One last bite of Tiki. Jjoe Garcia reminds us that with all these drinks, we should eat a little something, too.

Hot Zombie. Fred gets one last lick in on the Tiki Totem before February is out.

Source: Nick Chill Photography

Well folks, the long, tropical, volcano-lit dusk of Tiki Month is at last over. The sun peeks up over the eastern horizon, and the spirits of the Tiki Gods flee their hand-carved wooden totems.

Reality intrudes….

I think this has been my best Tiki Month to date. Although the Tiki Month 2012 page link will disappear sometime tomorrow from the header, it will still be available, and you can look back over everything I wrote this time through there. But I thought I’d do a little roundup of everything I posted, so you can see what you might have missed and want to look for.

I did eleven drink posts, from the sublime to the ridiculous. I had a great time talking with Ed Hamilton, the hero of American Tiki fans who brought us back Lemon Hart 151. I really started to get into the whole Tiki mug thing this year, alas for my wallet.

I also managed to gin up some almost controversy over Beachbum Berry’s comment about Tiki and “guilt-free sex“.

I had a full-on, dress-up Tiki party in my temporarily Tiki Basement Bar. My kids loved the makeover at first, but they now want it restored to normal conditions. They like to hang out down there and it is hard to read by “volcano light”.

I spent a good bit of time navel gazing here at the end on why I did the first Tiki Month, and more importantly, why I keep doing it.

And of course, the blog highlight of the month was Mixology Monday LXIV: Tiki! Thanks once more to all the bloggers and other writers who contributed the more than 40 pieces to February’s carnival. And yes, I hijacked MxMo for my own purposes. I think it worked out well for all.

The most important thing to me about this year’s Tiki Month was all the buy-in and participation I got from so many of you. There were vast opportunities to employ Rule 2 as blogger after blogger hopped on the Tiki Month bus and made their own contributions on their own blogs. I linked every post I saw, if I missed yours, please let me know. Beyond that, I got lots of comments this month. Comments are like nectar for bloggers, folks. When we get them, pro or con, we know you are paying attention. We all need to comment more. This month I got tons of feedback and it really kept me going. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to average just over a post a day, not counting sideblogs. It wasn’t easy, but the attention people were paying made it so.

Aloha everybody. I hope you come party with me again next February, but I also hope you stick around and keep reading here the rest of the year!

Exit Question: What do I drink tomorrow night, Old-Fashioneds or Manhattans?

The OTHER White Meat Kind of Tiki Party — A Luau. Cool posting at FOM about roasting a whole pig for a full-on luau!

I don’t want Tiki Month to end without a quick listing of what appear to me to be the big three Tiki events of each year. None, alas, are held during Tiki Month, but each seems to sell out, so now is probably a good time to make your plans to get your pagan on.

For all my fellow classic cocktail nerds, if you don’t get enough of Jeff Berry at Tales of the Cocktail, where he is treated like a rock star, visit one of these events, where I’m pretty sure the Bum is considered the Messiah….

For West Coast Americans, there is Tiki Oasis in San Diego. The 2012 event will be held August 16-19. There aren’t a lot of details at the website for this year’s event yet, but it seems that this year’s sub-theme will be spy genre fun.
Having a sub-theme at a Tiki event is an interesting idea, and ought to help broaden the appeal and perhaps bring in a few new folks to the movement, though I think that spy fun is a better fit with Tiki than last year’s South of the Border idea. You can see, and hear, the way Tiki and spy stuff overlap and compliment each other in this audio podcast episode of The Quiet Village, which I profiled earlier this month.

Next up is Ohana, Luau at the Lake. Alas for me, even though Ohana is a production of the Fraternal Order of Moai, whose origins are right here in Ohio, Ohana is held at Lake George, NY. This year’s dates are June 21-24, 2012.
Lake George appears to be a perfect place for a retro event like a Tiki convention, as it is one of those time-capsules of the pre-Disney, honky-tonk vacation era like Niagara Falls, ON or Ober Gatlinburg, TN. The headquarters for Ohana is the The Tiki Resort (autoplay video at that link). Tickets went on sale for Ohana just a month ago, and rooms at the Tiki are already sold out. Tickets for the event, and other rooms in Lake George are still available.

