UPDATE: Welcome, New York Times readers! I hope you look around while you are here.

Source: The Irrawaddy

That picture, my friends, is a sight to make me weep. That is the courtyard of the mighty Pegu Club itself in Rangoon, Burma. Nativity-place of the World’s Greatest Cocktail™. Once once of the great gentlemen’s clubs (the kind where the brass poles run horizontally along the foot of the bar) of the British Empire at its height, the club was last put to use as a military audit office and flop house for bureaucrats in the 1990s. Now, it rots as an abode for stray dogs. And the Burmese website that has this story (and many other beautiful, tragic pictures you should look at) describes its signature cocktail as “Gin and Rose’s lime juice”….

If you happened upon this post without knowing about the Pegu cocktail, it is not gin and Rose’s. That would be a Gimlet.

Look at that magnificent exterior, which is likely already past preservation. The building has been designated as a “heritage building” by the government, so I guess that’s something. As opposed to such actions here in the US, the protection of the Pegu Club consists entirely of a hand-written piece of paper held down by a brick that has fallen out of the wall which asks visitors to please not wreck the place.

The pictures I’ve shown you so far are from, I think, an anti-government outlet, and are designed to show the Pegu Club’s decay. Since first posting this, I got a tip from Ginger Bar Magazine about another set of photographs by Jacques Maudy and Jimi Casaccia on commission for the Yangon Heritage Trust. (They are apparently a preservation NGO who are endeavoring to preserve glorious architecture like thins in the area. Sadly, their website is currently the dreaded “under construction”) These photos are designed to help evoke how beautiful building like this could be, and evoke their past glory. Below is a quite different view of the Pegu Club. You can find many more, higher resolution photos on their website, or even buy their soon-to-be released book, Yangon a City to Rescue.

This sad story brings to mind something else I’ve been meaning to post about for a long time now. How the heck do you really pronounce “Pegu”?

Back when I discovered the Pegu in Paul Harrington’s Cocktail, a discovery that ignited my obsession with cocktails in general, I surmised that it was pronounced PEE-Goo. Then in 2000, we visited the American Bar at the Savoy in London, where my wife and I had a marvelous long conversation at our table with the legendary Peter Dorelli about the drink, which he thought was pronounced Pee-Zhou. I’ve always pronounced it thus since. But since Audrey Saunders opened her Pegu Club in Manhattan, most of the cocktail world has pronounced it PEG-oo, under the completely sound expectation that if Audrey says it, it very likely is so.

But I wondered.

So I picked up the phone and called the embassy of the Republic of Myanmar (what the communist junta renamed Burma to legitimize itself) in Washington, DC. I spoke to a marvelously helpful, if somewhat perplexed, young lady who had never heard the word Pegu or seen it written, at least not in English lettering. She agreed, however, to seek out someone at the embassy who was familiar with it, and call me back with the correct pronunciation. She did call back, (pro tip: say you are a “writer” working on a “story”, not a “blogger” writing a “post” if you want a call back) to tell me that a man in the embassy who lived nearby explained to her that the actual pronunciation is Puh-GOO.

So there you go. With that earth-shattering piece of investigative journalism out of the way, you can go back to calling the drink a PEG-oo, and I’ll keep right on calling it a Pee-Zhou, because I’m a creature of habit.

Aloha, Y’all!

Another Tiki Month has come and gone here at the Pegu Tiki Blog. No… as of tomorrow, it’ll be back to the Pegu Blog. I’ll be starting things off this March with a serious, cool post about (drumroll) the Pegu! Seriously, it’s pretty cool.

But for now, I just want to say thanks to all who dropped by this month.
To the regular cocktail crowd who put up with my temporary tropical insanity: thanks, and it is back to the usual.
To the Tiki lovers: hang around, the rest of the cocktailosphere is pretty cool too.
And to all the other bloggers who came along for the ride this Tiki Month… you guys are awesome! I hope I linked you all properly. If I didn’t, sorry. I wasn’t prepared with a good plan for all the buy-in this year. I’ll have a plan for next. I have many plans for next!

