The Pegu is a great way to aid the transition from wintertime dark liquor to a Summer of gin. The Hemingway Daiquiri is a worthy one, too.

“Making cocktails is a lot more like baking than it is like cooking.” I hear this all the time from bartenders, the point being that precise measurement is vital to making balanced drinks. A bit too much citrus, too little vermouth, and your finely crafted, expensive cocktail isn’t is as good as it should be. This is why we encourage bartenders and home mixologists to use a jigger. It’s more consistent and delivers better results than “free-pouring” as the bartending academies instruct.
-Jacob Grier

That is how one of my favorite bartenders and bar bloggers starts a new post today that challenges us all to really take drinks to the ultimate level of consistency and quality. Jacob notes that volumetric measurements are problematic, especially the very small measures used in such things as dashes. The solution that people who care about results use when baking is to use a scale.

Go read the whole thing at Jacob’s site. I will note that one reason for measuring the mass of ingredients instead of volume in baking has to do with the compressibility of powdered ingredients like flour. Now, I don’t have a lot of flour-based recipes in my repertoire, but I would not put it past some of our more creative artistes. And more to the point, the real problem in cocktails comes with the smallest of ingredient amounts, such as dashes or drops. If you can’t even count on one bottle of Angostura to the next delivering the same amount in a dash, imagine from one brand to the next. A high-quality digital scale is the answer to this issue!

I will note that the OXO scale shown in Jacob’s picture is not up to the task that he himself lays out for measuring such amounts as .666g of bitters, as it is accurate only to the whole gram. The PeguWife and I have a retired Olympic scale that was first used for weighing the shoes of beach volleyball players. It is sensitive to the thousandth of the gram, so it wasn’t precise enough for the outfits….

via FoxSports.

Since a scale like ours is in limited supply, I’d suggest something like this Ohaus Scout Pro Portable Scale for professional bars, as it appears to be robust enough to handle the rough, wet environment. It is a bit expensive, but only two ought to be enough for most any bar. For the home, I’d suggest something cheaper, like this American Weigh Gemini.

I’m excited by this whole new world of precision in my cocktails, and I expect to see scales in use all over on the next calendar year! It really isn’t that much more exacting effort to use this system. Let’s hope everyone starts expecting this, so the people who do will get exactly the drink they deserve.

Cheers, y’all.

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!

Jordan Devereaux of Chemistry of the Cocktail posted an original drink early on this Tiki Month entitled the Suit, Tie and Lei. To be honest, I didn’t know what to do with it, partly because I do not have one ingredient, Aperol, and partly because this did not look like a Tiki drink or a drink that I’d particularly like.

But I trust Jordan’s taste, and yesterday I went ahead and made up one, using a old bottle of Campari I haven’t gotten around to pouring out have been keeping around. And what do you know, it is remarkably good, and has far more of a Tiki vibe than I would have thought possible. It really demonstrates the transformative power of the kind of long list of ingredients that Tiki features, because no drink including Campari, Angostura, vermouth, and allspice should be this smooth and soft. It is a helluva lot more in your face than many Tiki drinks, but still remains accessible and possesses that undefinable new gestalt flavor that just isn’t any of its ingredients that makes Tiki drinks what they are.

Go check Jordan’s site for the recipe!

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!

Among my favorite blogging compatriots is Joe Garcia of Basic Civilization. While not strictly a Tiki blogger, or even strictly a cocktail blogger, Joe does both of those well. In fact, he kinda annoys me. See, he thinks he possesses a better sense of sartorial style than I. He is wrong, though I admit he has far more opportunity to indulge in haberdasherian excellence—He actually sees his customers face to face on a recurring basis.

More annoying is the fact that he may in fact be funnier than I am. Take a few minutes to read this piece, entitled “It’ll be fun,” they said. That is some Dave Barry, James Lileks, Patrick McManus-level stuff there.

And his cocktail posts also exhibit this sort of amusement value at times, as he does in the Tiki Month post I want to Rule 2 highlight here.
Since he has no picture, and the part I want to you to visit his site for is the writing, I’ll actually post the recipe here, and discuss. Joe calls his original drink the Aku-Capo Cooler. He actually offers two versions of it, but I will stick with #1, the better one.

Why two versions of the drink, you ask?
Read the damn post, say I!

I’ve modified his recipe in two ways. First, Joe wants you to rim the glass with dried, ground coconut. This is a pain in the ass to accomplish. Second, he wants you to shake the drink and serve on crushed ice, rather than blend it. Since he also thinks the Cooler is a bit on the sweet side, my solution is simply to blend the drink, rather than shake. This increases the cold water content. The cold water damps down the sweet and lets the other flavors come forward.

Don’t get me wrong, the Aku-Kapo Cooler is still on the sweeter side, but I really like it. I’ve served to a number of guests so far this month, and they’ve liked it to. I didn’t tell them they were supposed to be getting a coconut rim, because what they don’t know won’t hurt them.

Now this here is some Falernum. Doing it well, doing it beautifully. Via @Dabreb

I’d like to thank Rowan, in the sense that he is one of my fellow bloggers who is helping turn this year’sTiki Month into something of a month-long, slow-rolling, Mixology Monday-type blog carnival.

I’d also like to thank Rowan, in the sense of “Thank you sooooo very much for this festive earworm you’ve given me!” in his latest effort.

Yeah, he calls this drink the FM. And yeah, it’s good. It is a nicely musky mix of grapefruit and chocolate that makes a very effective drink for after-dinner relaxation. It also gives me a use for that aging bottle of creme de cacao I’ve been storing.

Sip an FM, and you’ll endure no static at all. And now hopefully I’ve gotten rid of the worm by inflicting it on you. Be sure you follow the link to check the recipe, and Rowan’s far classier, less garishly Tiki photo.

Oh, and enlarge my photo to see how I embedded a paper umbrella stem in a solid block of ice; a metaphor for trying to jam an icepick in my ear to remove Steely Dan….