Here’s a link to the recipe. I’d think it would be very easy to mix the tea and sugar ahead and make individual drinks with rum and lime juice if you don’t need to make a big batch of punch for a party.

I don’t have experience with Open Library. You can often find interesting things at Google Books (Wondrich’s Punch is there.) Good luck!

Thanks for an answer, Doug. It was very interesting and useful for me. Actually I’ve been thinking to write about Planters Punch every summer since I started to lead my blog :) Unfortunately I haven’t got any books you mentioned. But I can use numerous web-librarys, like the Open Library (by the way, do you use them? Could you recommend me something like that?) and thus I can operate a lot of original source.

Hi, scomorokh, it’s great to hear from you.

I’ve been intrigued by the history of Planter’s Punch, and of punch in general, for the last couple years, since I read David Wondrich’s Punch. What I gather from that history and from Jeff Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean is that punch in some form was the favored drink almost everywhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and only started to decline during the nineteenth century, with the rise of the cocktail era. But a recipe called “Planter’s Punch” didn’t appear until much later as tourism to the West Indies grew, and English writers reported drinks that used that name in the islands of the British empire—specifically Jamaica.

So my interpretation is that planters almost certainly drank punch, made with local product, throughout the West Indies and the Spanish main, and the drink known as “Planter’s Punch” was just one of them, chosen and named mostly as a marketing strategy by competing Jamaican hotels—and rum companies.

I look forward to learning more about it. And I recommend both Wondrich’s and Berry’s books.

I’m looking forward to reading your article. Glad you like the photos, thank you.

I have seen those articles, and I recommend them to anyone with an interest in more ways to make Planter’s Punch. Thanks for the reminder.

That’s what’s so fun about Planter’s Punch, there are so many variations.

Thanks!