Each year, during Tiki Month, I try to do an interview with one of the long-term Tiki-bloggers who helped spark my interest in Tiki drinks and culture in the first place. I call these folks my Board of Tiki Idols, and they all have been helpful to me in many ways as I learn about this fascinating cocktail sub-culture.

This year’s interview is with Blair Reynolds, aka Trader Tiki. Trader Tiki is a former bartender and video game quality assurance manager who lives in Portland, OR. (Yes, that means that when he wasn’t slinging hooch, he was playing video games for a living.) You can read his blog here. You’ll note that his posting is nowhere near as frequent as it once was. (This is sad.) The reason for this is that a little over a year ago, Blair took the leap and went into the cocktail business for real. (This is awesome.) His new firm, Trader Tiki’s Hand-Crafted Exotic Syrups, makes a broad range of excellent cocktail syrups such as his best-selling orgeat, a falernum, a ginger syrup, a vanilla syrup, and more. While he brands himself with a Tiki motif, the usefulness of his products extends way beyond Tiki drinks.
I talked with Blair a few days ago.

My first question was when he opened his doors, and how he came to decide to do so. Blair’s first sale was in December, 2009, and was to a friend who, interestingly, doesn’t drink alcohol! The direct impetus for going into business for himself was that same as it is for many entrepreneurs: a change with his employer that he didn’t like. As he cast about for a new professional direction, his Tiki blogging offered an answer.
I’ve written before that I only go Tiki one month a year because all the prep, ingredients, etc. are a huge pain to keep up with. Even Tiki Idols like Blair are not immune to this issue. Many times in the past, as he piddled around over a hot stove making small batches of all sorts of syrups, he often thought, “Someone should make all this easier.”
At last, Blair, started finishing that thought with, “Hey! I’m someone!” His blogging gave him a serious leg up in the venture. First, he already had a “brand” in place in both the Tiki and general craft cocktail communities. This didn’t hurt with establishing an initial level of business. Moreover, all the time and energy he had spent over that stove gave him a broad base of recipes and knowledge of product development.

He doesn’t manufacture his syrups in his kitchen anymore, of course. He has hired a commercial kitchen (or Co-Packer) to do the actual production and packaging. He has a large role in the production through quality control of both the ingredients and final product. The arrangement let him get off the ground for a manageable investment and is scalable. So, as happened this week, when he gets a giant new customer, his operation won’t veer into a ditch.

Business apparently is good. “Sales are up over 340% over last year,” he told me. “It’s great because I can experiment a little now with an expanded product line.” The first bitters from Trader Tiki is in production and will be showing up in just a short while. When I mentioned to Blair that his website is titled, “Trader Tiki’s Exotic Syrups, Bitters, and Spirits“, and asked what his plans were to fulfill the rest of that mission, he laughed and told me, “Buy more syrups!”

So who buys his stuff? “I’ve got an unusual business model,” says Blair. “I do direct retail sales myself over the ‘Net. I sell to bars and restaurants. I sell wholesale to retailers. and I’m now making some good sales to large distributors.”
His largest segment right now is direct sales to bars. This is both a great potential market for Blair, and a difficult sale.
Lots of craft bars, who use many of the unusual ingredients that Blair makes have gotten used to making them themselves. For some it’s habit, for others, a point of pride, and a few simply don’t want to let their customers see them using commercial ingredients of the sort that cocktail snobs believe need to be homemade. “That’s great for ‘em, if that’s what they want to do,” says Blair. “But they need to consider a few things.” First, as I noted above, making your own syrups, especially those like orgeat and falernum, is time-consuming, expensive, and frankly, hard to get right. “If they use my syrups, they can have same control and consistency with these things as they do with their spirits.” A bar that makes its own syrups and like ingredients is going to have a hard time making sure the strength and consistency is always the same, and they would have a harder time managing their inventory to make sure they never run out as well.

Be you a cocktail enthusiast or an owner or manager of a Bar That Cares About What It’s Doing, and you want to give Trader Tiki’s stuff a whirl, you can get it directly from him at his online store. It’s also available at retailers in New York, Washington, Seattle, Oregon, California, and even Indiana. (Someone in Ohio, get on the stick!)
For a complete listing of retailers, online sellers, bars and distributors who have the goods, check out Blair’s Where To Buy page. There’s lots to choose from. Blair’s current product line is: Cinnamon Syrup, Don’s Mix and Don’s Spices #2, Falernum, Ginger Syrup, Hazelnut Orgeat, Hibiscus Grenadine, Orgeat, Passion Fruit Syrup, Peppermint Syrup, and Vanilla Syrup.

