Añejo Highball

Novice

The Añejo Highball is Dale DeGroff's rum buck, built in 2000 and dedicated to the Cuban bartenders of the 1920s and 30s. That dedication is not decoration: every ingredient in the glass is something a Havana bar of that era would have had to hand. Aged rum, orange curaçao, lime and Angostura go into the glass and ginger beer goes over the top. Most bucks run to three ingredients and rely on the ginger to carry them. This one seats five, and the two extra are aromatic rather than structural: the curaçao threads bitter orange through the ginger, and the bitters give a long drink the finish of a stirred one. It is a highball with more going on than a highball usually needs, which is the point of it. DeGroff published it into general circulation through his books and it has stayed there, one of the few modern recipes that turns up on menus without anyone feeling obliged to explain who wrote it.

BuiltLong DrinkClassicSessionable

Glassware: Highball Glass

Garnish: Orange Slice and Lime Wheel

Ingredients

Serves

Aged Rum

45ml

Mid-weight and Cuban in style: enough oak to be audible through the ginger, not so much that it turns into a sipping rum being wasted in a tall glass.

Orange Curacao

15ml

Not triple sec. Curaçao is drier and carries real bitter orange peel, which is what threads through the ginger; a sweet orange liqueur just adds sugar.

Fresh Lime Juice

15ml

Squeezed to order, and drop the spent shell into the glass. The oils in the skin keep working while the drink sits, which matters in something this long.

Ginger Beer

90ml

Ninety millilitres is most of the drink, so the choice decides it. A fiery brewed ginger beer, not a mild ginger ale; anything gentle leaves the rum with nothing to push against.

Angostura Bitters

2 dashes

Two dashes, added before the ginger beer so they distribute. They give a long cold drink the dry aromatic finish of a stirred one, which is the recipe’s least obvious idea.

Instructions

Fill a highball glass to the top with cubed ice.

Add the rum, curaçao, lime juice and bitters, and stir briefly to combine.

Top with chilled ginger beer.

Stir once, gently, to lift the bitters through the drink.

Dress with an orange slice and a lime wheel.

Expert Tip

Use a ginger beer with actual heat. Ninety millilitres is most of the volume in the glass, and a sweet, mild one leaves you with rum and orange squash. If it does not make you blink on its own, it will not survive being diluted by ice and lime. Add the ginger beer last and stir once, gently. The bitters and curaçao want distributing, but a long drink that has been churned goes flat before you reach the middle of it. Do not skip the curaçao thinking it is a garnish in liquid form. Fifteen millilitres of bitter orange is the difference between this and any other rum buck, and without it the recipe has no reason to exist.

Flavour Profile

OakGingerBitter OrangeLimeSpiced

Where It Comes From

Dale DeGroff built the drink in 2000, at a point when his work at the Rainbow Room had already done more than anyone else's to bring measured, fresh-juice cocktails back into American bars. He published it with a dedication attached: to the cantineros, the professional bartenders of Havana's golden age, whose bars ran on aged rum, citrus and curaçao while Prohibition sent half of New York's drinkers south to find them.

The dedication explains the recipe. Nothing in the glass is anachronistic. It is a modern drink assembled entirely from an old bar's stock.

The Five-Ingredient Buck

A buck is spirit, citrus and ginger beer, and most of them stop there: the Moscow Mule, the Dark 'n' Stormy, the Mexican Mule. The formula works because ginger beer is loud enough to make almost any spirit interesting.

The Añejo Highball adds two things that do nothing structural at all. The curaçao is not there to sweeten, because the ginger beer already does that, and the bitters are not there to balance, because the lime already does. Both are aromatic. What they produce is a long, cold, refreshing drink that smells and finishes like something stirred, which is an unusual combination and the whole reason to make it.

Why Aged Rum

White rum in a buck disappears. The ginger takes the top of the drink, the lime takes the middle, and a light spirit ends up as alcohol with nothing to say.

Añejo has spent long enough in barrel to have vanilla and a bit of weight, which gives it something to hold against the ginger. The Cuban style is the right one here rather than a heavy Jamaican pot still, which would fight the curaçao instead of sitting under it. Mid-weight is the target: audible, not dominant.

Curaçao, and What to Buy

Orange curaçao and triple sec are not interchangeable here. Triple sec is sweeter, cleaner and built to disappear into a Margarita; curaçao is drier, slightly bitter, and carries the peel through the ginger the way it does in a Mai Tai.

