Secret Santa

Not that there is a bad time for tiki drinks, but the holidays are an especially festive occasion and it is nice to bring out a recipe that is a little extra special during a celebration. The Secret Santa is a holiday cocktail that captures some of our favorite holiday flavors. It layers together rum, amaro and spiced pear brandy in a cocktail that is a tiki tribute to all the non-alcoholic apple and pear ciders out there.

Rum is still the backbone of this recipe, but our starting point was actually St George’s excellent Spiced Pear Brandy. This brandy has a rich pear flavor, plenty of sweetness and just the right amount of spice to bring it all together. It is downright amazing on its own and we wanted to show it off here. We combined it with rich Foursquare Port Cask Rum and Amaro Montengro, which adds its own unique spice and tempers the sweetness of the liqueur and the vanilla-infused honey syrup we used as a sweetener.

The celery bitters are the oddball ingredient in this cocktail. They’re slightly spicy and taste like they would be great in a Bloody Mary – which they are – but they add something that really brings out the fruitiness of the pear brandy. We experimented with a few types of tiki bitters and found that some of them added too much spice, resulting in drinks that were delicious, but not drinks where you can taste all the wonderful components like you can in this one.

Secret Santa
1 1/2 oz Foursquare Port Cask Finish Rum
1/2 oz Amaro Montenegro
1/2 oz St George Spiced Pear Brandy
3/4 oz lemon juice
3/4 oz vanilla-infused honey syrup*
3 dashes celery bitters

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake vigorously until well-chilled, then strain into a rocks glass with a large ice cube or crushed ice. Garnish with pear slices.

*Honey syrup: Combine 1 part honey with 1 part water. To add vanilla, you can add 1/4 oz vanilla extract for every 2 oz of honey syrup you are making.