In Fort Lauderdale, FL, you can attend the Hukilau. The Hukilau will be April 19-22, 2012, and while it is headquartered at the Best Western Oceanside, it is spiritually centered on the legendary Tiki palace, the Mai Kai. I’ve been to the Mai Kai, and it rocked at 6:30 on a normal Thursday. I can only imagine what it will be like during Hukilau.
The Hukilau is the first of these big fetes and if you want to go, I’d get on the stick. South Florida in April is frankly awesome, and if you go to Hukilau, you should add on a day or two so you can go to the beach. You’ll have no time to do so during the event, I’m sure.

I’ve never been to any of these, and I’d dearly love to. But I know for a fact I can’t make it to any of them this year, drat it. If any of you do go, and write about it, drop me an email. I want to read the story, and I’ll throw some Tiki supplemental linkage your way!

This didn’t come out as well as I had hoped, but I’ll share it anyway. I used my DLSR to do a time-lapse video of several stages of my Tiki transformation of my basement bar, as discussed in these Tiki Month posts, Basement Bar Design #9: Tiki Bars and This Year’s Final Exam. Specifically, I will note that the video does not include the changes in lighting I made, as those frames ended up looking so dark they weren’t worth it. Still it’s fun and illustrative of what I did, so here it is!

{Larger version available at YouTube}

My pace of at least one full post a day throughout this year’s Tiki Month got a little attenuated at the very end, not because I was burning out, but because I was ramping up to and recovering from a sort of doctoral dissertation on all I’ve learned so far about Tiki. We hosted an all-out Tiki party at home for about twenty of our friends. I’ve hosted a ton of cocktail parties, of course. And I’ve thrown in some Tiki elements or drinks from time to time. But I’ve never done the whole magilla, and I wanted to see how much Tiki knowledge I could employ and still pull it off with out some kind of capsize event.

I think it worked. I learned a lot of lessons in the process, and spent more than I needed to to get the effect I wanted and offer the refreshments I required. But I didn’t mess anything up, and I definitely got the atmosphere I was looking for.

I started with modifying my basement bar. I’ve written quite a bit about it already, and it is most definitely not a Tiki bar atmosphere in its bones. It is all black and aluminum and purple, with bright white lights. I started by replacing all the can lights with colored floods. I used red in the areas where guest were to go, and lit the far corners and service/inventory areas in a mix of blue and green. This gave the effect I was looking for of an evening, fire-lit environment. I then removed the barstools from the bar, and ran a long, fairly lush length of rush skirting along the entire length and around the end, enhancing/disguising the top edge with some fake flower leis. The soffit overhead, I covered with vinyl printed like bamboo, and used more to wrap the base of all the pillars in the room. I covered a table along the opposite wall with sand-colored fabric and “planted” two fake palm trees covered in Christmas lights. Two cheap flower door curtains did a remarkably godo job obscuring the messy inventory room in the back.
If I had been making a permanent Tiki bar, I’d have done much the same things, but with all natural, far more sturdy materials.

I also jacked up the ambiance with a few inexpensive hand-carved objects like a nice Tiki Bar sign, a small electric fountain for some running water, and lots of fresh cut orchids all over the place. Again, in a permanent installation, I’d have used potted orchids (with more variety of look), a larger fountain, and more wooden carvings, rather than the cardboard and vinyl Tikis I put in badly lit areas to disguise their nature.
I even dug into the Summer gear and lined the front walkway with burning Tiki torches.

I put in several hours putting together a really good iTunes playlist of Exotica and other Tiki-sounding music. Two songs that I just loved, and which served as some vocal moments in the list were Don Tiki’s Pagan Lust, and An Occasional Man. The music was especially effective in adding depth to the atmosphere I was trying to create, changing the lighting in the basement from merely dim and hard to see, into darkly exotic.