As a final note, I also talked to Blair about his fabulous Basement Tiki Bar, though I’ll save most of that for another post. For now I’ll merely note that he calls it Reynolés Galley, and notes that it is wonderful evidence of Tiki’s ability to co-opt a great deal of anachronistic elements, such a Caribbean pirate fables, into the essential glorious inauthenticity of its South Seas exotica.

I recently reviewed Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log for Tiki Month. I thought I’d do a little Rule 2 work and point you to a much more comprehensive homage to the Log. Pegu Blog Board of Tiki Idols member Tiare has undertaken a Bloggessy she entitles Mixing Through Grog Log. This is a bit of Rule 2 on Tiare’s part as well, as she is riffing on Erik Ellestad’s mammoth jeremiad, Stomping Through the Savoy, over at Underhill Lounge. Erik is attempting to survive making every cocktail in The Savoy Cocktail Book, in order. (Itself a riff on similar to Julie Powell’s Julie/Julia Project of movie fame).
Tiare is making a run at the much more human task of running through the Grog Log. Not only is the Log shorter, but it is a Best Of compilation. Also, Tiare has made the decision to do an original variant on each of the Bum’s entries, and you can get a nice insight into the mind of a Tiki expert on crafting drinks. Plus, it gives her a chance to post a second, gorgeous picture….
The great thing about that is it gives me an excuse to steal a couple of her pictures to illustrate! Here are the pictures from Mixing Through Grog Log 5. On the left is Beachcomber’s Punch, on the right is Tiare’s variant, Tiki Queen Punch.

Recently, I heard that OXO, the makers of many nifty kitchen gadgets, had discontinued their gadget most near and dear to the hearts of many cocktailians, the OXO 2oz. Angled Measuring Cup.
I was miffed, as were a bunch of others. I asked everyone who read my piece to spread the word and to contact OXO, asking them to please not discontinue this essential product. Apparently, our efforts got their attention, because this comment appeared yesterday:

Stop the presses!!!! This is OXO. Seriously…OXO. I want to clarify that the Mini Measuring Cups are NOT discontinued! They are currently only available at retail (and I saw them on Amazon – just type in “OXO Mini Measuring Cups”), however we are working on a configuration to make both the stainless steel and plastic versions available on our website, http://www.oxo.com, very (very) shortly. Stay tuned!

I immediately communicated with the commenter, Bena, who is a Senior Brand Communication Manager for OXO. Apparently, the problem was that OXO had discontinued selling the cups on their own website, rather than discontinued making them. Apparently, they had a minor internal miscommunication which resulted in inquiring minds being told that the cups were no longer being made. The issue is that heretofore, OXO has sold the cups only in packs of 24. This does seem a pretty large number to buy at once, I will admit. When you buy a single cup from Amazon, or at a retailer like Bed, Bath, & Beyond, for four bucks, the retailer has broken up one of these 24 packs for resale. Why they don’t just sell them in smaller quantities (I’d suggest three packs), I don’t know, but Bena assures me it isn’t quite that simple. (Last sentence edited after clarification)
Still, the status of discontinued on the OXO website will apparently be short-lived. Plastic mini measures will soon be available there again, with the stainless steel to follow at some point. Bena has not gotten me actual numbers on the calls and emails they’ve received, but she was sure it was a pretty good number. It got her attention at any rate! So I call this one a victory for the cocktailosphere (whether our squawking actually had anything to do with the decision or not).
Regardless, we can all rest easy, our cocktail jiggers will not pass into that good night. Also, another OXO manager I corresponded with, Michelle, did reassure me that, while the cups were designed primarily for cooking, OXO has for quite some time realized how popular the product is with bartenders, professional and enthusiast.

Oh, and I did not call a Tiki Timeout from the February festivities here for this post because I think the mini measures are especially valuable for Tiki drinks. More than any other kind of drink, Tiki drinks call for large numbers of ingredients in small quantities. You can make these drinks with jiggers and spoons, but the process gets even more laborious. And all the Hawaiian shirts and Tiki music in the world won’t keep your mood happy if it takes you longer to make your drink than it does to drink it!
So, to celebrate the resurrection of the Mini Measure, demonstrate it’s Pegu Blog Certified Tiki Effectiveness™, and make a Rule 2 tie-in back to where I first heard of the whole kerfuffle (as well as throwing in a shoutout to two products brought by the Liquor Fairy), I present to you the following treat from Tiare, at a Mountain of Crushed Ice.