A dry curaçao made to the older style is the useful thing to have on the back bar, and it justifies the bottle across enough drinks to be worth buying. If all you have is triple sec, cut it back to ten millilitres or the drink turns sweet.

How to Serve It

Build it in the glass over plenty of ice, not over one or two cubes. A tall drink with too little ice dilutes faster rather than slower, because what ice there is melts quickly.

Dress it properly. An orange slice and a lime wheel are not garnish for its own sake: the orange sits over the curaçao and the lime over the juice, so the nose gets both of the things the drink is built on before the first mouthful arrives.

The Spirit

Aged Rum

Rum matured in oak, usually in ex-bourbon casks, until the wood has given it vanilla, caramel and dried fruit. What an age statement means varies by producer more than in any other spirit category, so the number on the label is worth reading carefully rather than trusting.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

Who created the Añejo Highball?

Dale DeGroff, in 2000. He dedicated it to the cantineros, the professional bartenders of Havana in the 1920s and 30s, and published it through his books, which is how it reached general circulation rather than staying a house drink.

What makes it different from a plain rum buck?

Two aromatic additions. Orange curaçao threads bitter peel through the ginger and Angostura gives the finish a dry, stirred-drink character. A plain rum buck is spirit, lime and ginger beer; this one has the same spine and considerably more above it.

Can I use white rum?

You can, but it makes a thinner drink. Ginger beer is loud, and a light spirit has nothing to hold against it once the lime is in as well. Aged rum brings the vanilla and the weight the recipe assumes.

Is orange curaçao the same as triple sec?

No. Curaçao is drier and carries genuine bitter orange peel; triple sec is sweeter and designed to blend away. Triple sec makes a sweeter drink with less of the orange thread the recipe is built around, so cut the measure if you use it.

Master the Techniques

Stirring vs Shaking: When to Use Each Technique

Moscow Mule

The Moscow Mule is the drink that taught America to drink vodka, and it was born of two business problems having lunch. In 1941 John Martin could not sell the Smirnoff brand he had recently bought, and Jack Morgan of the Cock 'n' Bull on Sunset Strip could not sell his house-made ginger beer. They solved each other over a table. The copper mug, by the best telling, came from a third party with an unsellable stock of them. Three surpluses, one immortal drink. The build is a buck at its most direct: vodka for clean strength, fiery ginger beer for everything else, lime to hold the line. Vodka's neutrality is a commercial handicap almost everywhere and the design here: nothing interferes with the ginger and lime running at full brightness. The mug turned out to be engineering as well as marketing, which nobody involved had planned and everybody has benefited from since.

Dark ’n’ Stormy

The Dark 'n' Stormy is Bermuda's national highball and one of very few cocktails with a legal department. It was born after the First World War, when ginger beer brewed at a Royal Navy officers' club on the island met Gosling's Black Seal, the local black rum, and a sailor observed that the result was the colour of a cloud only a fool or a dead man would sail under. The legal part is not decoration. Gosling's trademarked the name and has gone to court to defend it, which makes the recipe binding rather than traditional: a Dark 'n' Stormy is Gosling's Black Seal and ginger beer, and a version built on any other bottle is a dark rum and ginger beer, often excellent and differently named. The build is the whole theatre. Ginger beer first over ice, lime squeezed if the day calls for it, and the rum poured last and slowly, where its density holds it as a black weather front above the golden fizz.

El Diablo

El Diablo is the devil in a highball, and a Trader Vic creation from 1946: tequila and crème de cassis under a ginger beer top, lime squeezed and dropped, one of the first cocktails anywhere to treat tequila as worth building around. Vic printed it as the Mexican El Diablo when tequila was still exotic; the drink outlived the qualifier. The blackcurrant is the sly part. Cassis colours the drink a plausible devilish crimson and sweetens the seam between agave and ginger, the tequila’s pepper answers the ginger beer’s bite, and the lime keeps all three honest: a mule’s architecture wearing a darker suit. It drinks easier than its name and colour promise, which was presumably the joke. Among tequila highballs it sits between the Paloma’s sunshine and the serious stirred drinks: fruitier than the former, more playful than the latter, and the best possible answer to a ginger beer bottle already open from Storm & Spice duty.