DrankTank : The Beverage Blog

I probably should not post this story on the internets, but hey, if you are my mom, my future kid, my employer, or some reader from the future thinking of voting for me for some office, please skip over this post.

1 year prior to Katrina, I had the opportunity to go to MARDI-GRAS for the first and probably only time in my life.  It was a nasty fun party for days with lots of good stories.  One involved the infamous New Orleans drink known as the HURRICANE.

The Hurricane is a rum-based, fruity drink that’s been a classic in New Orleans since WWII.  Legend has it that Pat O’Brian, a bar owner, invented it while trying to get rid of a surplus of rum that the liquor distributors forced on bars at the time because rum was one of the few liquors in abundance during the war.  Every bar that serves Hurricanes has a little different recipe and ratio of ingredients, but almost all of them involve Passion Fruit juice.

Most homemade Hurricanes involve about 50% rum and 50% liquid mixer.  This is were I made my mistake in my New Orleans hotel room.  To save on booze cost, I had packed a 1 gallon glass jug of rum and a powder mixer.  Having already drank too much before I decide to “mix” some Hurricanes, I skipped the READ DIRECTIONS part.  In my drunken, ignorant mind, this powder and my gallon of rum seemed to have all the necessary parts of a Hurricane.

I hadn’t packed a funnel, but luckily we were staying at a Marriott (which is Mormon-owned) and discovered that a page from the Book of Mormon works very nicely as a funnel for pouring powder into rum.  A little shake and voila!  Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler!  100% rum with a bunch of red KOOL-AID-like powder thrown in.

Needless to say, the rest of the story is a little fuzzy in my memory.  I recall a policeman telling me I can’t carry around a glass jug, even in New Orleans.  After begging him to let me keep my quart or so that was left, he gave me to the count of 10 to find another container, which I did just in the nick of time in the nearby garbage can.

In one night, a gallon of “hurricane” got gone with only 2 people working on it.  I do remember sometime in the early morning hours stumbling to the bathroom of the hotel room to find my friend passed out naked in a bathtub full of kool-aid red vomit. Unfortunately, the rum did not blur that memory.

Happy Mardi Gras.