So I had to resort to hiring a crew to clean up my yard after the wholly inadequate job I did last Fall of putting the gardens to bed. I was outside in the gloaming just now and discovered that my unstoppable bed of mint has put in its debut. This annual appearance always leaves me of two minds. On the one hand, my struggle to keep it in its confined bed becomes more and more like Leiningen vs the Ants each year. On the other hand, mint is the greatest combined cocktail ingredient and garnish since limes.

Lemons?
Screw lemons. They aren’t in the same class.

Cherries either.

The way I see it, a cocktailian has only two choices when he beholds nature’s first offering of mint each year. He can whip up a Mai Tai with a garnish so thick it tickles one’s whole face. Or it is Julep Time, baby! Somehow, I always end up making the same choice. There is time enough for Tiki Month flashbacks later.

Screw waiting for Derby Day. And screw the sickly sweet, maddeningly green concoctions you are too likely to get at a commercial bar or lame home parties when Derby Day comes. The Julep is one of the truly great cocktail categories of the 19th Century, and it is high time it is restored to greatness in the 21st.

That is my recipe. You can omit the other spirits, if you like. If you are a wimp. You can also substitute rye for the bourbon, which I often do, especially if I’m having my Julep before, rather than with food. A Julep at its heart is just spirit, sugar, and mint. How you put it together shows whether you are a contender… or a pretender.

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.

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.

Oh man, do I love this drink.
Rather than fighting his way through the savage natives of greater Van Nuys to unearth this recipe from a spider-filled attic of some bartender’s grandson, Indiana Beachbum Berry just up and created this one himself. Unlike the cocktail-style offerings which have comprised so many of the drinks that I have highlighted, and will continue to highlight, this Tiki Month, the Beachbum’s Own is a classic crushed ice, ceramic mug filler.

I’ve adjusted Jeff’s recipe slightly from the one appearing in Remixed to account for 151 being the only Lemon Hart Demerara we can get in the States right now. If you have a regular proof El Dorado or other aged demerara, use 1 1/4 oz.

Licor 43 (aka Cuarenta y Tres) is an underused liqueur in Tiki drinks, if you ask me. Richer, deeper, and boozier than vanilla simple syrup, it adds more complexity to any already complex drink. In this beverage, it really helps give a unique and different element.

A final word on the Beachbum’s Own, it is very classically Tiki in that there is a lot of alcohol in here, and it does not give much indication of this to the unsuspecting drinker. It’s no Zombie or Hurricane, but comport yourself with all due caution….

Hawaiian Karaoke?
No thanks, I’ve heard you sing.

Ha! I’ll have you know I used to be a soloist… when I was still a soprano… But no, Carioca was a bar in Puerto Rico in the Second World War. Let’s hope they didn’t have karaoke back then.

This is pretty simple little cocktail, and it definitely tastes less Tiki than many of the other drinks I’ve tried this year. It actually has Caribbean origins, so it makes sense that it work more like classic rum cocktails, rather than the Tiki drinks that descended from them.

Be sure to have a ball with the garnish, to help Tiki this little number up. It’s a rewarding sip, but as I said, it lacks the Pacific island funk I’d like in a February libation.

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!

One odd phenomenon about this year’s Tiki Month is a new-found affinity on my part to drinks born out of Don the Beachcomber. In the past, I have always leaned much more to Trader Vic’s style of concoction. But so far this year, I’ve found a number of Don’s recipes turn out to taste much better than their ingredients list would give any indication. The Queen’s Road Cocktail is the best of these I’ve found so far.

The Queen’s Road also has the distinction of being one of the few true “cocktails” in the Tiki tradition. Thus you can give your arm a rest from hefting those fun ceramic grotesqueries that are close in size and weight to a 40 of Colt than they are to the delicate concoctions I sip the rest of the year, and instead give a nod to your regular stemware. Or you can combine the best of both worlds and serve it up in a TikiTini glass!

With honey mix and the dreaded orange juice, the Kanye West of cocktail ingredients, as well as some added simple, I expected this one to be far too sweet. Instead, the first sip was revelatory. It doesn’t taste sweet. It doesn’t taste boozy or rummy. And it doesn’t taste of orange juice. The flavor of this cocktail should appeal to just about any drinker, with any background, as long as they are not seeking the bite of raw liquor. It is good, folks.

I noted in the SideBlog a few days ago an excellent definition of the term “balance”, which describes it as existing in a drink where all the flavors get their turn and you can distinguish and identify them all. I’ll now quibble with that definition in my contention that a balanced Tiki drink is very nearly the opposite; all the flavors meld together, and subsume the characteristics of the spirit, to create a new gestalt of the whole, where it is hard to discern for sure any of the components.

In many of the really great Tiki drinks, instead of finely crafted harmonies, you get what seems to be an entirely new flavor. I think that it is this above all else that may account for the popularity of the original Tiki movement. Tiki may have explicitly exhibited its glorious lack of authenticity, but it delivered on its promise of an experience unlike any to be found in the comfortable, familiar environs of home.

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!

