Boo Loo

The Boo Loo is a tiki drink with a fun-to-say name – and a name that can get quite difficult to say after you’ve had one or two! It’s a drink that those who frequently reference the Grog Log will be familiar with, but it’s also on the menu at the Forbidden Island in San Francisco and a few other tiki bars. Beachbum Berry dates the recipe back to 1965, though he doesn’t specify the point of origin.

The original is a very tropical, fruit-foward drink that combines both pineapple juice and fresh pineapple, along with lime, honey and rum, in the blender for a very slushy drink. In addition to being fruity, the original recipe is boozy – very boozy. It contains a staggering 4 1/2 oz of rum, with a portion of that being 151. Even more surprising is the fact that you’re not going to be able to taste all that rum in a well made version, which makes the Boo Loo both enjoyable and dangerous. You may not realize how potent this concoction is until it’s too late.

Our version of the Boo Loo sticks to the original ingredients and still uses a blend of four rums, but we toned things down a little bit to make this cocktail a little less lethal and streamlined it so we could make it without pulling our blender out (although you could blend it, if you prefer). The original rums used are demerara rum, gold Puerto Rican rum, dark Jamaican rum and 151 demerara rum. We ended up using El Dorado 3-year, Plantation Barbados 5 year, Plantation Original Dark (which now has Jamaican rum in the blend) and Hamilton 151, which is a demerara rum. It was a fantastic mix with a great blend of flavors. The better your rums are, the better your Boo Loo is going to be.

Boo Loo
1/2 oz aged white rum (pref. demerara rum)
1/2 oz aged demerara rum
1/2 oz dark Jamaican rum
1/2 oz 151 rum (pref. demerara rum)
2 oz fresh pineapple juice
3/4 oz lime juice
1 oz honey syrup (equal parts honey and water)

Combine all ingredients in a shaker and fill with ice. Shake very vigorously – this will help encourage the pineapple to foam up – and strain into a goblet filled with finely crushed ice. Garnish with a pineapple stick or wedge.