Update: Welcome to the curious number of Harry Potter fans who are hitting this post via Google!
If you are looking for a real You Know Who Cocktail, I’ve got it for you here.
I’d like to do a quick hit on a cocktail that I can’t name. Why? Because the New York Supreme Court, in a decision that stands beside the SCOTUS’s decision that tomatoes are vegetables, says I can’t.
At the same time I received a bottle of Mount Gay Extra Old rum, whose use I detailed in my discovery of the magic of Mai Tais, I also got a bottle of Mount Gay Eclipse Silver. This very reasonably priced white rum has been starting at me for a while, waving a little, Alice in Wonderlandish sign that says, Drink Me!
Unfortunately, my repertoire of light rum-based drinks is pretty narrow. For all practical intents and purposes, it begins with the Rum and Coke, and ends with the Cuba Libré…. I know, I’m unspeakably lame, so let’s move on before Rumdood pops in and stats berating me for being a gin guy.
I decided that I wanted a very simple recipe, one that would let me evaluate the Eclipse Silver without much other stuff getting in the way. I like a very simple cocktail to evaluate a new liquor. Personally, I don’t drink, or even taste, any liquor (except single malt scotch) neat. And I’d hardly be able to tell much in detail about the Eclipse Silver in some committee-sized drink like a Hurricane.
So I settled on the following recipe:

If you instantly recognize an extremely similar cocktail, congratulations. You are either a pro or a geek. Or both. If you don’t, you can simply Google cocktail walsh barbizon, and you’ll find lots of stories that name it. Many will give you an entertaining read about why the New York Supreme Court says I can’t name this cocktail here, since I’m using Mount Gay to make it.
First off, this is a delicious cocktail. The lime juice and grenadine play well together, giving the cocktail a nice fruitiness that is refreshing, rather than sweet. Moreover, they support and enhance the flavors in the rum, rather than masking them, which makes it a good cocktail with which to evaluate the rum.

The drink is not so attractive as the pictures in books make it seem. They all seem to show a cocktail that is a bright pink, whereas mine is more a rosy green. The difference is homemade grenadine. What you give up in visual interest, you get back tripled in enhanced flavor. Add a drop of red food coloring if you need a pinker drink. If you want to make your own grenadine, there are numerous recipes in this MxMo.
But what about the main attraction? The Eclipse Silver is a very clean tasting rum that comes through nicely in this cocktail. It adds elements of some fruits beyond the lime and pomegranite, and a healthy dose of what I characterize as the soft, sticky burn of rum. What it does not bring to the party is any discernible… stuff. Most white rums I’ve tried, especially the namesake of the cocktail I’m talking about here, carry some baggage in the form of off-note impurities. I enjoy, but seldom spend the effort to really identify, the individual elements of a liquor’s flavor profile. All I really care about is whether they combine well to form a pleasing result. But I am very sensitive to harsh edges, out of place flavors, and petroleum tastes and aromas. There are no annoying guests in the Eclipse Silver party, just a collection of tasty party-goers.
The Mount Gay is a couple of bucks more than its much larger competitor whose name I’ve had so much fun not mentioning, but is still in the same basic price range. If you are going to mix or serve light rum in drinks where it isn’t completely drowned by Coca-Cola, I’d definitely recommend your baseline bottle be the Eclipse, over… you know… that other stuff.