I always create a menu for each cocktail party I throw. That way I can control what I need in stock, and gives me my talking points for the booze portion of the evening’s conversation. I decided this was especially important this party, since most of the guests didn’t know beans about good Tiki drinks and would have had no idea what to order. You can read a copy here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. With this, I was able to keep the ingredients under control, or so I thought. I ended up getting way too much of most fresh ingredients, and my respect for the professionals who run real Tiki bars and manage to stay in business has gone way up. I wanted to do all juices fresh, and while this did show in the drink quality, it also means I have way too much juice lying around to drink in the aftermath. With the right tools, the juicing wasn’t that hard, but guessing the right amounts needed was beyond me this first time.
I bought a few extra stems of orchids for garnish, preserved pineapple tops, and had a bowl of kumquats, which are a great Tiki alternative to cocktail cherries. And I went to the local produce wholesaler to buy gobs of super fresh mint for garnish. I wholeheartedly recommend you find such a business, likely located on the backside of your airport, for times like this. In Columbus, the place I found is Sanfillipo Produce, who have a retail Cash N Carry in their warehouse.
My wife and I both managed to buy, without consulting each other, a box of each fun/tacky garnish toys available in Columbus. As a result I now own approximately two gross of paper cocktail umbrellas. (We probably used five during the party.)

While I planned to spend more time behind the bar this party than most, I still hired my regular bartender Tony to assist. With the planned on number of guests, one guy would certainly not be enough when making the kind of Tiki drinks I was offering. A little more than a year ago, I kinda went postal on some hapless Brooklynite who declared you shouldn’t have a party if you’re too poor to swing a bartender. There are plenty of party formats where you don’t need staff, no matter how large. But if you are having a drinks geek party, (and why would I have anything else?) and you are having more than 10 guests, you won’t get out from behind the bar to enjoy your guests if you mix things yourself.
Tony is particularly great because, while he’s ten times the pro I’d ever aspire to be, he is always willing and able to absorb whatever new tricks and/or schtick I’ve got up my sleeve for my parties. Cultivate at least one good working pro bartender in your town who can work your own occasional parties with or for you.

I placed the barstools around a small high-top table across the room from the bar. This gave me a place to serve the bowls on my menu, with their flaming garnishes and make a big stinking production out it. The fire extinguisher is there but not visible in the picture….
Always have plenty of better than average fake flower leis on hand, in case an actual Tiki shows up at your event….

A few other tips that worked out well:

• A chunk of dry ice is a cheap and easy way to liven things up. Tony usually had one or two mugs frothing away on the bar, and he and I dropped a sliver here and there into random drinks to keep people’s attention.
• There is genuinely something fascinating about a swizzle stick being employed properly. People really dig it.
• People are afraid that Tiki drinks are too sweet. It took me a while to understand that what I thought of as “sweet” drinks on my menu weren’t all that sweet to them.
• Cultivate a good relationship with your fishmonger. I was able to get mine to give me 15+ pounds of crushed ice from his machine and it was plenty usable for the party a couple of hours later.
• No one wants to order a bowl drink. Everyone wants to drink out of them.

Of course, some drinks worked, some didn’t. My earlier idea that Dr. Funk might be a good Absinthe Entry Drug? Yeah, no. The kindest comment I got from this group of Absinthe virgins was, “It tastes like Good n’ Plenty”. The surprise hit was a new drink I learned about just that week on Mixology Monday, Gilligan’s Ginger Swizzle by Ed at Wordsmithing Pantagruel.
And of course the number one cocktail (almost everyone had one) was the Mai Tai (half Appleton’s V/X, half Smith & Cross). It is a never-ending surprise and delight to me to see the look on a friend’s face the first time they take a sip of a really well-made Super-Weapon of Tiki. If you are any kind of cocktail geek, you have no excuse not to know how to make a good Mai Tai. Even with Tiki Month six months away in either direction, when I am in full Pegu, Manhattan, Old Fashioned, Aviaton, Gin Rickey-mode, I always have the means to make Mai Tais. Not only is it among the easiest Tiki Drinks to make (the orgeat is the only remotely weird ingredient), not only is it likely the best Tiki Drink, but it is simply hard to make the case that Trader Vic’s Mai Tai isn’t one of the best straight cocktails ever invented.

The food looked like it was going to be hard, but turned out easy.

Easy for you to say, Mister!
I didn’t see you in the kitchen making any of it….

True. But at no point in the process did you threaten to take a hostage, so in comparison to the usual situation, I’d rate this party as pretty easy.

Hmmm.
You may have a point.

