Hulabilly Lemonade: The Fireflies Won't Be the Only Ones Getting Pleasantly Lit

Tiki Oasis is in full swing again. Regular readers know that for several years now, I've made a point of attending the four-day extravaganza of rum, beehive hairdos, Bettie Page lookalikes, surf tones, and tiki madness in San Diego. This year the theme is Hulabilly. Otto von Stroheim, the founder of TikiO, invited me to give a talk. So yesterday afternoon, we filled a ballroom, threw up some slides, hit the sauce, and delved into my field: illicit liquor. 

Over the next few weeks, I'll add some more stories from that talk, but I had so many requests for my boozy lemonade recipe yesterday that I realized I should put it up while the hulabilly hodown was in full swing.

Johnny Jeffery flew in from Wisconsin to join me for the talk since he was the distiller for one of the whiskeys we were tasting: Death's Door white whiskey. Jeffery is in the privileged position of sampling his white white right off the still. His recommendation for the rest of us who can't get it at quite such high proof? Try it in a margarita.

The Hulabilly Lemonade I made as a welcome drink for the crowd is a twist on an old-fashioned front porch lemonade…with two differences. The first is that I used two sugar syrups — one demerara and the other caramelized, which isn’t as sweet, but gives the drink a soft, almost praline note that complements the fresh lemon juice. The second is that I asked the volunteers helping out with the talk to pour in a whole bunch of whiskey.

Without the whiskey, the lemonade makes a good Arnold Palmer when mixed 1:1 with black iced tea. With whiskey, though, and cooling off on the porch some hot evening with a pitcher of this Hulabilly Lemonade and a few glasses…well, let’s just say that the fireflies won’t be the only one getting pleasantly lit.

Hulabilly Lemonade 

1.5 oz Death's Door White Whiskey
4 oz front porch lemonade (see below)
2 teaspoons caramel syrup (optional, see below) 

Mix whiskey, lemonade, and caramel syrup over ice. Garnish with mint if you're feeling extra fancy.

Front Porch Lemonade 5 parts lemon juice
5 parts water
3 parts Demerara simple syrup 

Stir until blended in a jar, pitcher, or gallon jug. 

A note on the caramel syrup: In my opinion, the caramel syrup really makes this shine, but it's not strictly necessary — you could leave it out entirely. It not just tastes good, though; it's a nod to old-school bootleggers who sometimes faked age in illicit spirits with caramel (a practice that hasn't died out). Author David Lebovitz has good notes on making caramel; if you've never made it, check them out before you begin. The way I make this cocktail syrup, it's a simple ratio: two parts sugar to one part water so that the final version — by volume — is 25% more than the original sugar volume. First, measure whatever quantity of plain white table sugar (12 ounces by volume is a handy amount for home use). Then measure half that of water (6 ounces in this example). Have it at the ready.

Slowly caramelize the dry sugar in a deep, heavy-bottomed pan (I use an unlined copper pot, but use what you've got). When it reaches a rich amber color, immediately (and carefully) pour in all the water. Be careful: it will spatter and steam. The whole mass will seize up in a hard candied blob. No worries. Turn the heat to low, stirring now and then, until the sugar dissolves. Some water will have evaporated as steam, so when the whole thing is liquid and cool, put it in a measuring cup and add just enough water to make the total volume 25% more than the original volume of sugar. In this example, 12 ounces (100%) plus 3 ounces (25%) = 15 ounces. Just top off with cool water until the total volume is 15 ounces. Easy peasy.

Goes well with:

• The Tiki Oasis site.
• Death's Door spirits are distributed in 40 US states, including California. Check out their website.
• Martin Cate (almost) Blows the Lid off Tiki Oasis, a piece about San Francisco barman Martin Cate, his talk on the history of punch, and a recipe for his Tiki Oasis 10th Anniversary Punch.
• The Hyperreality of King Kukulele, an affectionate look at the slippery notion of authenticity when talking about tiki.

Sweet Spirit of Cats a'Fighting! It's Moonshine at Tiki Oasis

It's Tiki Oasis time — or, rather, it will be soon enough. Next month is the 13th annual celebration of all things tiki here in San Diego as hordes of revelers take over the Crowne Plaza Hotel for a weekend blowout of rum-drinking, hula-dancing, surf music-playing, aloha shirt-wearing, beehive-sporting fun. It is, as I've mentioned, a blast. The theme this year? Hulabilly. What else will there be? White whiskey, maybe a little ti root. You'll just have to drop by to find out.

