I’m not sure where this drink comes from originally. I found it in Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log, but that tome is unusually silent on the origin, only dating it as circa 1965. Incidentally, that is rather late in the era for a Tiki drink this good. The Boo Loo is apparently a beloved signature offering of Forbidden Island, a Tiki mecca I have never visited. (Any readers out there in the Bay Area need a friend rubbed out?)
I’ve modified this one to suit my equipment, which includes a BlendTec. If you don’t have the horsepower, substitute most of the pineapple for juice.

This delicious, remarkably balanced drink rolls in at over five ounces of liquor (effectively six if you have the 151), so may I recommend two straws?

I think it is about time, with all this Tiki-blogging, to try to contribute something original. So here I go, throwing caution to the wind and risking ridicule by advancing a fresh drink of my own creation.
Casting about for inspiration, I found myself grinning at the most un-tropical, un-pacific ingredient in my home: A bottle of Swedish lingonberry juice I bought at Ikea recently. Since counter-intuitive is just what I do, I set out to create a Scandinavian Tiki drink, in honor of my favorite Viking Tiki Wench. And since I was going all Scandi here, I also wanted to employ an offering from the Liquor Fairy I got a while back and never reviewed, Krogstad Aquavit. Aquavit is Scandinavian, but Krogstad is not. It’s made in Portland, OR, by the same folks who give us the magnificent Aviation Gin.
Now, both lingonberry and aquavit take a little getting used to for the American palate (or my palate at least), so I wanted a drink where both would be parts in an ensemble, rather than flavor-forward. When you talk Tiki and ensemble, my first thought goes to the marvelously, infinitely variable Zombie. And when you talk Scandinavian zombies, you mean the Draugr.

A product of the fevered inventiveness of the Pegu Blog Laboratories.

For tonight’s new Tiki drink, I offer you the Molokai Mule. This was a creation of the Kon-Tiki restaurant in Waikiki, one of a chain of Tiki palaces owned by Steve Crane.
The Molokai Mule is a product of the 1960s and thus an example of the sunset years of Tiki’s greatness. And in it I think that you can see the beginnings of the slow decline. There is everything you would expect to find in a Tiki drink here: Multiple rums, multiple juices, and one of the grand Tiki ingredients — orgeat. But it packs less of an alcoholic punch than earlier examples, both in proportion and in taste. And you can see here in reasonably full flower what some people like to harp on about with Tiki drinks, muddled flavor profiles.

I think the main culprit is the orange juice. It kind of overpowers the drink and drowns out the spirits. The cognac in particular might as well not be in there. I don’t bother with freshly squeezing my own OJ, but I think that the Molokai Mule is a case where you might see the difference.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a pleasant tasting drink. I wouldn’t have bothered posting it otherwise. But make it small, or you will likely be bored with it before you finish.
I found this drink via the iPhone app Tiki+. If you want to read more about it in a hold in your hands book (and have a spare 75 bucks) you can find it in Beachbum Berry’s Taboo Table.

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…..

The mere word Zombie is one of the most evocative in the modern English language. Both the word and the things it evokes are simultaneously silly and scary.
What is a Zombie? It’s either a dead human somehow still able to stumble around mindlessly, or a drink that allegedly turns living humans into reasonable facsimiles of definition one.
The walking dead kind of zombies are scary because they’re, well, dead. And they want to eat your brains. An entire motion picture industry revolves around finding new ways to produce zombies and put them on screen.
They’re silly because… they are! In practical terms, monsters that move slower than a walk and have no mental acuity require some pretty mental acuity-free victims to chow down on. Memo to movie chicks: If you’d ditch the fragile, four-inch, come-bang-me heels, and instead wear sneakers or flats, the body-count in your films will drop down to something more on the order of The Wiggles: Hot Potato Live!. (Note: Hello to Twitter heads rolling in here from pyngvild!)
The Zombie cocktail is scary because it generally is brewed up with lots of alcohol, some of it traditionally high proof. Then you cover that fire-water up with fruit juices, and syrups, and crushed ice, and Tiki mugs, and paper umbrellas, and fog generators, laser light shows. Or whatever items among that list that you have on hand. Even wearing flats when drinking Zombies won’t save you from the fate of ending up flat on your face at the end of the scene.
The Zombie is silly because… it’s Tiki, damn it. And because it is such marvelous overkill.
Like many of the great Tiki cocktails, Don the Beachcomber claims to be the Zombie’s inventor, with typically scant evidence beyond the fact that he’s Don. And like many of the great Tiki cocktails, if you order one in 99.44% of bars today, you will receive an undrinkably sweet mess made with mostly 151, if you get one at all. It will likely be closer to the Bacardi Rum Punch you get on the Jolly Roger Pirate Cruises you find all over the Caribbean. In short, a modern Zombie is more of a maximum buzz for minimum pucker device, rather than a real cocktail. Which is neither spooky, nor silly, but simply sad.
The fact is, it is hard to establish what is the original Zombie recipe, since it appears in print from different sources, in different forms, all at about the same time. I will print Don’s (or what is alleged to be his, since he guarded his recipes quite jealously) here as a starting point:

