The History
Created by Donn Beach around 1937, in the founding years of Don the Beachcomber. The drink uses Donn’s signature combination—falernum, Pernod, multiple rums, double citrus—that he layered across nearly all his canonical builds. Lost for decades and reconstructed by Jeff Berry through staff notebooks and post-war menus for Sippin’ Safari.
Ingredients
- 0.75 oz fresh lime juice
- 1 oz fresh orange juice
- 0.75 oz passion fruit syrup
- 0.5 oz John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum
- 1.5 oz dark Jamaican rum (Smith & Cross or Hamilton)
- 0.5 oz Lemon Hart 151 demerara rum
- 1 dash Pernod
- 1 dash Angostura bitters
- Crushed ice
Directions
Combine all ingredients in a shaker with crushed ice.
Shake briefly.
Pour everything (ice included) into a double old-fashioned glass.
Top with more crushed ice.
Lay a mint sprig across the crushed ice as the bed.
Garnish with an orange-peel spiral pinned with two cloves.
Ceremonial Serve
The orange-peel snake is the drink’s namesake—Donn Beach wrote it directly into the recipe, not as a flourish layered on after the fact. The Cobra’s Fang served in a rocks glass with a lime wheel is a solid cocktail; with the snake, it’s the Cobra’s Fang. One of the few garnishes in the canon that’s load-bearing for the drink’s identity, alongside the Mai Tai’s spent-lime hull and the Navy Grog’s ice cone.
The peel. Cut a single continuous spiral from a fresh orange—eight to ten inches of unbroken strip, about half an inch wide. Take it from a large navel orange so you get the length without doubling back. Keep the strip narrow enough to hold the curve but wide enough to read as a snake’s body from across the room.
The placement. Drape the spiral over the rim of the rocks glass so the tail coils inside the glass on the crushed-ice mound, hidden behind the mint sprig. The leading tip—the head—rises up out of the rim, curled back slightly like a snake about to strike. The mint underneath reads as the bed the snake is rising from. The composition only works if the mint is in first and the snake is layered over it.
The eyes. Pin two whole cloves into the head end of the peel, pushed through the pith side so the dark heads of the cloves sit on the outside of the peel where they read as eyes. Two cloves, both visible from the drinker’s side. The bite has to be present.
The fallback. No spiral, no cloves works in the sense that the cocktail underneath is still a Donn Beach build. But the drink’s name is the garnish. Skipping it is editorially equivalent to serving a Mai Tai without the lime hull—technically correct, somehow incomplete.