The Hurricane cocktail: how a cheap New Orleans tipple became a classy drink, and where to sip it in Hong Kong

Scotch and American whiskies were both in short supply in the United States during the second world war, but rum was plentiful. Suppliers accordingly took to twisting the arms of bar managers, such as George Oechsner Jnr, of Pat O’Brien’s Bar, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, to take more of their surplus bottles.

The deal was that the bars could buy a few cases of premium liquor, but only if they also bought a much larger quantity of basic Caribbean rum – for which there was little customer demand. Oechsner asked his bartenders to come up with a rum-based drink that would help him move the inventory he had reluctantly built up. After much experimentation, they came up with a formula involving rum and passion fruit, although the rest of the details are unclear.

The Hurricane – an insensitive name, you might think, for a cocktail sold in that part of the world – was so called because it was served in a glass shaped like a hurri­cane lamp. There are versions of the story that have the first Pat O’Brien’s Hurricanes being simply given away to drunken sailors, but over the long term the idea has served the bar well as a more conventionally commercial proposition.

The Hurricane is still the Pat O’Brien’s signature drink, although the original recipe is long lost, and the version served today is based on a much simplified formula, involving the house’s own bottled premix and a single gold rum, mixed in equal parts.

The drink is also popular in other New Orleans bars, often made with lemon juice and orange juice as well as rum and passion fruit – quite often also with a dash of grenadine and/or simple syrup, and garnished with a maraschino cherry.