Who's going to be there talking about moonshine? Yours truly.

I'm expecting something like this.

The name of the talk is Squirrel Whiskey, Monkey Rum, and Sweet Spirit of Cats a'Fighting: The Taming of American Moonshine. Here's the skinny from the TikiO site:

Despite the hype, most moonshine isn't corn whiskey and hasn't been since Donn Beach was knee-high to a moai. For almost 400 years, Americans have distilled untaxed liquor in cabins, sheds, warehouses, hollers, and now garages and basements. Author Matthew Rowley examines the history of moonshine, America's primal spirit. From the colonial era though Prohibition to its recent incarnations, moonshine has changed with the times. Through guided tastings from some of today's (legal) craft distilleries and Q&A, participants will learn to distinguish so-called "legal moonshine" and white whiskeys from their illegal forerunners and modern cousins.

See you there!

Goes well with:

• Find Tiki Oasis on Twitter here.
• Information on my talk and speakers at this year's Tiki Oasis (including San Francisco barman Martin Cate, radio host Charles Phoenix, and Lady Borgia with "The Higher the Hair, the Closer to the Tiki Gods") is here. 
• Lack tiki mugs in which to serve up your summertime moonshine drinks. Check out some of our favorite tiki mug vendors, including Tiki Farm, Munktiki, and Tiki Kaimuki.

Tiki Nights at Polite Provisions

Getting a strong drink in San Diego has always been as straightforward as walking into the nearest bar. In a town where many equate strong with good, however, finding well-balanced cocktails still takes some footwork. Fortunately, the odds of tracking down a good mixed drink has shifted in the last eight years since bars such as Lion's Share, El Dorado, Craft & Commerce, Prohibition, and the Grant Grill at the US Grant Hotel have stepped up the game. What we don't do particularly well (except for individual bartenders at certain bars on particular nights) are tiki drinks.

Schooners: good for bar fights and Prohibition hijinks 

Erick Castro hopes to raise our town's tiki profile a bit with a new tiki series at Polite Provisions, the Normal Heights bar he opened this year with the partners of Consortium Holdings. The second Tuesday of every month, Castro plans to host a Tiki Takedown. Or maybe it's a Tiki Tuesday. He seemed flexible on the name when I dropped by last week. The concept, though, is solid: on that second Tuesday, regular and guest bartenders will riff on classic polynesian-pop cocktails and serve contemporary drinks in the tropical style.

Helping to launch the series, Marcovaldo Dionysos is coming from San Francisco bar Smuggler's Cove next Tuesday, May 14th. Does that name ring a bell? I once asked Marco — to my mortification — for a Guatemalan Handshake. He was kind enough to give me what I wanted rather than what I requested.

Expect plenty of rums, fresh citrus, and lashings of spice. Named after a boat in George R. R. Martin's Games of Thrones series, Castro's Cinnamon Wind uses Jamaican rum and spike of Becherovka, a bitter Czech herbal liqueur with a cinnamon backbone that doesn't get the play it deserves.

Cinnamon Wind

2 oz Appleton Estate V/X
.75 oz fresh lime juice
.5 oz Becherovka
.5 oz cinnamon gomme*

Shake with ice ice cubes and pour — ice and all — into tiki mug. Garnish with freshly spanked mint (don't just fluff it; spank it!), then grate a cinnamon stick with a microplane over the whole thing.

*If your week's plans don't cover making cinnamon gomme, try BG Reynold's cinnamon syrup (see below for a link).

Tiki nights at Polite Provisions (4696 30th Avenue, San Diego, CA 92116) run from 7pm-2am on the second Tuesday of every month. The kickoff is next Tuesday, May 14th. If I get out from under a cascade of deadlines, you may see me there. If not, raise one for me. Either way, break out your finest Hawaiian shirts and dresses.

Goes well with:

• Tiki mugs. If no tiki mugs are handy, a heavy glass schooner is fine. No schooners, either? Sheesh. Get off the pot. Do as I did: get some from Tiki Farm (maybe the new Onigaw mug styled after a Japanese gargoyle) or Munktiki (I'm a fan of both the Stinkfish and hideously adorable Mermaid mugs). 
• This is not the first we've heard of Tiki Tuesdays.
• BG Reynolds' cinnamon syrup runs about $5 at okolemaluna.com.