CATDADDY MOONSHINE ZOMBIE PUNCH

• ¾ oz fresh lime juice
• ½ oz Donn`s mix (now available from Trader Tiki!)
• ½ oz Falernum
• 1.0 oz dark Jamaican rum
• 1.0 oz gold Puerto Rican rum
• 1 oz 151 demerara rum
• 1 oz Catdaddy Carolina Moonshine
• Dash Angostura bitters
• 6 drops Herbasint or Pernod
• 1 tsp Grenadine
• 6 oz crushed ice

Put everything into a blender, saving ice for last and blend at high speed for 5 sek. Pour into a chimney glass. Garnish 2 pineapple leaves and a lime slice.

Now, if I could only get them to make a metal, 2 cup, dry measuring cup, I’d be my wife’s hero….

A I begin my Second Annual Tiki Month, cramming the site full of Tiki drinks and Tiki thoughts, I’d best once again remind all and sundry that I am no Tiki expert. While I find Tiki fascinating, I do not (except in February) immerse myself in the mythos and minutiae of the theme. But I do like to at least avoid saying anything completely stupid when I am pontificating. Thus I have assembled a group of my friends who are Tiki masters, in one way or another, and dubbed them The Pegu Blog Board of Tiki Idols. They helped me at times when I needed it last year, and hopefully will again this year. I say hopefully because we all know that Tiki Idols are capricious and unreliable, and I’m not sacrificing any of my limited supply of virgins just for cocktail recipes.

In this post, I’d like to introduce Tiare, of A Mountain of Crushed Ice. A fellow CSOWG member, Tiare lives in Sweden, where I surmise her need for Tiki in the dead of Winter far exceeds mine. While not exclusively a Tikiblogger, Tiare’s mastery of garnishes and love of crushed ice, along with a darn fine knowledge of rums, makes her one of the experts on Tikidom that I most enjoy.
As I do with all the PBBoTIs, I asked Tiare, what is Tiki?

To me its first and foremost the great grand escape from reality, its escapism taken to the highest level. And it works. It’s a mix of many things and also fun and crazy humor paired with a very (heartfelt) spirit. It makes people relax and have fun. I mean, who can stay serious and big about himself if he wears a tropical shirt with flowers and drinks from a skull mug? In that attire you just have to relax and that’s the effect Tiki has on many people. It’s also very fake and that makes it fun. Pair it with some dark mysticism and drinks that – if done the right way – take you to drink nirvana.

Tiara hits the nail on the head for me here. Even before I ever had my first real (as opposed to sickeningly sweetly disgusting) Tiki drink, I somehow appreciated the pagan escapism that practically mandates you be in a silly mood for a while.
And what makes a Tiki drink a Tiki drink?

There´s a fine line between a tropical drink and a Tiki drink because a Tiki drink is a tropical drink that is Tiki.

I love it when people besides me wander down the rhetorical rabbit hole…. Then she ruins it by explaining herself.

A Zombie is a Tiki drink, a Pina Colada is not. Most Tiki drinks have an element of Tiki history, they were created during the grand old Tiki era. There are modern Tiki drinks too and what they have in common with the old Tiki drinks is that they are constructed in a certain way and they usually contain a balanced mix of specific natural ingredients like diverse flavored syrups, falernum or pimento dram. Most Tiki drinks – but not all – are made with different rums, carefully paired to create new flavors.The reason so many old Tiki drinks were made with rums is because rum was cheap at the time and rums also naturally pairs very well with all those fresh fruit juices and syrups and stuff.

Another thing many Tiki drinks have in common is some crazy silly funny names without being lame.

While most Tiki drink names aren’t lame, they do seem to teeter right on the edge. I think this is indicative of the moderate element of risk that is needed for really true Tiki.
To sum up, Tiare, what is the most important, non-liquid element of Tiki to you?

Got to be the Tiki mug, and then the shirt.

I so totally agree. I did not do enough shirt-blogging last year. I’ll be fixing that this February.
Thanks Tiare!

