Joy Bird

Giuseppe Gonzalez

May 9

Here’s a toast to a talented architect of delightful designs named Frans de Vreugd who so happens to design devious interlocking “burr” puzzles, and recently released a boxed set. My initial brainstorm on the topic of cocktail pairings for a burr set led me into familiar territory. The “Last Word” is a reliable classic cocktail made with equal parts gin, green Chartreuse, lime juice and maraschino liqueur. It’s tart, herbal, well balanced and quite popular. I have featured many a Last Word variation here over the years. It’s fun to play with the basic template and equally fun to adjust the cocktail name accordingly. For example, the “Last Burred” has a clever ring to it. But it sounded almost too familiar to me, and I realized I had already made this cocktail for a different puzzle in the past.

I took a detour into etymology and learned that the Dutch word de Vreugd translates roughly as “joy” in English. I grant you, not everyone associates burr puzzles with joy, but clearly these confusing puzzles have their passionate fans. Which led me to the Joy Bird, a delicious way to celebrate Frans de Vreugd’s puzzling contributions to the world. The cocktail is a simple variation on another well known classic, the Jungle Bird, a richly flavored and unusually bitter tropical rum tiki cocktail invented by Ong Swee Teik at the Kuala Lumper Hilton the early nineteen seventies. Modern tiki pioneer Jeff “Beachbum” Berry rediscovered the drink in an old ‘eighties bartender’s guide, changed the original “dark” rum to specifically Jamaican rum, and added it to his book Intoxica, 2002. What is really unusual about the Jungle Bird is that it includes Campari, which of course makes everything better. Because of this, the drink found its way onto many non-tiki bar menus, until Giuseppe Gonzalez really popularized it by dialing down the pineapple juice ration and changing the rum to deeply flavored, molasses heavy blackstrap rum. Like all great classics, there are now many interesting versions. This one replaces the simple syrup with orgeat, an almond syrup also found in many tiki drinks. The orgeat brings some almond joy to an already delicious cocktail, and that’s always a good thing. Cheers!