In case you’re new to this blog, I’m a longtime fan of tiki, and ever since I got my spiral-bound copy of Grog Log for Christmas several years back, I’ve kept an ingredient list in my notebook for those times when I’m in grocery or liquor stores that have an inventory leaning to the esoteric, so I’ll know if that jar of guava jelly or that box of passion fruit juice has any future in a rum drink.

But some exotic drinks have a “guess you had to be there” air about them, with ingredients that may not be that hard to obtain but that raise significant concerns — such as, “Isn’t that stuff crap?” and “What the hell would I do with a whole bottle of that stuff?”

Case in point: the Planet of the Apes, an original drink by Jeff “Beachbum” Berry (it first appeared in Grog Log, but now it’s also in Beachbum Berry Remixed, an essential volume for any home bar, tiki or otherwise) that lists among its ingredients pineapple juice (no problem), orange juice (ditto), dark Jamaican rum (are you kidding me? I’ve got loads!) and crème de banana (um, what?). (The drink also calls for fresh lime juice, and in case you didn’t read my previous post, the theme for this month’s Mixology Monday is “Lime,” as selected by this month’s host, Doug at Pegu Blog.)

In almost every liquor store I’ve been to, the only “crème de banana” I’ve seen on the shelf has been a urine-yellow syrupy liqueur that likely has a flavor closer to that of Juicy Fruit than to a real banana. Once or twice a year, however, I venture north to Vancouver, and as I learned several years ago, in that fair city it’s possible to obtain liqueurs produced by the French firm Giffard, including a premium line of liqueurs that are among the best and most evocative of fresh fruit that I’ve ever tasted.

Enter Giffard’s Banane du Bresil, which the company describes as “A blend of slow maceration of best bananas from Brazil, spirit of bananas for an intense aroma, and a touch of Cognac to add body.” Figuring that maybe it’s time I kept a banana liqueur around the house — either for times when I’m in the mood for a daiquiri with a twist, or for exotic-drink explorations such as the Planet of the Apes, or for just shocking the hell out of guests — I picked up a bottle earlier this month while spending the weekend in Vancouver. To be honest, I picked up two bottles, one of which is currently en route to Southern California, and I can now attest that there’s perhaps no better way to provoke a look of curiosity and concern on a liquor store employee’s face than by putting two bottles of fancy banana liqueur on the counter.

Anyway, back to the drink. Berry notes this drink is based on the West Indian Punch (though there are apparently a couple of those, in addition to the old-timey one from Jerry Thomas, so as with the rest of the world of drinks, confusion reigns), and the mix of orange, pineapple and banana is one of those classic (and overdone) tropical combinations that has the potential to be banal; toss some strong-flavored rum in the mix, however, and this flavor grows up very nicely.

I’m imagining that the 3/4 ounce of crème de banana that the recipe calls for would give the drink an identity that rests squarely on BANANA (flavored), but the Giffard banana liqueur is a much more nuanced thing. Tasting very much like fresh (or, more accurately, cooked) bananas with a little vanilla and ginger in the mix, the liqueur is lovely on its own, but when mixed with other ingredients its flavor is somewhat subdued; fortunately the liqueur is also not oppressively sugary, so it’s easy enough to remedy the issue by simply increasing the size of the pour to a full ounce.

Planet of the Apes
From Beachbum Berry Remixed

• 1 ounce dark Jamaican rum (I used Appleton Extra)
• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1 ounce pineapple juice
• 1 ounce orange juice
• 3/4 ounce banana liqueur
• 1/2 ounce amber 151-proof rum (I’m unfortunately out of Cruzan, so I used Lemon Hart demerara rum. Don’t tell Jeff I messed with his recipe)

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake well, and pour – unstrained – into a tall glass. Garnish with a slice of banana speared to a cherry.

Okay, so I talked more about the liqueur and not so much about the lime. But c’mon — in this drink the lime is there more for function than flavor, providing a little extra acidity so everything else hangs in balance. Lime’s flavor is excellent, but it’s also a great workhorse of the bar — in other words, perfectly suited for this month’s Mixology Monday. Now head on over to Doug’s place to see what everyone else has been mixing this month.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday, Rum, Tiki by Paul
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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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