Well folks, Tiki Month draws to a close, and I am drinking my last Tiki drink of the festivities. Not my last Tiki drink, of course. This stuff is too damn much fun to let go off permanently. But I have little kids and a wife. I don’t have time to be a Tiki blogger. Besides I love my classic cocktails too much to have more than an occasional fling with the tropics.
I wanted to go out with a bang, so I went searching with some criteria. I had to have read about it from one of the Board of Tiki Idols members’ blogs. It had to use either falernum or orgeat. It had to have pineapple. And it had to be a rum drink. And it had to have a long list of ingredients. In short, it had to be a Tiki drink!
Rick had the answer—a drink he wrote about back in the summer of 2006, when he was first falling permanently under the spell of the volcano gods. I decided to assemble a….
Puka Punch!
Rick got it from Intoxica!,by Beach Bum Berry. You can tell how old this post is by the fact that Rick calls him Jeff Berry. Also, he writes the following words:

In general, I find garnishes to be pretty boring.

Times change, people. That’s all I’m saying. Oh, and I made a few small changes, to suit my lack of passionfruit juice.

Rick calls for a fun glass. Okey dokey Tiki Idol, gotcha. This last drink had to be Over The Top Boys, hard core Tiki. I went with a hollowed out fresh pineapple for the vessel. Then I put a sugar cube in a lime shell, soaked the cube with 151, and floated the shell like a boat in the drink. Then I plunked a huge chunk of dry ice down into the drink.
Whadda ya think folks? Did I learn well this month?

Oh, and I learned one other thing. If you put dry ice in a drink, then try to light a garnish on the surface…..

As part of rounding up Tiki Month, I’d like to discuss some ingredients I’ve discovered that are integral to Tiki.
The first is Falernum.
I had honestly never heard of this stuff until the last year, and had absolutely no idea what the heck it was. I will say the name evoked some unpleasant imagery in my mind. I somehow transmuted it to a mish-mash of Faust and Infernal, or some such mental breakdown. The result was that I instinctively rejected any recipe with falernum in it for quite a while. There seems to be no definitive position on the etymology of this word, but Darcy has a good story, while NationMaster has a drier idea.
But as I started ramping up for Tiki month, it became clear that if I wanted to do a complete job on the subject, I was going to have to deal with falernum. In fact, Wikipedia has the following thing to say about it:

Famous drinks including Falernum include:

• almost any Tiki drink

While this is yet another good example of why you should never trust Wikipedia, it does hold some grain of truth. Falernum is a very important ingredient in Tiki. It’s common, but by no means omnipresent.
I looked around and found a small bottle of falernum made by Fee’s. I bought it, but was confused. What little I had read about the stuff before shying away from the weird name led me to believe it was a liqueur, not a syrup. What is this stuff anyway?
The long and short of it is, falernum is a… a… an ingredient. It combines a number of flavors, including clove, lime, ginger, and almond into a pungent, exotic, viscous fluid. It was originally a liqueur, and many falernums are still manufactured that way. But in most modern applications, it is an accent ingredient, so the alcoholic content is less important.
It does not take much falernum in a drink to make its presence known. In most recipes with it, (that I have tried at any rate) falernum fills the same kind of function as bitters, when bitters wouldn’t be appropriate. It adds a sharp, bracing undertone to other flavors, adding interest and complexity to a drink. In several Tiki recipes, including a lot of Zombies, the falernum is what turns the drink from a nasty sweet punch, into a cocktail. I speculate that falernum’s increasing rarity may have been a contributing factor to Tiki drinks’ latter day reputation as goopy, lifeless messes.
Assuming you want your tiki drinks to not be sweet, bland messes, you’ll occasionally need falernum. It is not easy, but you can buy it. As I said already, Fee’s has a non-alcoholic version, which works quite nicely, at least to my uneducated tastes. The drinks I tried sure benefitted from its presence. Or you can get liqueur versions such as this one, at places like BevMo. It is not available in Ohio in alcoholic form, FYI.
But, as a Certified Cocktailian of the New School™, I of course wanted to know if I could make it myself. The answer, equally of course, is yes. And it is simple to do—not easy, but simple. In fact, though there seems to be no mention of falernum as a cocktail ingredient in bar books before the 1930s (birth of Tiki, anyone?), it seems to have existed long before that as one of those things, like ketchup, where everyone made their own, from their own recipe.
I kicked around the web a bit, looking for advice, before going back to where I knew I’d end up all along: Paul Clarke’s Falernum #8. This recipe seems to have become the de facto standard within the Cocktailosphere, so I went with it. I made one alteration, upon the advice of BOTI member, Rick at Kaiser Penguin, whose falernum post I am ninja-ing here. Here’s the link, where you can see a photo of his entirely unrealistically attractive falernum in progress, as well as a drink garnish that is a bit over the top, even for him. Oh, and he has a contest, too.

