Planters Punch
Dark rum, lime and rich syrup in the old sour-sweet-strong-weak proportion.
CC BY-SA 4.0 · Cropped, white-balanced, graded and re-encoded to WebP by eXir.
An orange Planter's Punch in a large glass, topped with white foam and garnished with an orange wheel
Serving
Drink spec, per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count, which is what makes the two service modes comparable. Sugar per litre, strength and standard drinks stay in the units their own authorities publish, because they are figures for comparing rather than for pouring. Dilution is modelled rather than measured, as a fraction of the poured volume before any ice; dotted figures descend from that estimate.
The producer's own product page states the bitters are 100% vegan and gluten-free.
Diet and allergen labels are computed from the ingredients listed on this page and nothing else. They cannot account for cross-contamination or for the particular product you buy, and they are not medical or safety guidance.
Ingredients
Glass
Vessel
139 ml of liquid plus 230 ml of cubed ice occupies about 369 ml, inside the 400 ml the glass holds. The build fails if a recipe ever exceeds its stated vessel.
A batch needs a vessel that closes and fits a fridge shelf.
Method
5 steps · 1m 57sSqueeze the 30 ml fresh lime juice and strain out the pips and pulp.
Combine the 45 ml dark rum, the 30 ml fresh lime juice, the 15 ml rich syrup and the 3 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters (2.7 ml) in a shaker and fill it with cubed ice.
One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong to four of weak is the old rhyme this drink is built to, and the site's own dilution model supplies the weak part: the shake adds close to its own volume in melted ice, standing in for the water the rhyme names outright.
Shake hard for 12s.
Strain over fresh cubed ice into a chilled Collins glass.
Cut a swathe of orange peel, express it over the surface and drop it in, then set the 2 g mint beside the straw.
Common pitfallStandard-strength rum reads thinner here than the high-ester pot-still rum the proportion was written around; the ratio was set for a rum strong enough to still taste like rum after being cut four ways.
Keeping and make-ahead
Batched ahead, this keeps sealed and cold. The water line the engine adds is the dilution figure from the spec panel, not a rule of thumb.
About
A Jamaican rum punch old enough that its proportions survive as a rhyme, first printed in a London magazine in the nineteenth century and carried worldwide in the twentieth by the rum company that put its name on the bottle.
The drink's proportion is older than any surviving recipe for it. One part sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak was printed as a verse in the London magazine Fun in September 1878, itself framed as a recipe already known in Jamaica rather than a new invention 1. Punch made to that shape (spirit, citrus, sugar and water in fixed ratio) is older still and reached the Caribbean from India, carried by English traders who mixed arrack, lime, sugar, spice and water there long before rum entered the formula 2.
Planter's Punch itself became closely associated with Jamaica through the early twentieth century, served at hotels including the island's Myrtle Bank as punches gave way to a single measured serving rather than a shared bowl 2. Its spread beyond the Caribbean owes largely to Fred L. Myers, whose family rum company sent a bartender to mix Planter's Punches at the West Indies Pavilion of the British Empire Exhibition in London in 1924, putting the drink and the Myers's name in front of an international audience at once 2.
The rhyme survives better than any single fixed recipe, and the drink is better understood as a proportion carried forward through two centuries than as a formula anyone can date precisely.
- 1Planter's punchen.wikipedia.org
- 2Planter's Punchvinepair.com