Anyway, the key to remember in Tiki food, as with everything else Tiki, is that the key is in selling the presentation rather than in any kind of authenticity. Our most successful dish was a South Georgia and Carolina Low-Country specialty, Shrimp Sea Island. (Note: That’s not our recipe. No one gets our recipe.) There is nothing remotely Tiki about this dish, but skewer the shrimp on bamboo skewers with chunks of mango and serve on a bed of the lemons and Bob’s Your Uncle.
Sous vide chicken chunks, skewered with pineapple bits and finished under the broiler made for a second delicious main dish. Between the two of them, all the bamboo spears made the table look like the aftermath of Magellan’s last stand. Beyond that, we surrounded some pre-made spring rolls with fresh fruit and crudité, and were left with a tropical-looking spread that helped the guests extend their evening quite nicely.

Here’s the bottom line: Tiki parties aren’t hard. Certainly no harder than any other kind of party. Nor need they be much more expensive, especially if you plan on having them ore than once. But they do take planning, and especially imagination. Use plenty of both, and your Tiki party can be one you really hit out of the park.

Dr. Funk is back in play. If I’ve managed nothing else this Tiki Month, I at least have people talking about Dr. Funk once more!

I want to start to round up Tiki Month 2012 with an answer to a question I hope many of you have been asking all month, “Why Tiki Month?” Why am I posting as such a furious rate, changing my basic drinking habits, and otherwise driving my dear, suffering wife to distraction with this Polynesian potpourri?

The first year I did it was to see what would happen. Many of my most favorite bloggers, Trader Tiki, Tiare, Dr. Bamboo, Colonel Tiki, and Kaiser Penguin were Tiki bloggers of one sort or another. I had tried virtually none of their stuff because I didn’t view myself as a Tiki guy, and it all looked so hard. So I wanted an excuse to give a bunch of things a whirl.

Plus, he was looking for a blog stunt as a desperate plea for attention!

It was supposed to be a one-off experiment, just to see what it was all about and as an antidote to a Winter designed to make Al Gore feel (more) embarrassed about his life…. And I had fun. And the next year, as Winter set in once more… I couldn’t help myself.

Tiki Month 2010 was a bit more organized, both in my bar and here on the blog. I was discovering that getting your Tiki on is an acquired skill, one that gets better with practice. As I realized this, I decided that having some decent Tiki skills beyond just a good Mai Tai is an essential thing for any self-respecting cocktailian. I knew Tiki Month was a Thing then.

2011 was a breeze. I whipped through things, with lots of the basics already covered. I could delve into the auxiliary stuff, the cultural and artistic sides of Tikidom without it overwhelming me. and the drinks got easier. In response to Tiki Month last year, DJ Hawaiian Shirt wrote this insightful critique of Tiki and it’s shortcomings:

1) Their construction is labor intensive; most of them require you to freshly squeeze at least one kind of citrus

2) They often require more than one type of rum, and since rum characters vary widely by where they’re produced, you need at least a dozen or two varieties in order to capably adhere to recipes; it gets expensive

3) They require specialized equipment if you want to be efficient and/or proper, such as juicers, ice crushers, (real) swizzle sticks, and blenders

4) They often require rare (or even extinct) ingredients, such as orgeat, falernum, passionfruit syrup, cinnamon syrup, allspice dram, Cuban rum, and dark 151-proof demerara rum

5) They’re complicated; a five-ingredient tiki drink is considered simple, and they sometimes have over a dozen ingredients

6) Because of all of these above, their construction is time consuming; between juicing the fruit, gathering all the bottles, measuring each ingredient, and then using specialized equipment, plenty of drinks take between 5 and 10 minutes to make, and some of them take even longer

7) Most tiki fans from which you might get help or advice will insist on using only the proper techniques, and that even the obscurest ingredient cannot be substituted

As Tiki Month 2012 kicked off, DJ whined about not having a genuine swizzle stick to make a 151 Swizzle. The smart-ass who’s masquerading as “The Tiki Gods” in my comments insisted that he use only a real swizzle…. or a virgin. (The Tiki Gods seem really into virgins) DJ responded by resurrecting the above post.

I meant to link it earlier at first, but it got me to thinking, and I left off commenting on it here until it was getting to wrap up time.