Few Tiki joints in America inspire the kind of evangelical love as does the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale, FL. It is a living fossil; perhaps the only of the original independent Tiki palaces which never slipped quietly into that dark night. I’ve been there, and it is a nigh-veritable Disneyland quality execution of commercial Tiki. It has live shows, multiple bar rooms, and food that doesn’t suck. It hosts the annual Hukilau Tiki festival. And it has a long tradition of serious Tiki drinks.

During my one visit, I was pleasantly surprised at how close to old-school the drinks were. But the menu is not, fortunately, frozen in time. Still, if you update the menu, some old classics will be lost. The Big Bamboo is such a drink, now replaced by a “milder” version called the Mara-Amu.

This is really a delicious cocktail, and surprising in many ways. Orange juice is a bitch of an ingredient in any style cocktail, as even just a little too much can take over anything. But in this recipe it behaves itself nicely, bringing what it should to the party without dropping its pants and dancing on the furniture like it usually does. Together, all the fruits meld to form one of those marvelous, “tropical” flavor gestalts that make Tiki drinks so cool. But the bitters and all that ice neatly balance out what I was expecting to be a fairly sweet drink, instead producing a tart, zesty, highly refreshing result that brings an immediate smile. The feel here is neither in the Vic school, nor the Don to my way of tasting. I like that and want to find more such drinks this year, to expand my Tiki horizons. With only an ounce and a half of alcohol in a large vessel drink, it is pretty gentle. I’m not sure how much effect specific rums will have on this drink, but I will make enough of them to find out, I assure you.

As an exit question, the characterization of the Mara-Amu as “milder” comes from the Bum, in Sippin’ Safari. I’ve never had one of those, so I’m curious, in what way is it milder? The Mara-Amu is listed in the Medium section of the Mai Kai’s menu, and the Big Bamboo is a veritable kitten compared to the Swizzles and Jet Pilots in the Strong section. Any of my South Florida readers want to lay some knowledge on us?

Update: Here are two more takes on the Big Bamboo from last year: The Atomic Grog Blog, which expands on the history of the drink, and Chemistry of the Cocktail, which concentrates on trying to improve it.

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!

One thing I hope to do this year’s Tiki Month is find some good modern original Tiki drinks to try and to feature here. Lo and behold, I wake up first thing the morning of Day One to a Tweet from @Dagreb of Nihil Utopia, alerting my to the I Should Buy a Boat, an original by Joe at Measure & Stir.

If all you people are so Johnny on the Spot with the Tiki tips, this Tiki Month will go smoothly for all of us!

Above is a picture of Joe’s concoction. You need to click through to his site for more, larger pictures, as well as his exact recipe, and why his proportions are as they are. He unaccountably fails to mention in his discussion that this is a Tiki drink, but with rum, grapefruit and exotic spice syrup, I declare it so. In his post on the original version he did note that its spiritual godfather is Don the Beachcomber, though.

The presentation, though certainly beautiful and elaborate enough to be Tiki, isn’t what I’m looking to do this time of year, so when I took my shot at it, I went with crushed ice and curled the grapefruit slice into a flower with mint stamens. Also, I used equal parts vanilla syrup and cinnamon syrup, rather than Joe’s combined syrup. Frankly, it is still too much sweet, but the ice cuts things a lot. The challenge is to use the minimum of the syrup needed to still deliver the spice flavors. This is the best round I came up with:

Fez found at FezMonger

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!

This is the first new Tiki drink I made in the calendar Tiki Month, so I’ll blog it first, even though it is hardly the best I’ve tried so far.
Don’s Special Daiquiri is on first examination a near perfect Tiki variant on the Gospel of Rum, the classic Daiquiri cocktail. It uses multiple rums, the sugar is replaced with honey, and Tiki standard passionfruit is added to the mix. Very Tiki. Also, not very good.
Here’s the recipe as presented by the Bum in Remixed:

I didn’t read the background, or really look at the ratios here before making it, or I’d have been expecting the near cloying sweetness we encountered at the first and subsequent sips. If you deconstruct the recipe, you end up with a strong, sour, sweet ratio of roughly 4-1-2, with fairly gentle strong, and pretty robust sweet elements. My default for Sour-type drinks is 3-1-1, which may or may not be a bit much for some of you, but I wager that this recipe’s balance will feel off for most everyone.

The recipe is of 1970′s vintage, which could explain the severe sweetness two ways:

1. People in the 70′s had awful taste in cocktails. I doubt I will get much of a fight on this one.
2. These proportions were actually meant to be served as a smooth-blended Icee style drink. The addition of a ton of blended ice would cut the sweetness a lot.

Could the Bum have missed something in his research? More likely, the ratios were constructed because #2 was intended, but the staff was mistakenly told it was to be served Up, and no one noticed because… #1.

But underneath all that gooeyness, the flavors are trying to dance a good figure. I tried again, closer to my usual preferred balance, by changing both the honey mix and passionfruit to generous quarter ounces instead of halves. It is better. Much better.

But it still has no business wearing Don the Beachcomber’s name. Anyone else worked over this one, and come up with the right proportions? I’m sure they are in there to be discovered, I just have to move on. Lots to do this Tiki Month!

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!