Max's (Other) Mistake — A Tropical Drink With a Genever Twist

Genever is  — or used to be — a hard sell at the Whiskey Forge where the usual hangers-on prefer American whiskeys and rum. Nothing wrong with those two, but this knee-jerk mistrust of genever bothers me because the stuff is delicious and I'm a bit bummed to the be only one who regularly reaches for it. Genever (or jenever) is a grain spirit from the Netherlands and Belgium. A few varieties are available, some even flavored with citrus, but they all are flavored with juniper, those little blue-black cannonball berries that give gin its characteristic taste. Knowing their weakness for rum I found last night a way to sneak genever into my drinking buddies' cocktails; use it in a tiki drink that calls for gin.

The result? They used almost an entire bottle of Bols genever on multiple rounds of a drink that San Francisco barman Martin Cate dubbed Max's Mistake. I admit the response to the stuff was a little more enthusiastic than I'd hoped.

The original drink uses gin, but an elision to the Dutch stuff was a natural, and tasty, move. Here's Cate explaining the drink and how its name came about on his new cocktail series for CHOW (recipe after the video):

Max's Mistake  

Martin Cate 

Smuggler's Cove, San Francisco 

1 cup of crushed ice
2 dashes of bitters
1 oz passion fruit syrup
1 oz lemon juice
0.5 oz honey syrup (a mix of equal parts honey and water)
2 oz gin [Bols genever]
2 oz sparkling lemonade

Blend 2-3 second and serve topped with ice cubes and fresh mint.

Goes well with:

• Regular readers will recognize Cate as the mad genius behind the koi pond-sized flaming tiki punch at Tiki Oasis (pictures and scaled-down recipe here).
• Bitterballen, little fried croquettes quite similar to Cajun boudin balls, are classic Dutch bar food, perfect for a few shots of genever, even if it is all doctored up with fruit syrups and juices. Here's my recipe. 
• Americans used to have a great thirst for genever, also called Holland gin or, simply, Hollands. Here's Samuel M'Harry's 1809 recipe for making a semblance of the imported article from very local American ingredients. 
• Drinkupny.com has both Bols genever and the barrel-aged version on sale now. This is a good deal, but shop around; liquor regularly goes on steep discount during the 4th quarter and you may be able to find even bigger discounts. 
• Have you a glut of genever? Then consider whipping up a batch of kruidnoten liqueur, a Dutch recipe combining the spirit with...cookies. Those without so much to spare can swap vodka. 

Cthulhu Tiki Mug

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

~ Cole Porter

A casual look around the Whiskey Forge reveals that we are modest in our affection for neither liquor nor books. Even the barely interested can see that whiskey and cookbooks practically bow our shelves. The slightly more curious may note that there's an awful lot of rum as well...and swizzle sticks...and there, in the corner, a small case of tiki mugs. Downright nosy sumbitches will realize that someone, at some point, acquired an inordinate amount of materials by and about the American weird fiction writer, HP Lovecraft.

That would be me. 

Horror in Clay prototype

My days of actively prowling for Lovecraft books and ephemera are behind me. The hunt was far more enjoyable before the coming of the internet. Every book, pamphlet, or document I uncovered in a Pennsylvania barn or a Kansas City estate sale seemed like a little gem, like some real accomplishment. "I found this," I would think, "because I am very good at what I do and know the market better than these people." Now? Eh. Now when I want a title, I search online auction and antiquarian book sites in North America, Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and — with a flurry of keystrokes — have the thing in my hands in no time at all. Effective? Sure. Fun? Not really.

But I do still leave room for serendipitous discoveries. And sometimes they come by way of that same internet that's sucked so much joy out of book hunting. 

Jonathan Chaffin's campaign on Kickstarter brought a smile to my face and made me realize that I can make some room on the shelf for at least one more tiki mug. Chaffin is pimping a prototype of a mug he calls The Horror in Clay. It's taken from a line in Lovecraft's 1928 story The Call of Cthulhu about the dreams of artists and madmen the world over whose febrile nightmares are stirred by Cthulhu, a giant tentacled and winged entity who slumbered fitfully in the sunken South Pacific city R'lyeh. At least, it slumbered at the beginning of the tale...

Chaffin is looking for various levels of contributions to his funding campaign to make a full run of several hundred mugs. Tiki folks will go for it. Lovecraft geeks will want in on the ground floor. The level I'm interested in starts at $40. For that, contributors get a finished 28-ounce mug. Mo' money, mo' mugs.

