The Queen’s Park Hotel Super Cocktail is actually a pre-Tiki cocktail, but it fits perfectly into the category my friend Joe Garcia calls “Tiki Compliant“. Both Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic learned their respective Tiki drink templates in the rum soaked Carribean (Don as an itinerant youth, Vic as a cold-eyed businessman doing market and product research), consuming drinks like (and perhaps including) the Queen’s Park Hotel Super Cocktail. It checks all the required boxes for me to make it compliant: rum, citrus, exotic syrups, and melded flavors. I hesitate to just pretend it is an outright Tiki drink because of its origin, and its name, which is too British.

One of the things I love about this drink is that it uses vermouth! I had not encountered a Tiki recipe that used the stuff before, and I’m glad to see that you can make a quite tasty tropical that employs it to good effect. This one will be on the menu the rest of Tiki Month, and I intend to experiment with better and better rums, as this is a Tiki cocktail that I suspect will show off the better spirits, rather than waste them.

I found this in Jeff Berry’s lastest fantastic work: Beachbum Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean. (Currently in stock from its publisher, Cocktail Kingdom) I will certainly have a full review of this book later in Tiki Month 2014, when I’ve finished most of it. Suffice it to say here that not only is it a great cocktail book, it is also a fantastic history of the Carribean as a whole, seen through the lens of the bottom of a glass.