Take a tiki sour, remove the citrus, remove the shake, and see what is left. The Tradewinds Old Fashioned is Jean-Félix Desfossés' answer, and the answer turns out to be a slow, heavy, coconut-scented sipping drink that keeps the original's tropical vocabulary and none of its refreshment. The rum is fat-washed with coconut oil, which is where the texture comes from, and the whole thing is stirred over one large cube like the Old Fashioned it has become.
I wanted to capture the tropical flavors of the original Tradewinds while transforming it into something rich, silky, and meant to be sipped slowly.
Jean-Félix Desfossés, BYOB: Clear Ice EditionFrom Sour to Sipper
The Tradewinds is a mid-century tiki sour with diffuse authorship — aged rum, dark rum, apricot liqueur, lime, orgeat, shaken and served long. Every one of those moves is about refreshment: the citrus, the shake, the dilution, the ice. Desfossés keeps the flavour set and reverses the format. Lime goes. Orgeat goes. The shake goes. What replaces them is a fat wash for texture and a much smaller dose of sweetener, and the result belongs in the Old Fashioned family rather than the tiki one, which is why it is filed here.
It is worth being clear that this is a modern original quoting an older drink, not a rediscovered variant. Desfossés is a Québécois bartender who ran a hotel mixology programme for a decade before becoming better known as Truffles On The Rocks, and he published this in a booklet built around clear ice. The parent's authorship is genuinely uncertain; this one's is not.
The Spec
Two ounces of coconut fat-washed rum, two teaspoons of apricot liqueur, one teaspoon of rich demerara syrup, and two kinds of bitters. The source specifies the bitters by volume — 1 ml Angostura, 0.5 ml lime bitters — which is more precise than a dash and worth respecting if you own a small syringe. A dash of each gets you close enough.
The fat wash is the whole drink
Coconut is fat-soluble, which is why steeping coconut in rum gives you so little and washing rum with coconut oil gives you so much. The oil carries the flavour compounds in, the freezer takes the oil back out, and what stays behind is aroma plus a trace of lipid that coats the palate. That trace is what lets a stirred drink with no citrus and almost no sugar still feel full in the mouth. Skip the wash and use plain rum and you have a thin, sweet, slightly odd Old Fashioned.
- Step 1 Combine Melted fat shaken through the spirit
- Step 2 Rest Fat separates and rises to the top
- Step 3 Freeze The fat cap sets hard in the freezer
- Step 4 Filter Cold-strained: flavour stays, fat goes
Two teaspoons of apricot, and not more
In the parent, apricot liqueur is a full ounce and functions as a second base spirit. Here it is two teaspoons — about a third of an ounce — and functions as a modifier. That is the single biggest change in the conversion, and the reason it works: apricot at tiki volume in a stirred drink with no lime to cut it would be cloying within three sips. Rothman & Winter or Giffard are the reference bottles; the old-style "apricot brandy" that is really a sweetened flavouring will make this taste like cough syrup.
Lime bitters instead of lime juice
The half millilitre of lime bitters is the ghost of the citrus that used to be in this drink. It is nowhere near enough to make the drink sour — it is there to put a lime note on the nose so the tropical read lands, without adding the water and acid that would break the stirred format. If you cannot find lime bitters, leave them out rather than substituting juice. A quarter ounce of lime would turn this back into a weak Tradewinds.
Bottom Line
Tiki drinks are almost always long, cold, and citrus-driven, so a stirred tropical sipper is a genuinely unusual thing to have on a menu. This one earns it. The prep is front-loaded — the fat wash needs a night — but it makes two drinks and the second one is better than the first, because by then you know to take it slowly.