This leaves me with two questions: (1) When will they be cool enough to handle? and (2) What would Cthulhu drink?

Goes well with:

• Jonathan Chaffin's Horror in Clay campaign is here. 
• My review of Jay Strongman's book (with an intro by Tiki Farm's Holden Westland) Tiki Mugs: Cult Artifacts of Polynesian Pop  
• We've covered Lovecraft here at the Forge before. There's both the candied Cthulhu-head citron I made last November as well as a short film based on HPL's 1926 story of horror in the Cool Air.
• Lovecraft's not the only oddball writer whose stuff I snagged at every turn. Of a once-huge collection of Charles Bukowski materials, one of the few remaining items is a goof, a counterfeit, a sheet of fake stamps that would fit right in Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49.
• My Culinary Library: What Good Does It Do? I've spent the better part of three decades collecting books on food and drink. Why? What good could possibly come of it? Here are some thoughts on the value of such a collection.
• Finally, if you believe that's a Cole Porter quote, I've got a mug I want to sell you for $80.

Mixology Monday: Mai Tai Jellies

Sam Bompas and Harry Parr form the firm of, well, Bompas & Parr. Over in the UK, the two are a bit of media darlings. Even if you’ve never heard of the British duo, you perhaps have dabbled in their medium yourself. Sam and Harry, you see, work in gelatin. They have joined the ranks of those who traffic in whores, wars, fishes, and cheese. In their own words, they are jellymongers.

In a house free of children — and in possession of a full set of teeth — the preparation of quivering desserts and congealed salads made of brand-name gelatin does not occupy an appreciable amount of my time. But on rare occasions, I do use unflavored gelatin to stabilize some desserts and to make old-fashioned tea, wine, fruit, or cream jellies.

As pedestrian as the stuff seems today, there was a time when jellies were terribly fancy, palpable evidence that eaters were in the presence of wealth. To start, they were a pain to create; calf’s feet were most often called for in old recipes — hours and hours of boiling, simmering, draining, straining, and purifying (read: servants). Because jellies need to be chilled to set, one had to have either ice or refrigeration. Sure, fridges are ubiquitous now, but in 1790, 1869, or 1901, that was simply not true; great ingenuity and expense were required to get a jelly to gel in warm settings. Elaborate copper molds came into play, and shapes ranged from fanciful to downright architectural.

I’ve been pawing through the American edition of Bompas & Parr’s first book, Jellymongers, with an eye toward making a few jellies that are a step above the usual wobbly suspects. There are fresh citrus jellies, ribband (i.e., striped) and marbled jellies, gold-flecked, booze-spiked, and glow-in-the-dark jellies*.

My opportunity came when drinks writer Doug Winship offered to host this month’s Mixology Monday, the more-or-less monthly roundup of drinks on a changing theme. This month, it’s Tiki, a subset of drinks lashed with rum and laced with fresh fruit juices — and that regular readers may know is dear to my heart.

Tiki’s popularity has ebbed and flowed over the years since the 1930’s, but one of its iconic drinks, the Mai Tai, remains an immensely popular drink. Bompas and Parr know this and they’ve turned their limpid jelly eyes on that classic mid-century cocktail for inspiration. I’ve seen over the years many recipes for Mai Tai-flavored ice creams and sorbets, icebox bars, face masks (yeah, I wasn’t tempted), and more. Most of these recipes are for sweets and many of them omit an essential ingredient: orgeat.

Not these two. Their recipe includes the almond syrup called for in echt Mai Tais. For Winship’s Tiki Mixology Monday, I offer not a drink, but quivering, quavering, wobbly shapes: Mai Tai Jellies.

Mai Tai Jellies

Bompas & Parr use 5 sheets of leaf gelatin in their recipe, but I’ve converted their recipe to one deploying Knox powdered gelatin because that's what I had on hand when Winship emailed me. The London-based duo regard the powdered stuff in a dim light and prefer the leaf version. I've also rounded off their “scant ¼ cups” to 2 ounces. Note that a thin layer of almond oil or neutral vegetable oil applied with a pastry brush to the interior of the mold makes removing the Mai Tai jelly, once set, much easier. I used drinking glasses as molds to create about 5.5-ounce jellies. One could, in a collegiate state of mind, simply make these into several one- or two-ounce jelly shots.

