Black Devil

I tried for nearly 2 decades to get this cocktail correct, but felt like I failed every time. What was I missing?

Having grown up in and learned to tend bar in Pennsylvania–a liquor control state, where selection is not always the best–I thought the usual brands like Bacardi, Cruzan or Don Q were the “white rums” I should be looking for. But every time I mixed the drink with what we’ll loosely call “Cuban” style rum, the drink fell flat. And also, why was a drink so pointedly termed the “Black Devil” made with white rum… and was the name some sort of subtle racial slur? Rum being a product of the slave trade, the latter made some degree of sense… yet the drink in my glass did not warrant the powerful moniker the recipe’s ratios were suggesting.

I’d first found the recipe for The Black Devil in a cocktail book, circa 1997, long before the infinitely searchable internet we have today. I began bartending in 2006.

Round about 2016, I landed myself a bottle of Wray & Nephew over-proof white rum–which turned out to be a completely different animal! A close cousin to Smith & Cross, these Jamaican rums are powerful and have a particular funk to them that comes from pot distillation.

Almost as soon as I’d tasted Wray & Nephew, my mind went straight to that old recipe. Using Wray & Nephew if you follow that recipe to a tee, the drink is… fine. But having tended bar for over 10 years in what ended up a craft cocktail sort of establishment, I’d learned that (a) vermouth blanc goes much better with rum than does dry, and (b) over-proof rum needs to be diluted a bit to coax out the nuance and be properly enjoyed.

So, in addition to swapping out the dry vermouth for blanc, while pouring 2-oz of over-proof white rum, I also added an ounce of water to my tin before stirring with ice.

HOLY WOW! Stir until well-chilled, pour into a chilled glass with a large black olive (or three, smaller, oil-cured olives) and the Black Devil simply shined!

I still don’t know what to think about the name. I’d only stumbled on the recipe at all because of the name–and this was long before I understood the slippery-slope nuances of embedded racism. But I’m also a strong proponent of not tossing the baby along with the bathwater.

For me, the name stays. I also add a couple dashes of Regan’s Orange bitters to give it some depth. And those super-salty, oil-cured olives from Turkey (typically with pits) are just the ticket to make this drink sing. Just remember: if you’re using 3 olives to garnish, then you’d better change the name of the drink to the plural: The Black Devils.

Blame the olives if you want. But we all know it’s a distraction from the white stuff you put in the mix.