Feel free to play with this if you want – I’m open to suggestions for improving it, although there’s a certain amount of nostalgia about the original. The LIVE virtual tastings are carried out in the last week of the month. Please keep an eye on our socials for confirmed dates! We had just come into a bunch of bottles of Rhum J.M. Blanc Agricole and it was Brian who brilliantly decided to lengthen the drink with Cucumber Tonic Water. I adapted a few elements of this drink, changing the cucumber tonic to either Regular Tonic or Elderflower Tonic from Fever Tree and changing to cucumber bitters from Bitter Truth. But really any cucumber bitters will do and feel free to change the tonic out for anything you like, just remember to pair the flavored tonic with the cucumber flavor while doing it! This drink is an original developed by myself and Brian Tetorakis for the menu at Cole’s French Dip in 2019. The Idea here was to have something light and refreshing for brunch but also full strength.

As stated above, the original purpose of the Grenadine was simply to make the drink pink. I make my own Grenadine, which ends up being more purple in color, so I add a little red food coloring to it just for this drink. The advantage to using homemade is that it gives the drink a pomegranate component that it didn’t have before and that store-bought Grenadine doesn’t provide. If using store-bought, which is already Very Red due to its own food coloring, just use enough to make it pink, a bar spoon or so. I ran into problems when I excitedly tried to introduce the Pink Flamingo to friends years later. First, what was a great drink that year in the tropics was cloyingly sweet anywhere else. But even more importantly, not long after leaving DG whomever made the Apricot Schnapps (Mr. Boston, DeKuyper, Hiram Walker or one of those type brands) quit making it. Over the ensuing years I occasionally tried fiddling with the recipe to both tone down the sweetness and find a suitable substitute for the apricot. I tried tropical fruit-flavored rums, for example, without quite capturing the magic.