Pat O’Brien (the man) originally crafted the Hurricane in New Orleans during the 1940s. Almost a century later, the red rum drink is just as popular today at Pat O’Brien’s (the bar) as when sailors originally slurped the drink in glasses shaped like hurricane lamps.
Records reveal that O’Brien’s original Hurricane cocktail had just three ingredients – gold rum, lemon juice and Fassionola syrup. The entrepreneurial New Orleans barman apparently starting making the iconic drink in an effort to use up excess bottles of rum. Whether serving them in hurricane lamp-shaped glasses was a stroke of marketing genius or dumb luck remains a mystery.
The modern rendition of the Hurricane sold at Pat O’Brien’s isn’t what it used to be. Frassinola syrup made with a melange of fruit isn’t exactly easy to find these days. The bar crafts Hurricanes en mass using a proprietary mix that’s for sale at the bar as well as online.
We say go to the bar but don’t buy the mix. And don’t stay too long. The experience involves lounging in an outdoor courtyard with a view of a multi-colored flaming fountain so it’s not all bad. Plus, drinking a mass produced Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane will motivate you to craft a more classic Hurricane cocktail at home which isn’t bad at all.
Discover the most iconic New Orleans cocktails as well as the city’s most iconic bars. Then explore the best Mardi gras cocktails.
Ingredients
Our Hurricane recipe includes a list of ingredients that should be easy to source with one possible exception. Here’s the full list:
Ingredient quantities are detailed in the printable recipe card below.
Not everybody can easily find fresh passion fruit or even passion fruit juice and that’s okay. Another option is to buy passion fruit purée or passion fruit syrup.
Since we have easy access to fresh passion fruit, we chose to make fresh passion fruit juice with a hand blender. This extra step took us about five minutes and involved removing the pulp (seeds and all) from the skin, adding water, blending, straining and adding a bit of simple syrup.
The result was tasty and surprisingly earthy. Using fresh juice made a noticeable difference. However, purée and syrup are are both valid options if you don’t have access to fresh passion fruit or if you’re not inspired to make passion fruit juice at home.
Our Hurricane cocktail recipe includes two liquors and they’re both rums.
For the light rum, we used Bacardi Carta Blanca since that’s what we have in our liquor cabinet. Distilled in Puerto Rico, this popular rum has a 37.5% ABV.
However, we bought a bottle of Appleton Estate Reserve Blend specifically for this recipe. With more complex flavors, the dark Jamaican rum has a 40% ABV. We’ll be sipping this bottle of rum for a while.
Discover our favorite rum cocktails.
Monin produces our preferred grenadine in France. The company doesn’t add any artificial colors or flavors to its bright red pomegranate syrup. It’s the next best thing to using grenadine made from scratch.
Discover our favorite grenadine cocktails.