Rick and others have found that Paul’s original #8 does not keep well. The juice rots, regardless of the preservative powers of 151 and 2-1 simple syrup combined. Add it back in, if needed, at mixing time.
I said this was simple, not easy. Zesting the limes so as to keep the pith to a minimum is a huge pain, in more ways than one. I recommend the microplane, with plenty of Neosporin standing by for when you are done.
The resulting alcoholic syrup is a muddy color, much greener than the Fee’s. It is very fragrant too, in a pleasant-but-not-delicious-on-its-own kind of way.
I tried it in a Jet Pilot, my favorite falernum-based tiki drink, and I felt it made for a subtle but noticeable improvement. Generally, the home-made was cleaner. The flavors were the same, perhaps a little floral, but there just were fewer uninvited hangers-on.
I’ll leave you with an early Trader Vic cocktail that really puts this stuff front and center (tip o’ the hat to Slashfood):

If you want an example of how robust falernum is, and how easily it takes over a cocktail, try this one. It isn’t really to my taste, as it is far too pungent for me. If you like strongly flavored drinks, and are making falernum, it is definitely worth a try.

Among the requests I made of the Board of Tiki Idols was for Tiki drinks to try that were good and interesting. Tiare was most prolific is sending me links with drinks I could rip off, er, riff on. Among the posts she sent was this one: Tiki Drinks With a Twist. It offers a number of classic Tiki recipes that she modified in one way or another to take into account her own inventory situation. I picked out two drinks that interested me, and set to work.
I chose these two because they are bourbon-based. When I saw this, I was a bit puzzled. Tiki drinks based on liquor from back in the the Hollah? About the only spirit I could think of that made me think less of Tiki was liquor from the highlands of Scotland.

Hey!
You know Kentucky was settled….

Yes, I know Kentucky was settled in large part by Scots, and yes, I know the geography, economy, culture, etc. of both the Highlands and Appalachia are remarkably similar. And no, I don’t intend to go into it further right now. That’s another post, for another day, in (most to the point) another month. For right now, let’s just say whisk(e)y in general is not what I think of when I think of Tiki.

Of course not.
Tiki is about Rum, Rhum, and Rum!

You know, I can lock you in again….
The point is, I was intrigued. And since Tiara is among my muses, I followed.
Let us start with the Halekulani Cocktail, pronounced (I think) hall-AY-koo-lon-ee, from a bar with thr awesome name of the House Without a Key Lounge.

First off, I made a further change to Tiara’s changes. I had no passionfruit liqueur, so I substituted maraschino cherry juice. Also, she calls for a half a teaspoon. Doug can’t measure that small….
The resulting cocktail is pretty good. The overall character is a bit sour, but pleasantly so. The Angustora is detectable but more in the form of a slight edge, rather than bitterness. The Maker’s is a good bourbon here. I don’t see a cheaper bourbon as being very friendly, and a much fancier product would confuse the issue, rather than enhance it. And bourbon this whiskey must be. The unique caramel sweetness you seem to only get from Kentucky is needed to give this drink its nice balance.
I will say that overall it is a bit two-dimensional, particularly for a Tiki drink. The luxurious, meandering garden of flavors is more focused here. Still, it is gorgeous and tasty. Serve it on the rocks in a highball with a single cherry and no one need know you are offering them up to the Tiki gods!
Tiare’s other bourbon offering is the Eastern Whiskey Sour. It was invented by Trader Vic to honor the opening of his restaurant location in that natural Tiki Mecca, Toronto.

Here Tiara made four major changes to the Trader’s recipe, one of ingredient, several of degree. I found hers to be an improvement, but I’ll put Vic’s here. Go read her post for the improved version.

Tiare uses lime juice, and a lower concentration of bourbon.
This drink is actually tastier to me than the Halekulani, but is even less Tiki-like.

Duh!
It’s a Whiskey Sour….

True. The point to examine here is that the flavors meld so well together that they lose much individuality, especially in Tiare’s version. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just not too Tiki to me. The Eastern Sour has wonderful first flavor, and a wonderful last. They just happen to be the same, so it hardly a challenging drink. Sling one together for your more novice guests, who won’t feel gypped by being denied the chance to spend five minutes describing their cocktail.
Oh, and the Eastern Sour could probably benefit a bit more than the Halekulani from a higher-end bourbon than Maker’s, if you like. I haven’t tried one, but if you do, let me know if it’s an improvement.

