Tag Archives: tiki drinks

  • Mixology Monday Cocktail: Alone, Bitter at the Beach

    December 17, 2012

    36 Comments

    Alone, Bitter at the Beach

    Alone, Bitter at the Beach

    mxmologo-2It’s time for Mixology Monday, and if you couldn’t guess already, this month’s theme is “Humbug”. Firstly we want to thank JFL at Rated R Cocktails for hosting this month and Fred Yarm at Cocktail Virgin Slut for reviving Mixology Monday. Now lets get to the theme:

    Lets face it the holidays suck, yeah I said it. You put yourself in debt buying crap people will have forgotten about in a month. You drive around like a jackass to see people you don’t even like, or worse they freeload in your house. Your subjected to annoying music, and utterly fake, forced kindness and joy. Plus if you work retail your pretty much in hell, so don’t we all deserve a good stiff drink? So for this Mixology Monday unleash your inner Grinch. Mix drinks in the spirit of Anti-Christmas. They can be really bitter and amaro filled. They filled with enough booze to make you pass out in a tinsel covered Scrooge heap. They could be a traditional holiday drink turned on it’s ear. Or they could be a tribute to your favorite holiday villain. If you celebrate Hanukkah or Kwanzaa then you still suffer through the holidays, so feel free to join in with your Anti-Holiday drink as well. Whatever it is add a hearty “Humbug!” and make your drink personify everything annoying or fake about the holidays.

     humbug6While “some people” here at the farm have similar crabby feelings about the holidays, some of us don’t (ahem), but we both immediately said “tiki” when we thought of “anti-Christmas” cocktails. And when you are in a long holiday line at the store and the items won’t scan, and the kids are starting to squirm, and nobody can find the manager, and the next person in line is sneezing on you and yapping about their sex life on the phone, and and now you will be late for dinner, and you just can’t listen to one more fu…..umm, you need a trip to the beach. And, if anything, a tiki drink is a trip to a beach. Far, far away…maybe by yourself.

    humbug3So now that we had a direction, we started in on our “anti-Christmas” cocktail. The Alone, Bitter at the Beach combines, light rum, golden rum, aged Jamaican rum and Lemon Hart 151 rum with lime juice, pineapple juice, passion fruit syrup, a dash of absinthe and a big dose of Bittermens Hopped Grapefruit bitters over crushed ice. Garnish with a lime wheel and the most cutesy, annoying holiday-themed item you can find. The Alone, Bitter at the Beach starts with pleasant notes of rum and citrus then you get the sweet / tart kick of the passion fruit and some heat from the booze. Standard tiki. But on the finish you get the herbal and anise flavors of the absinthe and a dry, almost tannic note of the hopped grapefruit bitters. We think the Alone, Bitter at the Beach fits the holiday season perfectly- too much good stuff that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth (literally and figuratively) and a bit of a headache.

    humbug1

    Our kind of reindeer.

    How did we get here? We stared with the Zombie as a template and then made sure to tune it to match the theme. Boozy? Oh yes. We took one of the booziest cocktails and added another ounce of aged Jamaican rum. Is that too much? Probably, but it is the holiday season, after all. Bitter? Medicinal? Well the absinthe and grapefruit bitters took care of that (and many tiki drinks do include grapefruit and absinthe, so we aren’t too far off the reservation). And we made sure to keep Falernum and allspice liqueur out of the drink- no pleasant holiday spices allowed. The garnish and cocktail napkin were our own special touches. Now if we only had a Grinch mug……

    humbugAlone, Bitter at the Beach:

    Ingredients:

    • 1 oz. light rum (El Dorado)
    • 1 oz. gold rum (El Dorado)
    • 1 oz. aged Jamaican rum (Appleton 12 yr.)
    • 1 oz. Lemon Hart 151
    • 1 oz. lime juice
    • 1 oz. pineapple juice
    • 1 oz. passion fruit syrup
    • 2 dashes absinthe
    • 6 dashes grapefruit bitters (Bittermens Hopped Grapefruit)
    • Lime wheel, for garnish
    • Christmas ornament, for garnish (optional)

    Assemble:

    1. Place all the liquid ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake thoroughly and strain into a large glass or tiki mug filled with crushed ice. Top with more ice if needed. Garnish with a lime wheel and something holiday-themed and overly cheerful. Serve with a loud “harumph!” or “humbug!”.
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  • Bonus Cocktail: The Lani-Honi

    July 25, 2012

    18 Comments

    Lani-Honi Cocktail.

