Planter’s Punch has been the unofficial drink of Jamaica since the late nineteenth century, when foreign tourists first encountered this compound of lime juice, sugar, dark Jamaican rum, and water. An old jingle of uncertain origin called out the proportions: “One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak.” A fifth line sagely advised topping with grated nutmeg, “a touch of spice to make it nice.” Variations on this recipe had been noted in the Caribbean as early as 1694, but these rum punches were served in communal bowls. See punch. By 1900, when H. L. Mencken checked into Kingston’s Myrtle Bank Hotel and had his first Planter’s (“a drink I have esteemed highly ever since”), it had evolved into a single-serving punch, swizzled with crushed ice in a tall tumbler.
Fred L. Myers of the Myers’s Rum Company—which sold a Planter’s Punch Rum and operated a Planter’s Punch Inn on Kingston’s wharf—made the drink internationally famous in 1924 when he sent a Myrtle Bank bartender to England to make Planter’s Punches for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London, and such notable guests as the Duke and Duchess of York. In 1939 Myers also updated the traditional recipe to “One of sweet, two of sour, three of weak, four of strong.” Whether or not his motive was to sell more of his rum, this new ratio greatly improved the drink. See Myers’s.
Things went downhill from there. In the decades following World War II, Planter’s Punch morphed from a drink into a drink category, signifying any rum mixed with any fruit juice. Popular contemporary versions typically call for orange, pineapple, and guava juices, sweetened with grenadine (legendary New York State journalist Hugh W. Robertson, an early dissenter, wrote in 1938 that a bartender who uses grenadine instead of sugar syrup “should be shot at dawn without benefit of clergy”).
Recipe (H. W. Robertson, 1938): Shake 60 ml full-bodied, aged rum, 30–60 ml falernum (to taste), 30 ml lime juice; strain into Collins glass with ice, add 60 ml sparkling water, dash with Angostura bitters, and garnish with lemon and orange wheels, mint sprig, and cherry. Simple syrup may be used in place of falernum, although Robertson thought “the man who would do that would steal a dead fly from a blind spider.”
See also punch; rum, Jamaica; swizzle; and swizzle stick.
Berry, Jeff. Potions of the Caribbean. New York: Cocktail Kingdom, 2014.
Curtis, Wayne. And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. New York: Crown, 2006.
Robertson, Hugh W. “In Praise of Planter’s Punch.” Yonkers (NY) Herald-Statesman, July 16, 1938, 4.
By: Jeff Berry