Rum

Black Stripe

Name: Black Stripe
Yield: 1 servings

Glass: Mug

A pre-tiki rum-and-molasses warmer from Jerry Thomas's 1862 Bar-Tender's Guide, proto-tiki by way of the colonial sugar trade.

rum pre-tiki classic 19th-century hot-drink built caribbean

Ingredients

blackstrap molasses (1 tbsp)
hot water (2 oz)
aged pot-still Jamaican rum (2 oz)
fresh nutmeg (1)

The Black Stripe predates the Donn Beach tiki canon by roughly 70 years, Jerry Thomas printed it in his 1862 Bar-Tender's Guide¹ and David Wondrich's research traces the rum-and-molasses pairing back to at least 1833 in the United States.² It enters the modern tiki vocabulary as a proto-drink: along with bumbo, grog, and flip, it represents the 18th- and 19th-century molasses-rum tradition that Wayne Curtis (And a Bottle of Rum) places at the foundation of every later Caribbean rum cocktail.³ Thomas's spec works as either a hot toddy or a cold shaved-ice drink; the hot version is the one Wondrich vouches for, and the molasses-forward profile is what links it to the blackstrap-rum thread that resurfaces in modern tiki at the Mai-Kai (Black Magic) and at Smuggler's Cove. Restated cleanly, Thomas's 1862 spec is one wineglass of Santa Cruz (St. Croix) rum (about 2 oz) over a tablespoon of molasses, lengthened with hot water in winter or with shaved ice and a splash of cold water in summer, finished with grated nutmeg.¹ The file's spec substitutes an aged pot-still Jamaican rum for the 1862 Santa Cruz pour to align with the modern blackstrap-and-pot-still tiki idiom, a transparent modernization, not the as-printed Thomas spec.

Brand recommendations. Best: Smith & Cross or Hamilton Pot Still Black for an aromatic high-ester pot-still Jamaican; Cruzan Black Strap or Coruba Dark for a heavier blackstrap reading; Grandma's Original or Crosby's Fancy unsulphured molasses (Barbadian if available). Economical: Myers's Original Dark; supermarket unsulphured molasses; freshly grated whole nutmeg always over pre-ground.

Instructions

Place blackstrap molasses in a heatproof mug.
Add hot water and stir until the molasses is fully dissolved.
Add aged pot-still Jamaican rum and stir once to combine.
Grate fresh nutmeg over the top.

Sources

Thomas, How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon-Vivant's Companion (1862), Black Stripe entry, the foundational printed spec for both the hot and cold versions of the drink. ↩
Wondrich, Imbibe! (2007), section on punches and slings, traces the rum-and-molasses pairing in American practice back to at least 1833 and frames Thomas's printing as the codification of an existing tradition. ↩
Curtis, And a Bottle of Rum (2006), early-American rum chapters, places bumbo, grog, flip, and the Black Stripe in the molasses-rum lineage that underlies the later Caribbean tiki vocabulary. ↩
"Black Stripe" Wikipedia article, no dedicated Wikipedia article exists for the Black Stripe cocktail; the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stripe returns 404 at access time. The drink's later survival is documented through Thomas's 1862 Bar-Tender's Guide and Wondrich's Imbibe! (2007), cited above.