For the record, you approximate Don’s Mix with a 2-1 blend of grapefruit juice and cinnamon simple syrup.
This is not a bad drink. But it is just that, not a bad drink. The majesty of the Zombie comes when you slide into the sweet spot between this bare-bones presentation and the 1990′s debased rum kool-aid.
Last Thursday Drink Night was Zombie Night at the Mixosoleum. I think the Zombie was an excellent choice for the drunken chat room treatment. It is hard to completely screw up a Zombie, if your cocktail heart is pure. Just follow the basic rules of Zombie construction (eat your heart out, Hollywood) as illustrated by Don’s recipe:

• Include several rums, including one high-proof for scare factor.
• Mix in several juices, mostly tart or citrus.
• Add some spices and some sweetener.
• Blend it briefly.

In addition, time and evolved Tiki tradition demands more garnish than Don’s original sprig of mint.
I actually had some recipes ready for TDN, for the first time. One, the Red-Headed Zombie was a finalist for the night (Yay!), but got exactly zero votes (Boo!).

No votes?
You didn’t vote for yourself?

Shut up. I forgot.

All I’ll say about my version is that Canton is awesome in the Zombie application. It is also the genesis of the name. Ginger, get it?
I have pictures of my Zombie that I took. But they stink on (crushed) ice compared to those taken by BOTI member, Rick Stutz. So I’ll rip his off here as I discuss garnish on a Zombie. I have made the case that the Zombie is one of the most over-the-top Tiki drinks there is, so it needs an over top garnish.
Here was my suggestion: Shake while dancing around like a grass-skirted witch doctor and strain into a pith helmet. Add ice to fill. Garnish with a pineapple spear.
Had I had a pith helmet to hand, you’d see the picture, no matter how dark and muddy. But since I didn’t, here is Rick’s picture, which shows a slightly elaborate but visually very appropriate garnish:

Cool, huh?
During Drink night itself, Rick offered a different picture. One which shows why you do not want to get into a knife fight with the Penguin.

Get the idea of what is needed for Zombie garnish?
The garnish I suggested for my other (less awesome!) Zombie will be the subject of a soon-to-follow post on Tiki garnishes themselves.
Stay tuned!

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.

Let’s try another recipe from Trader Vic’s Tiki Party, shall we?
Here we go:

This is a decent little low-ball cocktail. Given all the Mai Tai mania that has gripped the cocktailosphere lately, it should be apparent to many of you that this is essentially the Trader’s take on a Mai Tai with tequila. The Pinky Gonzales is certainly sweet, but it’s not sticky or cloying. There are a lot of flavors here and they open up in your mouth as you sip, with that tequila bite showing up on the back end. It is very clean on the mouth afterwards, which is an odd feature of a lot of tequila drinks. Tequila has that funk that announces itself in no uncertain terms, but that funk also seems to clear the decks behind it. Of course, tequila will clear the decks cognitively too, if you let it.

