There was a period of about a week for which Nick, our manager, would sit downstairs alone watching this video series. It’s an Australian cartoon mocking the speech of New Zealanders, a beached kiwi whale who befriends an unhelpful pelican and bemoans the fact that he is, indeed, beached.

There are dozens of these things and Nick would watch them all, then run upstairs giggling and accost the employees with his impression of a beached Kiwi whale. This lasted roughly a week, long enough for the accent to infect the entire URBN staff. We’d approach each other unprovoked and say “Oh no, bru! I’m beached, bru!”

So in making the cocktail list, it became clear to me that I had to make a summer rum cocktail in the winter and call it Beached Bru, as a joke that is funny exclusively to the people who work at the restaurant. This is that cocktail.

Beached Bru

2oz Banks silver rum
1oz lime juice
¾ oz simple syrup
Muddled cucumber and mint
Shake and fine strain over fresh ice in an old fashioned glass. Garnish with a floating lime wedge.

This is probably the least inventive cocktail on the menu. It’s a short cucumber mojito, and the only reason I stand behind it is because the Banks rum is so goddamn delicious. I loved the rum when I tasted it and have been trying to mix with it, but everything I tried seemed to detract from the complexity of the spirit rather than add to it.

The cucumber and mint are so mild that to me, they don’t appear as flavor notes so much as like a breeze of flavor that gently sways the experience of an otherwise straightforward daiquiri. It starts with the rum’s sweetness and finishes with just the right amount of agricole funkiness. It’s accessible without being boring, and mildly dangerous only in that it seems to vanish out of the glass almost instantly.