If you’ve ever wanted to open the nation’s paper of record and find a big photograph of someone sipping an exotic drink while standing next to a giant tiki, you’re in luck with Wednesday’s Dining & Wine section.

Even better, that’s not just any someone — that’s Beachbum Berry with his mug in the New York Times. In “Cracking the Code of the Zombie,” the Gray Lady clues into the Bum’s significance with a lengthy profile accompanied by a handful of recipes, including the one for the original Zombie Punch. And if that isn’t enough, there’s even an interactive slide show, narrated by the Bum, on the history of tiki.

While drink-related stories are often buried in the depths of the Dining section, a quick glance at the Times’ website shows that the article is already the second-most e-mailed for today’s section — and it’s still Tuesday here on the West Coast. Mighty curious to see what the next 24 hours brings.

Good going, Bum — and if anybody still hasn’t picked up a copy of Sippin’ Safari you’d best grab one now, before Times-waving society matrons on the Upper East Side buy out SLG’s whole stock while planning a holiday luau.

Tags: Tiki by Paul
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Embarking on a tiki quest can be one long series of disappointments. You come across a recipe in Grog Log or Sippin’ Safari, it sounds fantastic, you set out to make it and — dammit! you have no guava nectar. No problem — there’s this recipe a few pages further, it sounded good last time you looked at it, but — hold on, you needed to start working on the syrup for this three days ago. So you flip around in the book some more, find something else that seems like a drink you absolutely must make right this very minute, but — Jesus! who ate the goddamn grapefruit!

I first read this recipe around nine months ago, when I was working on an article about the Bum for last May’s issue of Imbibe, and I managed to wheedle a few Sippin’ Safari drink recipes out of him in advance so I could break out the booze and start working on a few of Donn’s rum rhapsodies without having to wait for the book to hit the shelves. I even ran this recipe in the story, but the thing is — I never made the drink. Not because the list of ingredients calls for anything that distinctive, but rather, it was the drink’s finishing touch that kept me away.

I regret to say I’ve been mixing out of Jeff’s books for about two years now, but I haven’t tried my hand at an ice cone until tonight (or, last night really — since it’s another of the damn things you have to start planning for in advance). But, I finally broke down and bought an ice shaver — perfect timing, what with summer crapping out on us early up here in the Pacific Northwest — so between me and Mr. Snowman, we’re ready to take a crack at the Luau Grog.

Luau Grog (from Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari)

• 3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
• 3/4 ounce grapefruit juice
• 3/4 ounce soda water
• 1 ounce honey mix*
• 1 ounce gold Puerto Rican rum
• 1 ounce dark Jamaican rum
• 1 ounce Demerara rum
• dash Angostura bitters
• 2 ounces crushed ice

Put everything in a blender (ice last); blend at high for no more than 5 seconds, and pour into a double old-fashioned glass. Serve with ice cone**.

* honey mix - equal parts honey and hot water, stirred until honey is dissolved, and allowed to cool to room temperature.

** ice cone — shave a heap of ice, and pack it into a pilsner glass. Run a chopstick down the middle to make a hole for your straw, and freeze overnight.

Very, very similar to the Navy Grog, the Luau Grog has a lovely balance among the rums, with the honey and the grapefruit pulling in different but complementary directions. And while it’s mainly for appearance, the ice cone really is a nice touch — it gives one last little burst of chill to each sip of the drink, and it’s a refreshing step away from the mundane of the everyday. Which, when you come right down to it, is kinda what tiki is all about.

Tags: Drinks, Rum, Tiki by Paul
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It’s been a blisteringly busy few weeks. Not just the normal kind of busy, but the brain-boggling, overdrive kind of busy where you wake up thinking of all the things you need to do, then flail away at that list all day until finally giving in to exhaustion, and fall asleep while thinking of all the things you still need to do when you get up in the morning, just a few short hours away…

Times like that, there’s not much room for futzing around with cocktails. Sure, they’re around — they’d almost have to be — but it’s the simple, A + B = C, comfort-food kind of cocktails like good, potent Manhattans and simple, soothing Old Fashioneds, cocktails you don’t have to think about that much, and that don’t require much time to prepare.

