Zombie Glass

A Glass Named for One Drink

The Zombie is credited to Donn Beach, at his Hollywood bar, Don the Beachcomber, and usually dated to around 1934. It was strong enough that the bar is reported to have limited customers to two.

The recipe calls for three rums, lime, falernum, grenadine, Pernod, Angostura and Donn’s Mix, flash blended with ice and poured in unstrained. That comes to around 350ml of drink and ice before any top-up, and it needs a glass that holds it without looking like a bucket.

Tall and narrow keeps the volume without the width, so a 450ml drink reads as a long drink rather than a bowl, and the extra height gives the mint somewhere to stand. Who first called the shape a zombie glass is not recorded.

Against the Collins

They are the same idea at different scales. A Collins glass usually holds about 300 to 420ml; a zombie glass about 400 to 500ml, with more height for its width.

The practical difference is what fits. A Zombie built in a Collins glass has nowhere to put the crushed ice once the liquid is in, and the garnish sits flat on the rim rather than standing clear of it.

If you own Collins glasses and make tiki drinks now and then, use them and make the drink a little smaller. For the full Zombie, with its blended ice and a crushed-ice top-up, the extra height is what makes it fit.

Crushed Ice and Stability

Crushed, not cubed, and this matters more in a tall narrow glass than anywhere else. Cubes in a chimney stack with large voids between them down the length of the glass, so the drink pools in the spaces, and the top warms while the bottom stays cold.

Crushed ice packs the full column, chills the whole drink evenly and gives the texture the style depends on.

The trade-off is stability. A 500ml glass full of ice and liquid, narrow at the base, is top-heavy. Buy one with a thick, weighted base, and keep elbows clear of it.

Buying and Storing

Look for weight at the bottom and thinner walls higher up. Uniform thickness makes for a heavy, clumsy glass that chills slowly; a weighted base with thinner walls is both more stable and better to drink from.

Plain glass is right. Etched and moulded tiki glasses exist and are fun, but they hide limescale and the moulded ones are usually thick throughout.

They store badly: too tall for most cupboard shelves, unstackable, and crowded rims chip. Keep them on a shelf by themselves.

Common Questions