Ranglum

The Ranglum was invented in 2006 by Gonçalo de Sousa Monteiro at Victoria Bar in Berlin, back when he was an architecture student moonlighting as a bartender and cocktail writer. Velvet Falernum had just been reintroduced to the market, and de Sousa Monteiro found almost no reliable recipes built around it, so he started improvising while listening to Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin's 1996 album Below the Bassline. The name is his own portmanteau: Ranglin's surname fused with falernum. It has since become a fixture at German craft bars, and Victoria Bar still pours it today under the name "Ranglum 2006."

A Falernum Problem, Solved by Ear

In the mid-2000s, Velvet Falernum was coming back onto back bars after years of near-obscurity, but the cocktail literature hadn't caught up — there wasn't a settled canon of falernum drinks to draw from. De Sousa Monteiro, working the bar at Victoria while still in architecture school, treated that gap as an assignment. He built the drink by feel, pairing the liqueur's clove-and-lime spice against a heavy, estery Jamaican rum rather than the lighter amber rums more common at the time.

The Ernest Ranglin album playing that night supplied the name — de Sousa Monteiro has described it as pairing "liquid jazz lines with rhythms rooted in reggae and rocksteady," which is roughly the balance he was chasing in the glass. The drink spread through Berlin's cocktail scene and beyond; at his later bar Buck and Breck, he built out variations that layer in orgeat, allspice, and ginger, but the original stayed simple by design.

The Spec

This build follows the standard published version: a heavy-bodied dark Jamaican rum for backbone, a small overproof float for lift, falernum for spice, and just enough lime to keep it from reading sweet.

Why a heavy rum, not an amber one

Something like El Dorado 12, Hampden Estate, or Goslings Black brings the funky, estery weight the drink is built around. A lighter amber rum leaves the falernum with nothing to push against, and the drink turns thin and one-note.

The overproof float

A quarter ounce of Wray & Nephew is small enough not to unbalance the citrus, but it's the ingredient de Sousa Monteiro credits with the drink's kick — "like the heat at the core of the earth," as he's put it. Skip it and the Ranglum is still good, just noticeably tamer.

Falernum as the spice, not the sweetener

Velvet Falernum carries clove, ginger, and lime notes alongside its sugar, so it's doing double duty as both spice rack and sweetener here. The lime juice and rich syrup are there to keep that spice in check rather than to add flavors of their own.

Bottom Line

The Ranglum is a reminder that tiki's back catalog is still being written — this is a 21st-century Berlin bar drink with a documented creator, a real reason for its name, and a spec simple enough to make on a weeknight.