How to Create Your Own Tiki Drink

Tiki drinks are a very fun way to have fun, and coincidentally, it’s the only drink I’ve ever publicly set my pants on fire. (Thanks a lot, Smuggler’s Cove.) Also, they’re generally more difficult to make at home than most other cocktails; But hey, it’s harvest week, and if the vintage people of the world are to be believed, then everyone was literally better at everything.

Welcome to Retro Week , where we light up the flux condenser and introduce you to the 1950s know-how of everything from making casseroles to building fallout shelters to joys for kids to relax and play with trash.

With this theme in mind, we’re going to pretend that making 10-ingredient drinks in your home is an achievable goal, like paying college tuition for a summer job. The word tiki can conjure up all sorts of fun things – extravagant side dishes , secret recipes, swinger parties and lots of polyester, to name just a few, but we won’t talk about much of it. What we are going to talk about is one overarching principle of Tiki drink making: “What one rum cannot do, three rums can.”

Simple cocktails well prepared is a beauty. It’s hard to find a better basis for determining what makes anything “good” than the age-old concept of maximizing with the least cost. But tiki drinks are so much more than a basic level. They are extravagant, complex and generally funny, and therefore funny.

Theory

One easy way to make sense of the long list of ingredients is to ponder the quote above from the Tiki Dona Beach icon, which we’ll refer to as the Three Rums Principle. The Three Rum Principle is consistently used in many modern cocktail bars. The idea is that after you split a simple drink into its component parts, any of these components can then be split into several ingredients, which do the same in concert, but in a more interesting and hopefully worthwhile way. This kind of multiplication by division can, of course, get complicated very quickly and often leads to a confusion of tastes barely equal to the sum of their parts. But when done right, this principle is one of those things that make tiki drinks and drinks of all stripes challenging, unique, and seductively fun.

We mentioned earlier that most cocktails can be traced back to some really basic patterns: Old Fashioneds, Manhattans / martinis and sour. All of these types of cocktails illustrate the principle that one way to make a certain amount of base alcohol tastier and more interesting is to add the appropriate amount:

• Sugar, water and modifier
• Flavored wine and modifier
• Sugar and citrus fruits.

At the end of the day, a certain amount of any base alcohol can handle a certain amount of the above variables, with little wiggle room left to the particular spirit and taste of the drinker. But there are many different ingredients that fall into the categories of base alcohols, sweeteners, flavored wines, modifiers, and citrus juices, and there is no reason the total amount of a cocktail component still balances out the base alcohol, it cannot be composed of more than one ingredient.

Examples of

Here’s a simple cocktail that we all know and love:

Old fashioned

• 2 ounces of strong bourbon
• 2 sc tablespoons Demerara sugar syrup (2: 1 sugar to water by weight)
• 3 drops of Angostura or other aromatic bitters.

And here is the cocktail recipe on my bar menu (Double Dragon):

Stone cold fox

• 1 ounce bourbon
• 1/2 ounce apple brandy
• 3/4 ounce calvados (French apple brandy)
• 1/4 ounce apricot liqueur
• 2 sc tablespoons Demerara sugar syrup (2: 1 sugar to water by weight)
• 2 drops of orange bitter

To move from Old Fashioned to our cocktail at DD, we split the base spirit into three not-so-equal parts: bourbon and two completely different types of apple brandy. Bourbon, sweet, round and caramel, serves as a great starting point, but also holds other ingredients together very well. Apple brandies are incredibly different from each other: American apple brandy, which has increased stability, gives a little warmth, while Calvados gives a truly unique fresh apple flavor. For some extra fruity flavors, we’ve split the sweetener between our traditional syrup and apricot liqueur. Note that both the liquor and the sweet ingredients outperform the original old-fashioned ratio of 2 ounces to 2 bar spoons – where there is a little more, there should be a little more than the other.

Here’s another simple cocktail recipe:

Bee knees

• 2 ounces of London dry gin
• 3/4 ounce lemon juice
• 30 grams of honey syrup (1: 1 honey to water by weight)

And here’s another recipe from DD:

Boyfriend material

• 1 ounce London dry gin
• 1/2 ounce mescal
• 1/2 ounce aperol
• 1/2 oz Ancho Reyes
• 3/4 ounce lime juice
• 1/2 ounce honey syrup (1: 1 honey to water by weight)

For this cocktail, we split the base spirit into gin, mezcal, and aperol (usually considered a modifier; but balanced enough on its own not to just be called a “sweet” ingredient), swapped citrus fruits, and split the sweet component. between Ancho Reyes – the rum-based ancho-chili liqueur that’s so hot nowadays – and good old honey syrup. One more thing to note: Most honey syrups require 2 or 3 parts honey for 1 part water. I try to keep our syrups in DD less sweet, generally speaking, in part because we so often use more than one at a time, and this allows us to measure them in larger and more accurate amounts based on their relative sweetness.

Performance

So how do you apply this principle at home? Aside from walking around and shopping for bottles at the cocktail bar, try making the next few purchases deliberately free, or sharing ingredients that are the least expensive. Here’s how to get started:

Gin + Cognac

While it may sound unconventional, this combination works deceptively well in a range of cocktails and actually serves as the basis for one of the simplest tiki drinks: Suffering Bastard, which is very similar to Moscow Mule except for the good one.

Suffering bastard

• 1 ounce cognac
• 1 ounce London dry gin
• 3/4 ounce lime juice
• 1 tablespoon to 0.25 ounce simple syrup, depending on taste
• 3 drops of Angostura bitter
• Ginger beer top

Shake with ice and strain into a Collins glass filled with plain old ice. Top with ginger beer – garnish with an orange wedge and a cucumber slice.

Rum + other barrel-aged spirits

Just like indigo pairs well with other indigos, rum also pairs well with other rums. Unsurprisingly, it adds a pleasant earthy funk to cocktails with just about any other barrel-aged liquor. If you like it, try this combination to increase the size:

• 1 1/2 oz Aged Rum (Barbancourt 8, Bacardi 8, or Plantation 5 Years)
• 1/2 oz strong bourbon
• 1/10 ounce lime juice
• 1/2 ounce demerara syrup (2: 1 sugar to water by weight)

Shake over ice and strain into a compartment glass. Garnish with grated nutmeg

Rum + Too Much Syrups

This is what it sounds like, but people love their syrups. (Case in point: pumpkin spice latte.)

• 2 ounces aged rum
• 30 g lime juice
• 1/4 oz ginger syrup
• 1/4 oz cinnamon syrup
• 1/4 ounce organic oil

Shake over ice and strain into a compartment glass. Decorate nothing .

Put it all together

Once you get a feel for the above tactics, you can combine them all to create a twisted Slurpee from the craft cocktail hell. You will disappoint and captivate curious viewers. You will alienate old-fashioned drinkers. Why are there so many ingredients? they ask, and you say, like an eccentric, pink-haired, bespectacled baby boomer at a craft fair, “Because I paid for college with my summer job, and I’ll cry if I want to!” Or, you know, just whip up that little piquant number gently and sip it smugly:

• 1 ounce aged rum
• 1/2 ounce pot of more rum
• 1/2 ounce barrel-aged alcohol or your choice
• 3/4 ounce lime juice
• 1/4 oz cinnamon syrup
• 1/4 oz ginger syrup
• 1/4 ounce organic oil

Shake over ice and strain into a compartment glass. Decorate nothing .

Will these recipe ideas make you a tiki person? No. Only a pair of really loud shorts will do. But they’re fun to play with, and at least the principles behind them will make complex cocktails, tiki or others, make a little more sense, whether you’re in a bar or making them at home.

More…