Dark’n Stormy Cocktail
- Medium
- spicy
A spicy, medium-strength cocktail, stirred until cold, served in a collins glass.
Serve in: collins glass
Ingredients
- 1.5 ozGosling's Black Seal rum
- 3 ozginger beer
- 0.5 ozlime juice
- 1lime wedgeoptional
- Ice cubesoptional
How to Make a Dark’n Stormy
Instructions
- Fill a tall glass with ice and add the rum.
- Top with the ginger beer and lime juice.
- Stir with a barspoon and serve.
Garnish
Decorate with a lime wedge.
Tips & substitutions
- Build the ginger beer and lime over ice first, then float the dark rum gently over the back of a barspoon so it sits on top; stirring it in destroys the point of the drink. Choose a genuinely spicy ginger beer, since a sweet, mild one leaves the rum with nothing to push against.
- No ginger beer? Try ginger ale.
- No limes? Try lemons.
The glass
Serve this one in a collins glass. A collins glass is a glass tumbler which typically is used to serve mixed drinks, especially Tom Collins or John Collins cocktails. It is cylindrical in shape and narrower and taller than a highball glass.
Did you know
The Dark 'n Stormy is Bermuda's national drink and one of the very few cocktails with legal protection. Gosling's, the Bermudian family firm behind Black Seal rum, holds registered trademarks on the name in the United States and elsewhere, which means that in commercial use the drink is defined by its brand: Gosling's Black Seal and ginger beer. Bars have received cease-and-desist letters over substitutions. Whatever one thinks of trademarking a cocktail, it makes this the rare recipe with an official, enforceable specification.
The drink's roots lie in the Royal Navy's presence in Bermuda. Sailors brewed ginger beer locally, rum was the naval spirit, and combining the two was inevitable. The pairing is generally dated to the early twentieth century, in the years around the First World War, though as with most sailors' drinks the first glass went unrecorded. The name is usually explained by the drink's appearance, with the dark rum floating in cloudy layers over pale ginger beer resembling a storm cloud, and a much-quoted line about it being the colour of a cloud only a fool or a dead man would sail under. That phrasing circulates widely as Bermudian folklore rather than a sourced quotation.
Structurally it belongs to the Mule family, alongside the Moscow Mule, and shares that family's virtue of being almost impossible to get wrong. Its distinguishing feature is the layering: the rum is floated on top rather than stirred in, so the first sips are heavy with molasses and the drink lightens as you work down the glass.
Lime is the one point of genuine disagreement. Gosling's own presentation is essentially rum and ginger beer, while most bartenders add a squeeze of lime for balance, and many drinkers would find it sweet without. The layering, at least, everyone agrees on.
The ginger beer deserves as much attention as the rum, since it makes up most of the glass. Bermudians favour a fiercely hot, properly gingery brew, and the further a mixer drifts toward mild sweet soda the more the drink flattens out. If you cannot find a suitably spicy bottle, a homemade ginger syrup lengthened with soda water will get you closer to the original than a supermarket ginger ale ever will.
