Rum

Hot Buttered Pineapple

Name: Hot Buttered Pineapple
Yield: 1 servings

Glass: Heatproof Mug

Donn-era tropical riff on Hot Buttered Rum, Jamaican rum, hot pineapple juice, and the Gardenia butter batter in place of hot water.

rum tiki hot pineapple jamaican allspice built

Ingredients

gardenia mix (1 tbsp)
softened unsalted butter (4 oz)
honey (4 oz)
cinnamon syrup (1 tsp)
allspice dram (1 tsp)
fresh pineapple juice (5 oz)
aged pot-still Jamaican rum (2 oz)
cinnamon stick (1)
pineapple wedge (1)

Hot Buttered Pineapple is presented here as a Donn-era pineapple-substitution variant on the Hot Buttered Rum family, same Gardenia Mix butter batter as the Donn-spec Hot Buttered Rum at #131 (creamed honey, butter, cinnamon, and allspice), same warm-mug build, but hot pineapple juice replaces the boiling water and the rum bill leans single-origin Jamaican to keep the funk reading clearly through the pineapple. Where the colonial Hot Buttered Rum at #57 is a dark tavern toddy and the Donn-spec at #131 is a split Jamaican-Demerara reconstruction, this version is the tropical-fruit-forward sibling, pointed toward the Pearl Diver's profile but served hot.¹ Sourcing for the Hot Buttered Pineapple itself is essentially absent: the drink cannot be located in Berry's Sippin' Safari or in the PUNCH Gardenia Mix article, and venue-menu mentions of a Hot-Buttered-Pineapple-by-name are not directly attested in available sources. The Gardenia Mix architecture is well-attested through Berry's decoding and the Pearl Diver / Coffee Grog / Hot Buttered Rum lineage; the pineapple-substitution-variant below should be treated as a corpus-original reconstruction in the Donn idiom rather than a recovered historical recipe.²

Brand recommendations. Best: Hamilton Pot Still Black, Smith & Cross, or Worthy Park 109 for the aged Jamaican; St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram for the batter; raw wildflower honey and European-style cultured unsalted butter (Plugrá, Kerrygold); BG Reynolds or Small Hand Foods cinnamon syrup; freshly pressed pineapple juice (warmed gently, do not boil). Economical: Appleton Estate Signature or Coruba; Hamilton Pimento Dram or BG Reynolds Allspice; supermarket honey and unsalted butter; homemade cinnamon syrup; cold-pressed bottled pineapple juice (avoid shelf-stable canned).

Instructions

First make gardenia mix in advance: in a small bowl combine softened unsalted butter, honey, cinnamon syrup, and allspice dram, and mix until smooth and uniform. Cover and refrigerate; the batch keeps about two weeks and yields roughly 8 servings.
Warm fresh pineapple juice in a small saucepan over low heat until steaming but not boiling, boiling juice goes flat and stewy.
Into a warmed heatproof mug add gardenia mix and aged pot-still Jamaican rum.
Pour the hot fresh pineapple juice over and stir until the batter dissolves and the mug is uniformly creamy.
Garnish with a cinnamon stick and a pineapple wedge.

Sources

Berry, Sippin' Safari (2017 ed.), Gardenia Mix / Pearl Diver / Coffee Grog / Hot Buttered Rum chapters, Berry's decoding of the Gardenia Mix (creamed honey, butter, cinnamon, allspice) and the cross-drink Gardenia-batter family that this pineapple variant follows. ↩
Roger Kamholz, "Rediscovering Don the Beachcomber's 'Other' Essential Tiki Mix." PUNCH. https://punchdrink.com/articles/rediscovering-don-the-beachcomber-gardenia-mix-pearl-diver-tiki-cocktail-recipe/ (accessed 2026-05-03), modern publication of the Gardenia Mix sub-recipe; the file's leading note flags the absence of a documented Hot Buttered Pineapple spec transparently. ↩