passed between bartenders like a game of Recipe Telephone, many tropical drinks slowly devolve into a generic rum punch. Consider it the cocktail version of the second law of thermodynamics—tropical drink entropy only increases over time.
However, certain tropical cocktails have key identifiers that remain no matter how they’re tweaked, like the Bahama Mama’s combination of coffee and pineapple, or the Piña Colada’s coconut, pineapple, and lime. In the Rum Runner, this thumbprint is its use of a trinity of sweet elements—banana liqueur, blackberry liqueur, and grenadine.
What you get is a burst of tropical fruit flavor from a smaller volume of ingredients than if you were to simply make a punch out of similar juices. Lime is used to partially balance the sugar of the liqueurs, while pineapple juice brings in the rest of the citric acid needed to even out the drink’s sweetness.
When mixed properly, the Rum Runner is a drink that maintains a good sugar-to-sour ratio, but isn’t overloaded with so much fruit juice that it washes out the cocktail’s rum base. Here's how to make one.
Ingredients- 1 ounce light rum
- 1 ounce navy-strength rum
- 1 ounce banana liqueur (such as Giffard Banane du Bresil)
- 1/2 ounce blackberry liqueur (such as Giffard Creme de Mure)
- 2 ounces pineapple juice
- 1 ounce lime juice, freshly squeezed
- 1/2 ounce grenadine
- Garnish: brandied cherry
- Garnish: pineapple wedge
- Add the light rum, navy-strength rum, banana liqueur, blackberry liqueur, pineapple juice, lime juice and grenadine into a shaker with ice and shake until well-chilled.
- Strain into a hurricane glass filled with crushed ice.
- Garnish with a skewered brandied cherry and pineapple wedge.