But, it’s over (mostly). Deadlines have been met (or slightly fudged), and I can finally take a moment to breathe. But after such a long, frenzied streak, it’s tough to get your mind back into normal mode, and sometimes special tools are needed. That’s where our good friend the Grog Log comes in.

Jeff Berry’s tome of tiki packs a lot of good juju in its less than 100 pages, and there are plenty of options available for snapping you out of the workaday world and into a short mental vacation to the islands. After an extended hunkering down, I clearly need something exceptional — something cold and soothing, yet with the stress-busting capabilities of a tactical nuclear weapon. That makes it time for a drink I’ve been contemplating for months: Berry’s own creation, the Tahitian.

Consider this drink for a moment: on its face, it’s a run-of-the-mill tiki drink, with a rum base, a pineapple and lime fruit quotient, a sweetening liqueur and a dash of Angostura to add a little mystery. But the Tahitian takes these common tiki qualities and amplifies them, matching the pineapple and lime with white creme de cacao — which lends a gentle touch of chocolate that comforts you as it positions you in your happy place — and then methodically bludgeoning your daily concerns away with a whopping four ounces of rum: two ounces of the lean, aromatic Rhum Barbancourt, one and one-half of lush amber Jamaican and another half of the crisp gold Puerto Rican. Served over ice and sipped through a straw, the Tahitian seems mighty friendly; by the end of the glass, you realize it’s perhaps too friendly, as your lips grow numb and your eyebrows start to feel funny.

Wait…..work?

Mission accomplished.

Tahitian (from Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log)

• 1 1/2 ounces unsweetened pineapple juice
• 1 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1/2 ounce white creme de cacao
• 1/2 teaspoon simple syrup
• 1 dash Angostura bitters
• 2 ounces Rhum Barbancourt
• 1 1/2 ounces gold Jamaican rum (I used Appleton V/X)
• 1/2 ounce gold Puerto Rican rum (I used Bacardi 8 )

Shake with ice cubes, then pour into a collins glass. Garnish with pineapple wedge stuck to rim of glass; stick paper parasol into pineapple wedge.

The Tahitian comes to you as part of Mixology Monday VIII: Exotic, hosted by Meeta over at What’s For Lunch, Honey? If you haven’t already posted your entry — could anybody be running later than me? — be sure to get it up, and then check in over at Meeta’s place in a day or so for the wrap-up.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday, Rum, Tiki by Paul
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Pulling this drink out of the old reliable Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log, in pursuit of something in which to give the new falernum a spin — and given my purpose, could there be a more perfect name than the “Test Pilot”?

I first tried this last week, and immediately became very fond of it. The Bum credits the recipe to Don the Beachcomber, circa 1941, and as he wrote elsewhere in the book, one of Don’s secret ingredients was the combination of Angostura and Pernod. I can see why — both are used in minute doses, so you don’t actually taste their flavor up front, but Angostura does its deep, spicy thing in the glass while the Pernod takes its mildly sweet anise-ey flavor and spreads it out to the far corners of the drink, so you don’t actually taste anise, but you know something is in there that’s rounding the edges of all the other flavors.

I’d go even further and say that Don’s use of this bitters-pastis one-two punch is the missing link between the old-school classic cocktails of the Gilded Age and beyond, and the mid-century Tiki movement that Don helped launch. Bitters, of course, are one of four ingredients in the original cocktail as it was defined, and many of the old classics were given a little vavoom and a touch of wahoo with a few drops of absinthe (witness: the Third Degree, basically an old-time dry martini with a dash of absinthe; and the McKinley’s Delight, a rye Manhattan with a little cherry brandy and a dab of the old monster).

The Test Pilot is an excellent primer to tiki drinks. Like any good cocktail, it doesn’t taste like any of its constituent parts, but rather it’s a carefully balanced amalgam of all the different ingredients. I’d serve this to anyone who looked down their nose at tiki drinks, as proof that this style of libation can be balanced and layered, and can have a gentle sweetness that is in perfect accordance with the tartness from the citrus.

For this version, I’ve used Herbsaint in place of Pernod (I was looking for a reason to crack that bottle I brought back from New Orleans, plus the good Grog Log informs us that Herbsaint enjoys a certain degree of historical accuracy), and I’ve used Appleton V/X for the dark Jamaican rum (perhaps not exactly what was intended, but Lemon Hart Jamaican is nowhere to be found around here, and Myers just disappoints me), and slightly more flavorful Cruzan white in place of the light Puerto Rican rum. Also, I lacked a wooden oyster fork — really, there’s such a thing? — so I just tossed the garnish on top.

