It’s hot, we’re stuck and everything is terrible. These cocktails can swizzle your worries away.

When my laptop camera came up on Jay Correia, sitting outside the Swizzle Inn in Bermuda for our interview and clad in a breezy tropical shirt, I almost sighed out loud. I could see the breezes moving palm trees behind him, and as he briefed me on the situation in Bermuda — they seem to have successfully contained the virus, their curfew’s been lifted and they’re open for business — I experienced a pang of longing. What must it be like to be living in such a place, surrounded by waters of a color paint companies name shades of blue after, unmasked and safe thanks to good governance, drinking rum swizzles? I could only wistfully imagine.

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Of course, the picture wasn’t that rosy. As Correia told me, while Bermuda is open, it’s got barely a trickle of the usual visitors. “We’re worried about the U.S.,” he said. “Our livelihood is pretty much dependent on American tourists. We all want you guys to get it sorted so you can come back.”

I assured him the feeling was mutual.

I’d called Correia to get the scoop on the drink the Swizzle Inn is named and known for, the rum swizzle. “Swizzle Inn, Swagger Out” goes the pub’s slogan. Like many a tropical drink, the rum swizzle camouflages a solid whack of booze under layers of sweet and innocent fruit juices; the “swagger” turns to “stagger” when you swizzle too heavily.

Correia says the Swizzle Inn’s version is the original, but wherever it first swizzled into existence, the drink has taken on a life of its own. “Rum swizzle is an ingrained part of the social fabric of Bermuda,” says Correia. “Anytime locals have a party, there’s beer, there’s wine, there’s liquor, and there’s always swizzle. And that swizzle recipe can be different household to household. Everyone likes to play with it. The consistent ingredients are always Gosling’s Black Seal rum, orange juice and pineapple juice, but after that it goes all over the place.”

The Swizzle Inn’s recipe (or at least the one Correia was willing to share with a media parasite like myself) serves six, and is made up of 4 ounces each of Gosling’s Black Seal rum and Gosling’s Gold, the juice of two lemons, 5 ounces each of pineapple and orange juice, 2 ounces of Bermuda falernum and a good hit of Angostura bitters. The falernum they use is a spiced, nonalcoholic syrup sold in Bermuda. (You can make your own falernum or find versions online, but I got good results from the John D. Taylor brand, which contains alcohol.)

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But Correia hinted there might be a few other secrets in what they actually pour at the Inn. And around Bermuda, he says, “people put mango juice, apricot brandy, grenadine, all kinds of different stuff. Islanders here have an enormous sweet tooth.”

Bermuda’s swizzle is not the only one with a long history. The Queen’s Park Swizzle — which is less fruit-forward — came out of Trinidad in the 1920s, and in the modern cocktail world, the swizzle has evolved into a whole style of drink, created in a particular way: tall, overflowing with crushed ice, and usually both sweet and boozy. The Chartreuse Swizzle is one of my favorites.

The word “swizzle” describes both the drink and what you have to do to make one. Even if you’ve never had a swizzle, you’ve almost certainly held some version of a swizzle stick. Those tiny straws that show up in rocks drinks and jammed into sea turtles’ noses, the longer versions topped with animal figures or buxom mermaids, are all just modern iterations of the original swizzle stick — a literal stick from the Quararibea turbinata, a shrub native to the Caribbean islands.

Dried and trimmed, the shrub’s multi-pronged branches made it useful — for driving farm animals, for example; one botanical history database suggested they also made good hatracks.

I prefer their bibulous use: The tip of the stick (a “bois lélé” in French-Creole-speaking islands like Martinique) spreads into what looks like a medieval weapon and is terrific as a cocktail-mixing device. “The back-and-forth motion while also raising and lowering the stick makes sure you’re integrating and chilling everything,” Martin Cate, owner of the award-winning bar Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco, told me in an email.

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Use of the stick has disappeared from the Swizzle Inn, where they now just shake the drink with ice. But Correia says when his dad took over the Inn in 1962, “every swizzle was served at the table with the jug, the ice, and the swizzle stick was put into it to foam it up for the guest.” Now, he has only one real swizzle stick left, on display behind the bar.