Now, here’s why I have resisted delving into the world of Tiki until now: Among the impressions I get of doing the Tiki thing is that it is a lot of work. And as a certain semi-famous cocktail blogger will tell you, I’m all about shortcuts and stuff. So, I am cramming my Tiki exploration into one month, making for efficiencies in the process.
And since I am always into making less work for myself, I’m trying to hoodwink and bamboozle others into doing said work for me, which brings me to the:

These good folks are among my favorite Tiki Bloggers, either for their knowledge, their style, or both. You’ll see that they all have their own place of honor this month above the regular blogroll on the left. The first of them that I will introduce is Dr. Bamboo, the cocktailosphere’s greatest living illustrator. I put two questions to my Board of Idols, and the good Doc was first to respond with some very slapdash cogent thoughts.
Whenever I read his name, I always twist things around to hear Endora call out, Calling Dr. Bamboo! Calling Dr. Bamboo!
[Bamf!]
Dr. Bamboo, what is Tiki?

To me, what epitomizes tiki (and is possibly my favorite aspect of it) is that it is unrepentantly fake. Sure, there are fundamental elements of authenticity that it draws on, but at it’s core, it’s a big, glorious casserole of tropical fantasy. Back in the 30′s a New Orleans hustler throws together random bits of memorablilia (both physical and conceptual) from his warm-climate travels simply to give his bar an edge in a competitive market…and he ends up starting a cultural movement. What’s not to love? That is American-style bootstrap ingenuity and chicanery at it’s finest, in my opinion.

I think that this is very on point. Some of our greatest cultural institutions have the same appeal and are similarly made up from whole cloth. Someone has an idea, and it just so good, that people replace reality with it in their hearts. The whole idea of such cultural icons of Scotland as the clan tartans, and the kilts made from them, are the Tiki drinks of British fashion. They were invented in Victorian England by a pair of flim-flam artists. These guys came up with something insanely fun, and convinced an entire culture to believe in an alternate reality about themselves. Today, most people, even many Scots, have no idea that sporrans, and kilts, and so on are largely the creation of the English. (Source: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader)
In another fifty years, the world may genuinely believe that Depression-Era bars in Tahiti really looked and served drinks like a Trader Vic’s.

A second aspect for me would be the spirit of fun. A tiki bar is no place to for crying in your beer. You not only must dress the part and place yourself in the proper surroundings, but you must also have the correct frame of mind. Tiki is not dour, serious stuff. It’s a celebration, and good-natured escapism is the goal.
Plus, all that pagan imagery has a whiff of the blasphemous that is plenty hard to resist for most upstanding, clean-cut types.

This is why I so wanted to try this out for a month. I am sure I will drive the PeguWife nuts shortly by suddenly changing into a Hawaiian shirt every day at five o’clock. But come on, how can you not have fun with this? I’ll show how this concept is proven outside the world of Tiki drinks with this quote from Larry Dierker, back when he was broadcasting for the Houston Astros during a particularly bad stretch of boring, awful baseball:

You know what’s wrong with this team? Not enough Hawaiian shirts. They’re not having fun right now, and how can you not have fun when you’re wearing a Hawaiian shirt?

Alright then, Dr. B., second question: What makes a drink qualify as a Tiki Drink?

I think this is much harder to say. For me, it’s more about flavors, preparation, and presentation than specific ingredients. Tiki drinks have a depth, richness and complexity that sets them apart from other tropical-style drinks. For example, the Daiquiri, Mojito and Caipirinha are all tropical drinks made with rum (or something similar), fruit juice and some form of sweetener. Most tiki drinks have this as their nucleus too, but they have far, far more dimension. Also, tiki drinks evoke something exotic, and are just as much about what’s going on in your imagination as on your tongue.

I’ll be watching this as I try out the cocktails I intend to make this month. Hopefully there will be some good arguments over whether some of what I try even are Tiki drinks.

I also think that the labor-intensive preparation is key. Maybe it’s the whole anticipation thing…tracking down oddball ingredients, squeezing fresh juices, making syrups, etc. And then assembling it all in a stylish vessel and garnishing the hell out of it. You’re not going to find a 9-foot tall stone idol with flaming eyes on every corner, and you’re not gonna get a Zombie at your corner bar either. Each of those things is special, and requires genuine effort to find.

OK, so we are back to all the work I’ve got to do. Great. That’s why I’m doing my internship over a single, concentrated month. I just don’t see myself whipping up Falernum year-round.

And where the hell am I going to find a 9-foot tall stone idol with flaming eyes? Is that even up to Code?