The answer to DJ’s criticisms of Tiki is the answer to why I keep doing Tiki Month. Tiki requires commitment to be any fun for anything other than a meticulously planned special event. It requires commitment to gather the knowledge to make it fun, and the skills to pull it off well. But just doing things for a long time doesn’t really make Tiki work either.

If you examine most folks who do Tiki well, it’s all they do, drinks-wise. At first, I kind of thought this was because they were, well, weird.

Pot.
Kettle.

Yeah, exactly.

But that is not it. Let’s address a few of DJ’s complaints above, which I think encapsulate what most classic cocktail types think about Tiki.

1. Boo Hoo. I juice limes for almost everything. Or I use RealLime after peeking behind the curtain to make sure CocktailNerd won’t jump out and start bitching at me again. I ignore this one.
2. I got 12 types of gin in my bar regularly. It is no skin off my nose to have many bottles of rum, a spirit with far greater variety in style than gin. For most booze nerds, this is also the case. Still nothing blocking Tiki.
3. Yup. You do need some funky stuff for Tiki that may not be too useful for non-Tiki stuff. But who doesn’t need a good blender anyway?
4. Rare ingredients are again part and parcel of the modern booze nerd’s oeuvre. But we are starting to get to the heart of the matter here.
5. This also is on point. Not only do Tiki drinks have lots of ingredients, but those ingredients are not necessarily the same ones as even a first order cocktailian will have on hand as part of his regular inventory.
6. Bingo. This is real heart of it all. There is a butt-load of perishable ingredients or preparations to make Tiki drinks—make them well at any rate.
7. I think this seems like a bigger issue than it is. Tiki guys have all these specialized things on hand, so of course they assume you should use them. Fact is, there are lots of ways to finesse the more esoteric methods or ingredients.
   If you think that you have to do things the pain in the ass geek on the subject commands you… Have you met the Internet? A week on the web and you should realize that common sense is a needed companion when looking for answers hereabouts.

What all this comes down to is: For Tiki to be fun, it needs to achieve Critical Mass. You need several specialty syrups to execute some of the best drinks, and more to maintain any kind of variety from one round to the next. The produce you use may or may not be more than what you uses in regular drinks mixing, but it will be different produce for your normal needs. Dressing up yourself and your bar, and loading your iPod properly for the Tiki experience takes time and a change in routine. Bringing yourself up to speed for Tiki takes time. Do it only 28 times a year means spooling yourself up 28 times. It’s a mess. But do it 28 days in a row, and you spool up once.

Feel the power of Critical Mass!

In late January, I place an order with Okolemaluna for certain syrups I don’t want to make myself. I go online and order a few bottles of hooch that I can’t get in Ohio, but that I know I will want. I pick up a new shirt or two, and order any other new Tiki elements I want to have show up as the month progresses to enrich the experience. I make a few modifications to my bar’s ready rack of equipment, make up the fresh ingredients I need, and keep them in stock. I alter my produce buys. I then alter it further when my daughter discovers the joy of fresh pineapple juice and keeps drinking me dry….

And when it is cocktail time, for the entire month of February, I just toss on my shirt, don my fez, and go downstairs. A new drink, or repeat performer, is now really no more time-consuming than a regular cocktail. All because I have achieved Tiki Critical Mass. It’s a bit of work up front, but that pays off all month. And voila, Tiki is easy!

And at the end of the month, I box everything up, pour out any leftovers, and go on an Old-Fashioned binge. My guests and I have enjoyed a month of awesomeness and variety, I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve made something cool accessible to me.

And he’s gotten a whole month’s worth of material for his blog stunt that begs for the attention he still desperately craves!

Yeah. That too.

If you crave Tiki, but like me do not want to make the metamorphosis into a Tiki Idol, here’s the secret: Pick out a couple of weeks in a row, or even a month, and take a vacation to the South Seas. Immerse yourself and your friends. Have a fun time, and one that will be surprisingly easy and convenient. Then put it all away and go back to Sazeracs and Martinis, until the next time the mood calls you. As for when would be a good time to achieve your own Tiki Critical Mass, may I suggest next February?

We’ll be here!

Yes, we will.

Beachbum Berry: Why I Love Tiki. Recent interview with the world’s most exalted bum… (Via @JMGIII)