Each year, Tiki Month gets more fun and more elaborate. This year, instead of one big Tiki blowout, I hosted four casual drop-in Tiki happy hours for local friends. They all went well, but I expect more of you local types to show next year!

I love Tiki Month, but it is time to take down the decorations and store them, drop the Martin Denny and crank up the Psychedelic Furs, finish off the passion fruit syrup and make up some blueberry, and put away the blender. Tiki Detox around here always means a lot of Old-Fashioneds….

Thanks for the ride, guys.

Uninverted Source: Dr. Bamboo

Fred Yarm of Cocktail Virgin Slut, and author of Drink & Tell: A Boston Cocktail Book, is the man I call The Hardest Working Blogger in Booze Business™. Nowhere is this more clear than in his shouldering the burden of keeping Mixology Monday alive, and in wrangling other hard working bloggers into running the monthly programs. Since I am not a hard-working blogger, I have managed to miss almost all of the second wave of MxMos.

Bad blogger!
No Fernet for you!

But I made it in for this month, since I had a Tiki idea.

The excellent Stewart of Putney Farm stepped up to the plate to host MxMo this month, with a cool, if maddeningly open-ended, theme of Inversion. You can read his excellent round up of the results at that link, but I noted that there was a surprising number of Tiki or Tiki Compliant entries beyond mine and wanted to give them all a second link here.

My buddy Dagreb inverts the Suffering Bastard to give us the Flourishing Heir. For reasons unknown, this makes me think of Downton Abbey, and every time I read his post I am seized with the image of a Tiki party at Downton, with Carson arguing with the Earl of Grantham that it is scandalous for him to appear in that fighter plane-patterned dinner jacket, and the Earl should behave himself and wear his more conservative aloha floral patterned tails.
Oh, Dagreb offers a second inverted cocktail as well, but it is a vile perversion of all that is good and holy and I shall not write of it here.

Joey of Rated R Cocktails has bought into Tiki Month in a big way, may Pele bless him. He will need those blessings, because his offering, the Iat Iam (Mai Tai inverted, get it?) commits almost every sacrilege imaginable to Tiki’s holiest concotion… and still manages to produce a good result! Seriously Joe, gin? Orange juice? Bitters? Red superball cocktail cherries? Freaking Blue Curaçao? What, all out of commercial “grenadine”, were you?

Chef-blogger Nathan Hazard, whose blog sports the gloriously inexplicable moniker of The Chocolate of Meats, pulls off no mean feat in The Tigress—a completely juiceless Tiki drink! I don’t have the time to produce his pineapple cordial which ties it all together, which is too bad because I think this might be an ideal culmination of this year’s unofficial Tiki Month theme of cocktail-style Tiki drinks.

Another Tiki cocktail, a dessert one this time, is the Hawaii-O, from Danish blogger Andrea at Gin Hound. She takes a long-forgotten candy and inverts it into a cocktail. Chocolate and pineapple go really well together under all circumstances, but with a healthy dose of rum? Yum. The only thing I don’t like about this post is that it reminds me that I did no dessert drinks myself this time through Tiki Month….

One of my favorite bloggers, and one of my wife’s favorite bartenders, Jacob Grier of Liquidity Preference takes the classic Nui Nui and beers it up with Inversion IPA! I’d wax on here about the very interesting head Jacob gets on the drink from shaking it with a carbonated ingredient already mixed in, which I’d have never considered doing, but I’m too busy wondering where to find that extraordinary cocktail umbrella.
(Bonus: Check out Jacob’s Great Moments in Heterosexuality, which I’d previously not noticed.)

“Boozenerds” Christa and Shaun offer two Tiki, or at the least Tiki Compliant, cocktails. The Invertita (pictured) is a spicy aromatic drink where the frozen stuff stays under the liquid. The second, the Rogue Wave, is an Old-Fashioned that morphs into a Tiki drink as the frozen fruit nectar ice cubes melt. Tiki is a particularly ice-nerdy genre of drinks, and these are two fun-looking techniques that I intend to try with stuff that isn’t Tiki-related too.