8 oz medium Jamaican rum [I disregarded "medium" and used a mix of 5 oz Appleton Estate 12-year with 3 oz Smith & Cross]
5 Tbl orange curacao [Cointreau]
5 Tbl orgeat (see below)
2 oz 1:1 simple syrup
2 oz lime juice
2 packets (14g total) powdered gelatin [Knox; for a softer set, use 10-11g]
Mint leaves

Combine the rum, curacao, orgeat syrup, sugar syrup, and lime juice in a saucepan.

Sprinkle the gelatin evenly over the surface of the liquid. Leave the gelatin to soften for 10 minutes. Gently, gently heat the liquid (do not bring it to a boil), stirring constantly, until the gelatin is melted.

Once the gelatin has totally melted, pour the whole lot through a strainer and into a pitcher.

Pour this mixture into a prepared mold or glasses (see above) and set it in the refrigerator at least four hours, but 12 will give it a stronger set.

When you are ready to serve, unmold and garnish with the sprig of mint.

Next Thanksgiving, why not ditch the ribbed cranberry jelly and serve slices of these? Edit later that night: I don't usually just fire off a post here, especially one with a recipe, but time was tight and I broke with tradition in the interest of meeting the Mixology Monday deadline. Consequently, I didn't play with this recipe as much as I might normally do. Although we liked the softer set version of the recipe above, keep in mind that this is a lot of alcohol for what seems like a simple Jello-O type dessert. These would be absolutely fine as jelly shots, the purpose of which is to convey a bunch of booze at one go. Despite the inclusion of orgeat, though, one of the crucial ingredients missing here is ice. When drinking a Mai Tai, the dilution of slowly melting ice makes all the difference between a strong, boozy drink and once that soothes and relaxes. So, on a whim, one of the boys popped his Mai Tai jelly in the microwave for 25 seconds, just melting it without getting it too warm, then mixed in a handful of crushed ice. The result: a regular Mai Tai with an unexpected round mouthfeel. Next thing you know, two more glasses went in the machine. Stayed wholly liquid until the very last few sips.

Goes well with:

• Fortunately, orgeat is much easier to find now than a few years ago, thanks to syrup purveyor monger BG Reynolds. If you don’t see any locally, the company ships.
• *Glow-in-the-dark jellies? You bet. Ever been in a nightclub and notice that your gin & tonic glowed like a purplish blue beacon? The effect is caused when ultraviolet black lights hit quinine, an ingredient in the tonic water. Quinine fluoresces under UV. Bompas & Parr leverage this quirk of chemistry in the book to create glowing jellies with gin, tonic, rose water, and gelatin. Images of their SFMOMA glowing funeral jellies are here.
• Converting leaf to powdered gelatin recipes is tricky. Different grades and producers mean that there's no standard conversion for "x number of leaf gelatin = y teaspoons of powdered gelatin." But the good news is that converting to weights makes things easier and there's a detailed discussion over at eGullet that outlines how one goes about doing that. 
• Leaf gelatin's not at all hard to find; it's just that I had none on hand, am getting ready to head to Bourbon Country for work, and didn't have the time to fuss with having some shipped. If you want to try some, King Arthur sells good quality stuff here.

Harry Parr and Sam Bompas (2011)
Jellymongers: Glow-in-the-Dark Jelly, Titanic Jelly, Flaming Jelly
160 pages (hardback)
Sterling Epicure
ISBN: 1402784805
$19.95

Tiki Cannibal Carnage for TDN: Nuku Hiva

Thursday Drink Night happens, more or less, once a week on...um, lemme check. Yep. Thursday. Celebrants sometimes gather in person, but it's more of an online deal in which cocktail bloggers, spirits writers, bartenders, and drinks enthusiasts fire up their computers, chat with each other, and mix cocktails based on a theme or a particular spirit. This week, the theme is tiki...with a twist.

From the Mixoloseum blog regarding tonight's Thursday Drink Night:

[The] theme will be “Nuku Hiva” based on recent events on that tropical Polynesian island. A little back story:

In early October, the charred remains of a German adventurer were discovered at a campfire site on a South Pacific island. The tabloid media were quick to portray the slaying as a possible case of cannibalism on Nuku Hiva, an island historically known for human sacrifice. But locals are offended and experts say such killings are a thing of the very distant past. (read more)

Therefore, in honor of this darkly exotic mystery, the goal of the night is to create tiki drinks with at least one German ingredient! Bonus if you use fire!  Stop in to the chatroom after 8pm EST for all the fun and frivolity.

