The Electric Avenue was created by bartender Conor Myers at The Exchequer in Dublin as his 2017 entry for the Bacardí Legacy Global Cocktail Competition — a worldwide contest Bacardí itself runs and judges. Both Difford's Guide and Bacardí's own site credit Myers, the bar, and the year identically, though it's worth noting those two sources aren't fully independent: Difford's entry draws on the same competition materials Bacardí publishes. Myers has described designing the drink to be "loud and fun," built for big rooms and big crowds rather than a quiet speakeasy pour, with a modest ABV and low-cost ingredients that could scale behind a busy bar. There's also an unrelated cocktail of the same name by Dave Arnold at Booker and Dax in New York — a Daiquiri variant with frozen pineapple and pomegranate cubes — which shares nothing with this drink but the title.
Built loud on purpose — a competition drink designed to work for a room full of people, not a bar of one.
A Competition Drink, Built to Scale
Legacy competitions reward drinks that are memorable, repeatable, and cheap enough to pour by the hundred, and the Electric Avenue reads like it was built to that brief: gold rum, pineapple, and lime over crushed ice, with a ruby port floated on top instead of a second spirit. The port adds a dry, grape-skin edge and a visible color break without raising the proof — exactly the kind of move a competition judge notices and a busy bar can afford.
We haven't found the drink covered by Punch, Liquor.com, or other independent cocktail journalism — its documentation runs back to the Bacardí Legacy program itself, republished by Difford's. That's a real origin with a named creator and date, just not one with much independent reporting behind it yet.
The Spec
Build it in the glass over crushed ice so the port float sits visibly on top rather than blending in — the visual is half the point.
Why a port float instead of a second rum
Most tiki builds stack two or three rums for complexity. Myers's version gets its second layer from ruby port instead — cheaper than a second aged rum, and it drops a thin band of deep red across the top of the drink rather than mixing into a uniform color. Stir it in and the drink loses that visual signature along with some of the dry, fruit-skin bitterness the port contributes.
Not the blue drink you might expect
The name suggests neon, but there's no blue curaçao or butterfly-pea color trick here — the Electric Avenue is gold-to-red, not blue. We couldn't find any source connecting the name to Eddy Grant's 1982 song of the same title; it reads as Myers going for an energetic, "loud and fun" mood rather than a direct reference.
Bottom Line
A well-documented, fairly recent competition drink rather than a bar classic — real creator, real bar, real date, just not much history beyond the contest that produced it. The port float is the detail worth keeping if you make only one change to a standard rum-pineapple-lime build.