Happy All Hallows Eve everyone! Keeping with the holiday weekend theme, and my desire to break out a drink I’ve been dying to try, I made Zombies this week! Also, now you have The Cranberries stuck in your head (in your head), You’re welcome.

The Zombie is the brainchild of Donn The Beachcomber aka Don Beach. A WWII veteran, he is widely credited with starting the tiki fad of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He is one of the bartenders (the other being Trader Vic) to have claimed to have invented the Mai Tai. However, that drink is for another time.

The Zombie is a drink with copious amounts of rum, along with a sweetener made from cinnamon, sugar, and grapefruit, called Donn’s mix.

The recipe I used is from my go to, the Please Don’t Tell cocktail book.

Zombie

1.5 oz. Appleton Estate Reserve Rum

1.5 oz. Bacardi 8 Rum

1 oz. Lemon Hart Overproof Rum

.75 oz. Lime juice

.5 oz. John D. Taylor’s Velvet falernum

.5 oz. Trader Tiki’s Don’s Mix*

1 barspoon Grenadine

1/8 tsp. Vieux Pontarlier absinthe

1 dash Angostura Bitters

Combine all ingredients into a shaker filled with ice. Shake, and strain into a tiki mug filled with pebble ice.

*Don’s Mix (per Serious Eats):

3 Cinnamon sticks

1 cup Unrefined sugar

1 cup Water

2 cups Grapefruit Juice

Put cinnamon sticks in a zip lock bag and bash a few times with a rolling pin. Combine broken cinnamon sticks, sugar, and water in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Let simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let steep for 15 minutes. Strain cinnamon syrup into a mason jar with a mesh strainer. Let cool. Add grapefruit juice to cinnamon mixture and shake. Mixture can be stored, sealed, in the refrigerator for up to 5 days, though it’s tastiest when fresh.

Nose is rather pleasant for what I assume will nearly kill me from alcohol poisoning. No boozy aroma, mainly sweet fruit, from the grapefruit added into the Don’s Mix.

Starts off surprisingly fruity, but then quickly gets overshadowed by the trio of rums. Despite the volume of booze, no single rum dominates, just an overall boozy flavor is what I get the most of. I initially thought this would be drinking something a rung below lighter fluid, but that isn’t the case. That could be because I could not find the overproof rum specified in the recipe. I got what I could, but it only topped out at 126 proof.

The rum flavor continues pretty much unabated throughout the sip. I do get a little of the Don’s mix towards the end. A slightly bitter/alcohol-y aftertaste lingers after swallowing. I ended up adjusting down the Don’s mix ratio to suit one drink so that may have something to do with it. A quick note on the aforementioned mix, it is one that is best to make as needed. Adding the juice to the mix might shorten the lifespan of the syrup if you make the full amount. What I did is I mixed them together before adding to the shaker. I also ended up halving the original recipe. For never having used any sort of cinnamon syrup before I like it very much and want to play with it more. In this application, it adds a nice bittersweet depth That helps muzzle the alcohol burn (as much as it can) and makes it so it doesn’t feel like you’re high octane gas.

There’s no doubt the Zombie is strong. It’s definitely not a drink that sneaks up on you. It is very much in your face. Certainly a one and done drink maybe two if you’re not going anywhere. I’m pretty sure one of these will put you over the legal limit to drive. Go be like Rick Grimes and take down some zombies this Halloween weekend.

(Banner image found here)