I’ll throw in a word or two here about the tequila I used, Inocente. This triple-distilled white tequila is one of the gentlest tequila’s I’ve ever encountered. If you like the funky background in Margaritas, but stay away from other tequila cocktails because of the severely in your face character of the spirit, Inocente is a damn good tequila to broaden your horizons with. If you intend to do some shots, and want to make sure your crowd will go for a second round, Inocente is a very smooth choice that should scare off the minimum number of drinkers. If the softness of the liquor is not sufficient incentive, you can tell them that the company claims that the triple distillation process reduces the hangover-inducing contaminants.
If you are a serious connoisseur of tequila, you may find Inocente a bit bland, or over-processed. That’s OK, no liquor should be all things to all people, or we’d have no need for all this wonderful variety we have.
As a final note, the bottle they use is gorgeous, and deserves a spot on your display shelf. When I finish this bottle, I’ll be reusing it in-house, either on the bar for infusions, or in the bath for homemade bath unguents. Reduce—Reuse—Recyle!

So how does the Pinky Gonzales compare to its progenitor? Is it better than a classic Mai Tai? Hush your mouth! It lacks the melded depth of the Mai Tai, probably because tequila lacks the depth of old or mixed rums. I considered that this might be put down to the Inocente’s purity, but I imagine that if you used a more full-flavored (more impurity-laden?) tequila, you would get less meld more than more depth. Overall, the drink is still a nice little diversion. I’ll probably make it again for myself at some point, and I’ll certainly keep its recipe on hand in the event a guest wants something with tequila and it’s a Tiki night.
And there are some other more general things to discuss about Tiki that the Pinky Gonzales illustrates.
I had never thought of the spent lime halves I produce so many of these days (shut up, Gabe!) as having any use beyond clogging the disposal. Yet, this was only the first of many drinks I’ve run across which employs the lime shell as a proposed garnish. It works surprisingly well. A lot of Tiki garnishes seem a bit of a waste of good ingredients, but this one is essentially free. Reduce—Reuse—Recycle! See? Wouldn’t Al Gore be proud? I’ll bet that Pinky Gonzaleses are all they serve at his house….
Finally, I gotta talk about the name: Pinky Gonzales. It’s… well, it’s a bit stupid really. And I’m sure it’s politically incorrect. (Maybe the staff doesn’t serve these at Chez Gore.) BOTI member Dr. Bamboo examined the whiff of blasphemous that appealed to stuffed-shirt WASPs of the old days. Perhaps the tinge of politically incorrect that pervades most of Tiki (not just the Pinky Gonzales) is part of the resurgent appeal of Tiki today. Political religions aside, the name is silly. And lots of Tiki Drinks have silly names, e.g. Doctor Funk of Tahiti, The Colonel’s Big Opu, and The Zombie. Before the month is out, I’m going to come up with one decent Tiki drink of my own and give it a completely ridiculous name….

If it wasn’t Tiki Month round these parts, I would not have made this cocktail… ever. Just take a single look at the Jet Pilot’s recipe and the tiki-ness will practically poke your eyes out. It’s got wads of liquors in it, multiple juices, and stuff that I either don’t like (Pernod), or don’t know what the hell it is (Falernum).
Oh, and it’s a blender drink. I do not do blender drinks. Well, Doug the Pegu Blogger doesn’t do blender drinks. For Tiki month, my trusty but dusty blender is getting twenty-eight days of continuous counter time.
So, why is this rather baroque drink my first deployment of said blender? Well, I’ve read about it several times in the past from BOTI members Dr. Bamboo and Kaiser Penguin, as well as one of my very favorite bloggers, Robert Heugel, who I’m glad to see back blogging a bit more. He writes great stuff, but apparently he has some side project that has been pushing aside important stuff like blogging….
The Kaiser seemed to like the Jet Pilot so much that he forgot to go ape-sh*t with the garnish, so it has to be good.
Finally, Dr. Bamboo really caught my eye with this illustration:

Ah ha!
So you just made this drink in order to rip off more of Doc’s awesome pictures, didn’t you?

I resent that. It’s not true, and besides, it’s on the Internet so it’s free, right?
Actually, I did have the Jet Pilot on my list, but I only remembered to try it after thinking about a certain very level-headed jet pilot who has been in the news lately. (The following tape may or may not be completely accurate….)