For blending, I decided to also use an immersion blender in place of one of the upright canister types — partially for noise & hassle-of-cleaning reasons, but also because the stick blender gives me a little more control, so I can pulse it a few times with crushed ice over five seconds or so, and have a drink that’s mixed, but without the consistency of a slushy.

Test Pilot

• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1/2 ounce Falernum
• 3 teaspoons Cointreau
• dash Angostura bitters
• 1/8 teaspoon Pernod
• 3/4 ounce light Puerto Rican rum
• 1 1/2 ounces dark Jamaican rum

Blend with 1 cup crushed ice for 5 seconds, then pour into double old-fashioned glass. Add more crushed ice to fill. Garnish with a wooden oyster fork with maraschino cherry skewered on prongs.

Tags: Drinks, Falernum, Rum, Tiki by Paul
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Six weeks ago or thereabouts, the good Dr. Cocktail set a little corner of the cocktail- & tiki-blogging community a-twitter with an in-depth discussion of the classic Barbados liqueur / sweetener known as falernum. As those who, for some inexplicable reason, have been visiting this blog since last summer may attest, I’ve been on a sporadic quest to create my own falernum, one that will compare in flavor and surpass in freshness the commercial brands that are available (in certain markets, typically not Seattle, which was another impetus behind taking on this mission). After Doc’s story came out, I talked big about having landed the Giant Falernum, then quickly had to scurry into my kitchen to make sure I knew what I was talking about.

I didn’t, but that’s nothing new.

Still, by that point I’d got my hackles up — no falernum’s going to make a monkey outta me! — and I embarked on several more rounds of falernum experimentation before finally arriving at this recipe. I liked it fine, but distrusting my tastebuds, I took some to Tales of the Cocktail where I sought the expert opinions of Dr. Cocktail and Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. The experts succeeded in getting a taste down without gagging, making me damn proud, and Doc even gave me an uneasy smile before offering me $5 to go sit at a different table. I consider that a ringing endorsement.

Now, as I’m kind of tired of messing with the recipe — you have no idea how my family is reacting to a refrigerator full of mason jars with green, funky-smelling liquids in them (and that’s in the spaces between the vermouth bottles) — I thought I’d share it with my readers. Both of you.

Falernum #8

• 6 ounces Wray & Nephew Overproof White Rum
• zest of 9 medium limes, removed with a microplane grater or sharp vegetable peeler, with no traces of white pith
• 40 whole cloves (buy fresh ones — not the cloves that have been in your spice rack since last Christmas)
• 1 1/2 ounce, by weight, peeled, julienned fresh ginger

Combine these ingredients in a jar and seal, letting the mixture soak for 24 hours. Then, strain through moistened cheesecloth, squeezing the solids to extract the last, flavorful bits of liquid.

Add:

• 1/4 teaspoon almond extract*
• 14 ounces cold process 2:1 simple syrup (two parts sugar to one part water, shaken in a jar or bottle WITHOUT HEAT until all the sugar is dissolved)
• 4 1/2 ounces fresh, strained lime juice

Shake it all together and serve.

Is it the be-all and end-all of falernums? Of course not — rather, it’s an easy and cheap way to make a fairly obscure flavoring that’s essential in a class of exotic drinks. As it uses fresh ingredients, it has (to my palate) a better aroma and snappier flavor than the commercial brands I’ve tried. Of course, this freshness also limits its shelf life, so make small batches — this recipe may easily be halved — keep it refrigerated and use it within a month or so. Either chuck the old falernum or, better yet, just have a big swizzle party before your batch expires.

You can also customize this recipe. If you really like the tartness of the Fee’s falernum, for example, you can either add more lime juice (be careful though; the flavor will take over) or you can track down some citric acid crystals and add them to your mix (it won’t be as natural and pure, of course, but what the hell — it’s your drink).

If anyone decides to give this a spin, toss a note my way in the comments — I’m curious to hear what other folks think.

Tags: Falernum, Special Projects, Tiki by Paul
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