Queen’s Park Swizzle is a high-octane cousin of the Mojito, with rum, mint, sugar, and bitters, that was long a staple of the Trader Vic’s bars and is now considered a tiki standard. It first saw print in the 1946 Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink as “a world-famous drink from the Queen’s Park Hotel in Trinidad.” Since Vic would have encountered the drink on his one and only stay there in 1938 and it didn’t appear in the hotel’s 1932 souvenir recipe booklet, its creation was likely between 1933 and 1938. It is also quite possible that Vic created the recipe himself, in loose homage to the swizzle served at the Queen’s Park Hotel, since that establishment’s characteristic drink was a Green Swizzle. See Green Swizzle. This was made with no mint, and with Carypton (a local spiced rum unavailable in the United States after Prohibition) instead of rum, which was characteristic of the swizzle, but as made not in Trinidad but in Jamaica (it was, for instance, in the famous Myrtlebank Hotel’s swizzle).
Recipe: Combine 90 ml demerara rum, 15 ml sugar syrup, the juice of 1/2 lime, two dashes Angostura bitters, mint leaves, and crushed ice in a tall glass and swizzle.
See also Mojito; swizzle; swizzle stick; and Bergeron, Victor “Trader Vic.”
Bergeron, Victor. Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink. New York: Doubleday, 1946.
Marshall, Hugh D. Trinidad and Other Cocktails. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Queen’s Park Hotel, 1932.
By: Jeff Berry
The well-verandaed Queen’s Park Hotel, Port of Spain, Trinidad, ca. 1905. The hotel was demolished in 1996, one year short of its one hundredth anniversary. Source: Wondrich Collection.