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.

Tiare is keeping up her end of Tiki Month until the finish. Here’s the last of her three new mugs, containing a 2070 Swizzle, created by Martin Cate.

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!

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.

“Oh, I think we’ll be the judge of that!
Source: Meme-O-Rama

Twitter is, no doubt, a terrible time-suck. I can think of any number of great cocktail blogs whose death can be attributed to being cut up into 140 character chunks and fed to the big blue bird. And if you follow and are followed by the wrong sort of tweeter, Twitter can be a hive of scum and villainy so awful it makes Mos Eisley spaceport look like a convent.

But if you have the right followers, Twitter can also be a great place to start conversations and develop new ideas.

One such idea we’ve been kicking around this month, that I believe first arose from the mind of Joe Garcia, an otherwise excellent blogger, tweeter, and commenter who apparently constantly teeters on the edge of washing his clothes with dried coconut flakes, is the cocktail class we’ll call Tiki Compliant.

A Tiki Compliant drink is one that is not, due to its origin, history, name, etc., a Tiki drink, but which sure as hell works as a Tiki drink. If you were to find one of these cocktails on a real Tiki bar menu, the ignorant drinker would not be able to tell the difference, and the average cocktailian would say, “you know, that really makes sense if you think about it.” Even the serious Tiki types, the ones who will argue vehemently until 3 in the morning that the Q.B. Cooler is really the prototype of the Mai Tai, will look at a Tiki Compliant drink and go, “Eh. I’ll allow it.”

To be clear, people who argue that the Q. B. Cooler is the progenitor of Trader Vic’s Mai Tai are known, clinically in the Latin as, “wrong“. They are hapless Donn Beach fanboys deluding themselves about this subject, and who, if outnumbered by drinkers who test positive for “correct”, are always nine seconds away from making this YouTube video:

And yes, I am aware that this Q.B. Cooler thing is espoused by no less a light than Jeff Beachbum Berry himself. But Jeff is forgiven for it because he has to sell tickets to seminars, and Rule 4 says there is no success like controversy.

I want everyone to know that Guy’s opinions are his own, and if you don’t like them, address your flames to his Twitter feed, @TheGuyPegu, that way your mascara won’t run all over me.

And now, if I may have my post back before you completely derail it?

By all means. My work here is done.

So what are some Tiki Compliant drinks, and why?

I’ll start with the one that started this whole process, the Dark ‘n Stormy. Intellectual property issues aside, the Dark ‘n Stormy is no Tiki drink. It has only two ingredients. And while it is from an island, it is one on the wrong side of the world and which is known chiefly as the home of funny shorts and where Bloomberg runs off to hide when there is to much unremoved snow or storm water lying around for his limousine to navigate the streets of New York City. But with its particularly dark rum, and the spicy sweetness of ginger beer creating such a mysterious and unaccountably deep blend of flavors, the DnS just works.

Another obviously compliant non-Tiki drink is the Hemingway Daiquiri. The ingredient list reads a lot more like a Tiki drink this time, with two citruses, rum, and an oddball liqueur in the mix. But it clearly isn’t Tiki again because it’s Caribbean and it’s godfather is one of the least Tiki old SOB’s I can think of who nonetheless slept that much on a boat.

There are lots more, lesser known drinks that are Tiki Compliant to one degree or another, like this new Martinique Cocktail from Chow.

And how about drinks considered Tiki drinks that should really be considered Tiki Compliant? The Carioca Hawaiian that I blogged earlier this Tiki Month is maybe one of these. It is called a Tiki drink because of the recipe, and because it was invented as a Tiki drink to begin with.
But it isn’t really that Tiki in its actual flavor. Do we perhaps call it more Tiki Compliant than straight up Tiki?

It’s a fun game to play. What is your favorite Tiki Compliant cocktail?

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!