I sure hope I can see it for myself one day. In the meantime, I’ll be here with the rest of you, worrying and swizzling in place.

Here’s how to swizzle with the best:

Stick it to them. You can find real wooden swizzle sticks at some good cocktail supply stores and online at Cocktail Kingdom. “The bois lélé is key because of the forks at the end that help agitate the drink much more effectively than a straight stick,” says Cate. In fact, he says, “the classic Hamilton drink mixer that’s so key to the preparation of exotic cocktails is really just a bois lélé attached to a V8.”

Or use a cocktail spoon. If you don’t feel like shelling out for a real swizzle stick, you can get a decent approximation by using a cocktail spoon — preferably one with a fairly broad bowl — in a similar way. Sink either tool deep into the drink and the crushed ice, rolling the long handle between your palms and moving it up and down gently within the drink. “The primary goal is to chill, dilute and froth your drink through the rapid movement of the swizzle stick … and to create an aesthetically pleasing frost on the outside of the glass,” says Cate. Once the drink is good and cold, you can top off the glass with more crushed ice, then garnish it.

Don’t skip the crushed ice. If you’re not lucky enough to have a fridge that makes it, you can crush ice by giving it a very quick spin in a blender (you want it cracked, not slushy) or crack it yourself with the back of a flat metal spoon. “The ice has to be crushed for two reasons — the ease of moving the stick through the drink and the increased surface area of the ice, which promotes faster chilling,” says Cate. “It’s a great show for your guests who appreciate the effort and attention to detail in the preparation of the drink. … All of these special touches are part of what makes bending elbows at your favorite watering hole a pleasure and a reward, and why we all look forward to taking care of our guests again as soon as we can.”

Amen to that.

Click on the name of each drink to scale and print each recipe and to see nutritional analysis.

Sunset Swizzle. (Tom McCorkle for The Washington Post; food styling by Carolyn Robb for The Washington Post)

Sunset Swizzle
A vision in orange, this drink takes the bright tropical notes of passion fruit, rum and lime and gives them a little bittersweet kick of neon Aperol. Passion fruit syrup is available at some liquor stores and online (Small Hand Foods and BG Reynolds both make good versions), but if you can’t locate it, you can make your own (see NOTE).

1 serving

1 1/2 ounces white rum
1 ounce black blended rum
3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
3/4 ounce passion fruit syrup
1/2 ounce Aperol
Crushed ice
1 sprig fresh mint, for garnish (optional)

Combine the rums, lime juice, syrup and Aperol in a highball glass, then fill the glass three-quarters with crushed ice. Insert a swizzle stick or bar spoon into the drink and swizzle the drink, then top with more crushed ice to overfill the glass. Garnish with the mint, if using, and serve.

NOTE: To make passion fruit syrup, in a small saucepan over low heat, combine 1 cup commercial passion fruit juice (such as Ceres) with 2 tablespoons sugar, and heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Continue to cook the syrup over low heat, stirring from time to time, until the volume decreases by about a third. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature, then transfer to an 8-ounce bottle with a cap and refrigerate until needed. (It can be refrigerated for up to 1 week.)

From Spirits columnist M. Carrie Allan.

Kaieteur Swizzle
Named after a waterfall in Guyana — the source of the blended rum that cocktail expert and bar owner Martin Cate recommends for this cocktail — the swizzle gets its spice from the clove-and-lime liqueur falernum and its sweetness from maple.

1 serving

2 ounces blended aged rum, such as El Dorado
3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce pure maple syrup
1/2 ounce falernum liqueur, such as John D. Taylor’s Velvet or Bitter Truth’s Golden
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Crushed ice
1 slice lime, for garnish (optional)
1 sprig fresh mint, for garnish (optional)

Combine the rum, lime juice, syrup, liqueur and bitters in a highball glass, then fill the glass three-quarters with crushed ice. Insert a swizzle stick or bar spoon into the drink and swizzle the drink, then top with more crushed ice to fill the glass to the rim. Garnish with the lime over the edge of the glass and/or mint, if using, and serve.

Adapted from “Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum and the Cult of Tiki” by Martin Cate (Ten Speed Press, 2016).