    Some cocktails we expect to be good. They are famous, they are everywhere, people write songs about them, name bars and casinos after them. Yes, I am talking about Margaritas, but the same can be said for Martinis, Mai-Tais and Manhattans. These cocktails are icons. And they are (mostly) great drinks.

    But then there are surprises. Cocktails you would never think of, often with somewhat esoteric ingredients, but that just taste great. This week’s bonus cocktail, the Lani-Honi is one of the surprises. And a very pleasant surprise, at that.

    The Lani-Honi has only three ingredients and is easy to make.

    The pleasant surprise is that the Lani-Honi is, technically, a tiki drink, but it includes just three ingredients: Benedictine, white rum and lemon juice served on the rocks. It tastes like a rich, lemony and slightly herbal punch- a simple drink but a good one. And it goes down very, very easy. And not only is the Lani-Honi an easy drink to like, it takes almost no effort to make, and you can make/serve it in batches. The Lani-Honi’s only real downside is that it could be a “dangerous” drink. And perhaps one extra downside is that you need some Benedictine.

    A good excuse to get some Benedictine.

    Benedictine is a French herbal liqueur that’s been around (depending on who you believe) since the 16th century. The provenance and the recipe are somewhat in question, but we do know that Benedictine was mass-produced (and well-marketed) starting in the 1860’s. With sweet, spicy and herbal notes, that some liken to cola, Benedictine became a very popular cocktail ingredient until the middle of the 20th century, when it started lose favor. But many home bars will have a bottle of Benedictine gathering dust somewhere, and the Lani-Honi is a good reason to break it out, or even buy a bottle.

    We found this recipe in Jeff “Beachbum” Berry’s iPhone Tiki Drink app. We bought a bottle of Benedictine for some classic cocktails, but we didn’t find anything we loved (yet), so we started to look at other uses and searched the Tiki Drink app for Benedictine. More famously, Benedictine is in the Singapore Sling, but the Lani-Honi looked tasty and easy to make. And it was. Carolyn and I both loved the Lani-Honi and we plan to serve it at a few summer parties. We think almost everyone will enjoy it, the Lani-Honi just feels like a cocktail that will please a crowd. Continue reading »

  • Tiki Drink for Memorial Day: The Ancient Mariner

    May 23, 2012

    9 Comments

    Ancient Mariner Cocktail

    We can’t resist tiki drinks for long here at the farm, and Memorial Day provides a good excuse, so here we go again. Although for this tiki drink, we need no excuse. The Ancient Mariner is one of our favorite cocktails, period. And unlike most tiki drinks, the Ancient Mariner is a recent creation from a mixologist in his prime, Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. We’ve mentioned Berry’s books on tiki drinks and culture and his excellent iPhone app. Berry is well-known for chronicling the world-famous tiki bartenders “Trader Vic” Bergeron and Don the Beachcomber,  but he also makes his own recipes and the Ancient Mariner is his creation. And it is a great drink.

    A mix of dark rum, light Demerara rum, allspice dram, lime juice, grapefruit juice and simple syrup, the Ancient Mariner has all the fruit and sugar flavors of a classic tiki drink, but with a dry, spicy finish from the allspice dram. Mixologists like to talk about “balance” a lot, and it is often hard to define. (Often I think balance means “what I like”). But whatever balance is, the Ancient Mariner has it. Sweet, sour, tangy and spicy with just a touch of boozy heat, the Ancient Mariner is a lovely sip. The only downside we see is that it might be tempting to have way a few too many.