And I did my aforementioned post as well, in which I “inverted” making a critical Tiki ingredient by, um, not making said critical Tiki ingredient.

There are plenty more worthwhile (though not Tiki) posts outlined in Stewart’s roundup post. Do go check them out as well!

And hey! This post is part of Tiki Month 2013 here at the Pegu Blog! Be sure to look around for LOTS more Tiki stuff all February!

Cocktail-style Tiki drinks really have ended up being the central theme of exploration this Tiki Month, and here is another: The Captain’s Blood. Of course, both in name and in flavor, the Captain’s blood is more Pirate than Polynesian, but I’ll allow it. After all, pirate stuff has a long association with Tiki, just as spy-themed music and paraphernalia do. And Tiki’s patron saints, Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic, were really pirates in all but the name. (They also omitted the bad hygiene and most of the old ultra-violence, but let’s not quibble)

There are all sorts of recipes for Captain’s Blood on the web, and aside from all pretty much containing rum, lime of some fashion, and usually bitters of some type, there seems to be no definitive recipe. I suspect that this is one of those drinks with a great name that has been reverse engineered from the memory of the taste countless times, and for which we shall never find a rock-solid origin or original formulation. I went with the one of CocktailDB, which has propagated the farthest on the web and which is the most nearly Tiki in character. I made two amendments, which I will explain.

The original CocktaiDB recipe calls for one dash of Angostura and a half teaspoon of sugar (roughly 1 tsp simple syrup). That result I found to be too thin, even sour, in flavor, especially if you are looking for a Tiki, or at least a Tiki Compliant, cocktail.
Increasing the bitters demonstrates that great, largely unappreciated by the masses, cocktail truth: Bitters in small amounts don’t increase the bitterness of a drink, they knock the edges off other outsize flavor elements instead. In this case, the extra bitters just sands down the sourness of the lime and falernum without hiding the underlying flavorful goodness.
I got the idea for the honey mix from Rumdood’s old post on homemade falernum. It was my choice to up the amount. I like the melding of the flavors resulting from the added sweetness, and the honey also gives a tiny bit of additional complexity. But make no mistake, this remains a tart drink. The honey also gives a tiny bit richer body to the cocktail, which I like as well. Next time I try it, I may even replace the honey mix with gomme syrup, to see how far I can take that effect.

The suggestion for this Tiki Month post from Jason McGrady, who presides over the mahogany at Sazerac Restaurant in the Hotel Monaco in Seattle, where Maggi and I stayed two Summers ago. What’s that? Yes, I keep in touch with bartenders I haven’t seen in two years. I keep track of an incredible number of good bartenders around the world whom I seldom actually see. You never know when I am going to have a sudden need for an agent to do me a favor and make me a good drink. I’m like the Shadow that way.

“Someday, bartender, I will need a Manhattan from you….”
Source: Alex Sheikman

And hey! This post is part of Tiki Month 2013 here at the Pegu Blog! Be sure to look around for LOTS more Tiki stuff all February!

Here’s a punch recipe.

Sound fun? Go check out the whole back story at Hurricane Hayward’s Atomic Grog Blog. It involves the two rockingest hats in the rum world, those belonging to Jeff Berry and Ian Burrell, as well other assorted Tiki celebrities. The author of the recipe is Martin Cate.

Folks, this is a serviceable punch. Sure, it doesn’t require 8 liters of light rum, 4 liters of gin, 4 liters of rye, 4 liters of cognac, and 9 gallons of wine, along with the stockings of a soldier’s wife and soil from the land which last shuddered under the regiment’s guns, but a serviceable punch none the less.

Had Admiral Schley been still alive, Hurricane would have had to double his shopping list. I loves me a really big punch.