Despite its name, the Jungle Bird’s ingredients aren’t difficult to source. In fact, you should be able to find the following ingredients at your local market and neighborhood liquor store:
Ingredient quantities are detailed in the printable recipe card below.
Pineapple
A pineapple is the most exotic ingredient in the Jungle Bird recipe and serves three purposes. First, the pineapple’s juice provides much of the tropical cocktail’s sweet flavor. Second, a pineapple wedge serves as a colorful garnish. And, finally, leaves plucked from the pineapple give the cocktail a distinctive plumage-like flair.
Using a fresh pineapple provides wow factors both in the drink’s appearance and taste. You could hypothetically use canned pineapple and omit the recipe’s decorative pineapple leaves but then you’d be concocting something more suitable for imbibing on an Ikea couch than in a Park Avenue townhouse.
Rum
Other than deciding whether to buy a fresh pineapple or not, choosing the rum will be your biggest decision.
The original Jungle Bird recipe simply specified dark rum and Poister’s book did the same. Berry went one step further by specifying dark Jamaican rum in his recipe. Bartenders in NYC later upped the ante with blackstrap rum distilled with molasses.
Having both dark Jamaican rum (Appleton Reserve) and blackstrap Bermudan rum (Goslings Black Seal) in our liquor cabinet, each with a 40% ABV, we opted to use the latter rum in our Jungle Bird recipe. We’d previously bought the blackstrap rum to craft Dark & Stormy cocktails and were curious to see how it would work in the this recipe. With deep rum flavors that counteracted the sweet pineapple juice and bitter Campari, our rum choice was a success.
Discover our favorite rum cocktails.
Campari
There’s no decision regarding Campari. The complex liquor’s flavor has no substitute with its herbaceous tones derived from 50+ secret ingredients that include bitter herbs, aromatic plants and fruit. It has an ABV of 25%.
You probably already have a bottle of Campari in your liquor cabinet. It’s a common cocktail ingredient found in the Negroni and other Italian cocktails.
Discover our favorite Campari cocktails.