    Note the “ancient” jelly jar for a glass. We need some lowball glasses…

    But there is one part of this drink that kept us from posting it sooner, the allspice dram. We try to avoid more obscure cocktail ingredients in the blog, but this one is worth finding. Allspice dram (also known as pimento dram) is an allspice and rum-based liqueur from Jamaica. It is a low-alcohol (45 proof) ingredient used to add spice and a touch of almost tannic dryness to cocktails. Widely used in tiki drinks, allspice dram is also used in regular cocktails like The Lion’s Tail and the Balm Cocktail. But about 25 years ago the Jamaican importer stopped bringing allspice dram to the States. So unless you wanted to make your own (and many a mixologist did) you were out of luck.

    Allspice Dram

    Continue reading »

  • Tiki Cocktails: The Sumatra Kula

    April 12, 2012

    9 Comments

    Oh yes, we had to buy the tiki mug. But more on that below, let’s get to the drink first.

    The Sumatra Kula is a tiki drink from Don The Beachcomber, who along with “Trader Vic” Bergeron led the tiki craze in the 30′s, 40′s and 50′s. If I can summarize, Don was the Socal guy, Vic was the Norcal guy. Both liked rum and created lots of tiki drinks. Vic had the Mai Tai, Don had the Zombie. Both created chains of bar / restaurants in very un-tropical places- most, but not all, are gone now. But tiki is coming back and many of Don and Vics’s drinks are coming back as well, and we think that is great news.

    As for the Sumatra Kula, this is supposedly one of Don the Beachcomber’s first tiki creations from the 1930′s. And as it was early in his career, the recipe is still very simple. But this is a tasty drink and has the added bonus of using ingredients that are easily available. The Sumatra Kula combines lime, orange, grapefruit, honey syrup, light rum and crushed ice. The honey syrup is a 1-to-1 mixture of honey and water, heat until the honey dissolves, thus making it easier to mix in drinks. And in this drink the honey is the key, surprise ingredient. It is sweet, but clearly not sugar, and brings that mystery to the drink. The other thing you will notice is the use of just light rum, as tiki drinks evolved multiple types of rum were used for extra complexity. As it is, the light rum lets the fruit juice shine- so this is a nice refreshing tiki drink.

    Oh, and it comes with a "hat", too...

    Continue reading »

  • Tiki Cocktails: The Rain Killer

    April 9, 2012

    1 Comment

    Rain Killer Cocktail: Tiki 101

    Funny thing about tiki drinks, when you are in the “real” world of tiki some of the ingredients are hard to find. Orgeat syrup and Falernum don’t grow on trees out here. I should know, I asked a local about the Orgeat trees and he looked at me kinda funny. No Falernum bushes either, go figure….;-)

    Happily, the fresh fruit and rum are in good supply and we brought some of our own cooking and cocktail gear- so the eating and drinking has been good (real good, actually). Not so happily, this week’s cocktail is aptly named. It is raining. Hard. Thus we start our adventure in tiki cocktails with the Rain Killer.

    The Rain Killer could be called “Tiki 101″,  it is as basic of a tiki drink you can get. You can go to any liquor stor and/or supermarket and get the ingredients for this cocktail. And it takes just a few minutes to make. Lime juice, orange juice, pineapple juice, rum, bitters and simple syrup. Think of this recipe as a “foundation” for tiki drinks.

    But the Rain killer is still a tiki drink. The whole point of tiki drinks is to have layers of flavor that blend into something more than the sum of its parts. By having multiple fruit juices, liquors, sweeteners and spices you get a drink that keeps you coming back. A common adjective for a good tiki drink is “beguiling”. The best tiki drinks really do take you “somewhere else”, and that is the magic.  Famous bartenders / impressarios like Trader Vic Bergeron and Don the Beachcomber created tiki drinks like the Mai Tai and the Zombie that are still with us today. And even in today’s world of advanced mixology, their drinks are still great. (More from these two as we go though the week.) Continue reading »