I sailed down to the Pegu Tiki Lounge with the recipe clutched in my hot little hand and immediately realized that I was going to have to exercise some calm improvisation myself if I wanted to drink this right away. I had not made up any cinnamon syrup yet, and I was missing, well, all three rums in this concoction. Here’s my recipe, along with what it supposedly should have in parenthesis.

There is a lot to talk about with this drink.

1. It is really delicious.
2. It is a prime example of Tiki-ness in that it shows how amazingly well some very different flavors will blend together. The result is a drink where all sorts of flavors seem to actually line up in orderly fashion for a chance to entertain you. Each sip goes through about three or four distinct taste profiles, and they are all in harmony.
3. The Jet Pilot was Robert’s MxMo: Limit One entry; if you plan on mixing two, alert the authorities.
4. If you don’t have the cinnamon syrup already made, and divert to the powdered cinnamon, you have to drink this fairly quickly, or the cinnamon will precipitate out.
5. There is not enough ice, and you don’t blend it long enough, to get what I expected in a blender drink. Instead you get a frothy, slushy layer on top that you sip the cocktail through. From pictures and descriptions, I think this is what I will get with a lot of classic Tiki presentations. Whether you like this or not is a matter of taste. I found it very pleasant, the PeguWife was less enchanted. This summer, I think I’ll try upping the ice content considerably and go for the Fat Tuesdays plastic cup filled from a slurpee machine texture. If you hear about a case of spontaneous human combustion and odd, carved wooden idols seen fleeing the scene, you’ll know what happened.

Tiki Month is a lot of fun, folks. Stick with me. And join me in lifting a Jet Pilot up to Cap’n Sully.

Fog Cutter. Hell, after two of these, you won’t even see the stuff.
—Trader Vic

If you are just stumbling through, February is Tiki Month here on the Pegu Blog. All Tiki, all month! Behold, my first genuine Tiki drink of the grand experiment: The Fog Cutter.
Let’s start with the recipe as I put it together:

I chose to write up this drink first because I really liked it from the first sip. It has a lot of depth of flavor, with tropical fruits getting along nicely, and the various liquors coming out pretty assertively, despite the fairly low overall proof of this cocktail. It is sweet and exotic, without the cloying overload you normally get in average restaurant tropical drinks. This would be a fabulous hot day libation, as it is both sweet and thirst-quenching. I’m not sure how it would go on a dank, foggy day, however. The one thing I’m unconvinced of is the sherry float. Does this add anything to the drink, really? Overall, this drink will definitely stay in the rotation once Tiki Month has run its course. If all you’ve had is Mai Tais from Applebee’s and therefore thought that Tiki drinks aren’t for you, the Fog Cutter is a good one to reconsider over.
So, what general Tiki lessons do I take from this first recipe out the box?

• Orgeat is a magical substance when used with fruit juice. It makes a lot of other tastes meld better than I’d expect. It’s almost like mortar between stonework. At least I get the distinct impression that it’s the orgeat that’s performing this office. I’ll be experimenting and writing further on this stuff as we go.
• This drink is also illustrative of Tiki drinks’ tendency to mix lots of different base spirits. I’m much more comfortable with a mix of a single liquor with a liqueur or two, so this will be serious Terra Incognita for me. Is this melding of liquors, even just melding of different rums, a prerequisite for a Tiki drink? It this process just adventurous, wild abandon, or is it cunning alchemy?

And where do I need to improve myself to bring my Fog Cutter up to serious Tiki standards? I love the picture, and love the drink, but my first failing is with the garnish. It classically calls for a mint leaf. My mint is all under feet of snow. I need to lay some fresh in from the grocery store. And if I don’t go with the mint, I need something more elaborate, or at least with larger chunks of fruit.
Also, I didn’t squeeze the orange juice. I should start. But then again, I will not be doing that. If I start juicing oranges for my cocktails, my daughters will start expecting that I do it for their breakfast. Henceforth all OJ used here will be from the carton. I think OJ doesn’t pale near as quickly as lemon and lime juice do once squeezed. The pilsner glass works nicely, but is hardly a full on Tiki vessel.
Trader Vic’s has served this drink since the forties in a signature tall ceramic mug, graced by an island maiden wearing one half of a hula outfit. I gotta get my hands on one of those.
The mug, not the island maiden!