“It’s one of those things that can be a total trash drink,” says Evan Major, bar manager at Brooklyn’s Gage & Tollner and Sunken Harbor Club. “If you order a Jungle Bird, you’re rolling the dice.” The pitfalls facing the 1978 tropical classic are not that different from any other recipe—if one ingredient is off, it can throw the whole drink out of balance. But when two of those ingredients are as bold and bitter as Jamaican (or blackstrap) rum and Campari, respectively, finding that balance becomes a much more difficult proposition.
Experts Featured
Talia Baiocchi is the founder and editor-in-chief of Punch.
Kitty Bernardo is the bar manager at New York’s rum- and tropical-focused bar Paradise Lost.
Austin Hartman is the operator of Paradise Lounge, a tropical pop-up event series.
Evan Major is the bar manager of Brooklyn’s Gage & Tollner and Sunken Harbor Club.
Mary Anne Porto is a Punch editor.
“For the longest time, I didn’t like Jungle Birds because I was getting Campari bombs,” recalls Kitty Bernardo, bar manager at Manhattan’s Paradise Lost, recounting one of the most common ways the drink can fail. Bernardo, one of Punch’s Best New Bartenders of 2024, was in attendance at Sunken Harbor Club alongside Major, rum expert Austin Hartman and the Punch editorial team for a recent blind tasting of 10 Jungle Bird recipes submitted by bartenders across the country. The drinks were prepared to each bartender’s specifications by Sunken Harbor Club’s Tom Wolfson.
In a departure from the last time we went in search of the ultimate Jungle Bird (in 2019), when Campari was considered a nonnegotiable ingredient, the submitted recipes this time around included a number of alternatives, reflecting the broadening market of red bitters stateside—though Campari still dominated the entries. And where the original recipe calls for dark Jamaican rum, half of the entries leaned on blackstrap rum, a swap popularized in bartender Giuseppe González’s Jungle Bird, a version that has become canon since its debut in 2010. (González’s version also dials down the pineapple quotient from four ounces to an ounce and a half, a style choice that has likewise been widely adopted.)
According to Hartman, “Blackstrap is a bold choice—it doesn’t often play well with other rums.” At the same time, however, the judges were looking for that pronounced molasses flavor that blackstrap possesses in spades. “The molasses works well with the bitterness,” said Major.
Appropriately, blackstrap rum featured in two of our three favorites. Taking the top spot was the Jungle Bird of Rockwell Place. The Brooklyn bar splits the rum portion of the drink between an ounce of Appleton Estate 12 Year Old Rare Casks rum and a half-ounce of Cruzan blackstrap rum; the bar team likewise splits the red bitter between Campari and Aperol. To complete the drink, they use the requisite lime and pineapple juices, plus two teaspoons of rich Demerara syrup and, finally, five drops of saline solution. Like all of our top selections, it was served over a large rock rather than crushed ice; the latter led to drinks that diluted too quickly and didn’t display the visually appealing frothy head courtesy of the shaken pineapple juice. The judges praised the texture and body of the drink, and the balance among the three central pillars of the cocktail: rum, red bitter and pineapple. As Punch editor-in-chief Talia Baiocchi noted, it was the “most archetypal” of the bunch.
Second place went to the Jungle Bird of Will Pasternak of Blacktail, which is currently operating as a pop-up in New York’s Backbar at Hotel Eventi. Blackstrap features prominently in this version, with three-quarters of an ounce complemented by a half-ounce each of Appleton 8-year rum and Smith & Cross Jamaican rum. The drink is otherwise identical to González’s take, with the addition of one dash of Angostura bitters and white sugar in lieu of simple syrup. The judges found it a natural evolution from González’s blackstrap-forward spec, and a drink that only improves as it sits, beginning in a way Baiocchi described as “challenging, but in a way that I like,” ultimately winning over even its initial skeptics. “I was a hater,” said Punch editor Mary Anne Porto, who noted that it had a medicinal quality at first, “but I’m converted.” Hartman added, “It gives so much, you can chill out and drink that for an hour.”
Third place went to New York’s aptly named Jungle Bird. The bar’s house recipe eschews blackstrap altogether in favor of a blend of Don Q pineapple rum and Smith & Cross. To that is added Campari, Giffard pineapple liqueur and the expected lime and pineapple juices. Juicy and refreshing without a pronounced rummy punch, the drink was deemed “a great gateway Jungle Bird,” by Major, and “the friendly Jungle Bird,” by Hartman. Despite agreeing earlier in the tasting that the Jungle Bird is not a drink that most people would order more than one of, thanks to its aperitivo-like bitterness, all the judges would make an exception for this one.