Now, what's a German ingredient? Kirsch? Yes. Bärenjäger? Yes. Jägermeister? Yes. Jägertee? Sure. Speckklöße? Not so fast...

Goes well with:

• A bit I wrote a few years ago on Santa Maria tri-tip, bringing together The Smiths, Mr Gay UK, a taste for human flesh, and the inestimable Jeffery Jones in the 1999 film Ravenous. 
• On Licking a Human Skull. I have, certainly. What? You haven't? Savage. 
  

Dispatching Zombies for Halloween

They might not seem like much one at a time.

But in a group, all riled up and hungry?

Man, you 

watch 

your

ass.

~ Morgan to Rick Grimes

The Walking Dead

Halloween candles from Chicago's P.O.S.H.

Last Thursday, I bought candy — bags of candy — for tonight’s trick or treaters. We won’t get very many visitors, I know (there just aren’t that many young kids in our neighborhood), so I expected to have leftovers. What I didn’t expect was that the boys would devour nearly half the stash before Halloween. Yeah, ok, I may’ve helped.

Treats the neighborhood kids won’t be getting tonight, though, are our zombies. Seriously, now; it’s Halloween. What else are we gonna drink? After the recipe, check out Blair Reynolds of the Oregon Bartenders' Guild crank out a slightly tweaked version.

First, though, from Beachbum Berry’s Tiki+ app, here’s Don the Beachcomber’s midcentury version of this potent tiki classic. And a parting word of warning. As Morgan says above, these might not seem like much one at a time, but a bunch of them? Watch your ass.

Don the Beachcomber’s 1950 Zombie

1 oz lime juice
1 oz lemon juice
1 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
1 oz passion fruit syrup
1 oz gold Puerto Rican rum
1 oz white Puerto Rican rum
1 oz 151 Demerara rum
1 teaspoon brown sugar syrup
dash Angostura bitters
sprig of mint

Shake well with lots of crushed ice, pour into a tall glass. Garnish with mint sprig.

Shake Dem Bones

This weekend, I stopped by Pigment, a neighborhood store specializing in...well, green hipness, perhaps. I drop in about once a month to paw through birthday cards, books, and design-heavy preciousness. Sometimes I buy things, sometimes not.

There are art tomes aplenty, a selection of cookbooks for  urban homesteader and DIY kitchen crowds (though, oddly, not even one DIY distilling book), whiskey rocks, thick felt drink coasters, letter press greeting cards, cool kids' toys, garden seedlings, ceramics, heirloom produce and flower seeds from Baker Creek, odd hand towels, and loads of eco-globes and wall-mounted terrariums.

Lots of knickknackery I may want, but nothing I truly need. In other words, it's fantastic place to find gifts for someone else.

This Sunday, a set of ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped liked stylized bones caught my eye. With two salt cellars and a workhorse of an old pepper mill at home, I have no use for something like this, but the set of shakers (made by California designer Chris Stiles) called to the mischievous meat eater in me. I may just have to reconsider the salt cellars and slide back over there before the week is out.

Hang on, though. Now that I...yeah, now that I think about it, I may just need a cinnamon shaker for those tiki punches we make around here...

Pigment
3827 30th St
San Diego, CA 92104
(619) 501-6318
Mon-Sat 11-7, Sun 11-5

Stiles in Clay salt and pepper shakers: $32 for the set.

Goes well with:

• Should you find yourself with a batch of actual bones, I suggest you roast them and  feast on them.
• And if you're in San Diego, check out The Cookbook Store's going out of business sale. Word is, it'll all be gone before Christmas.

Tiki Tuesdays

Whether the house specials are tropical drinks or tacos, it seems as if Tiki Tuesdays are cropping up in bars all over these days. Some tikiphiles don't even bother with bars and simply make delicious rum concoctions at home before the work week is even half over. Me? I don't know why we have to make it Tuesday. Seems Tiki Wednesday and Sunday are perfectly fine days to mark the passing of the week. That's not to say I would turn around and leave if I should stumble across a full-blown Tiki Tuesday in progress...and that's exactly what I found at Rogue Ales public house in Portland last month.

Because I intended to catch up with Blair Reynolds of tiki syrup fame, Craig Hermann (aka Colonel Tiki), and their families while there, I packed along a Hawaiian shirt. For this, I was roundly mocked at home. This was, of course, not the first time that has happened. Whenever I don one of those floral shirts, my sidekick Dr Morpheus asks "Is that what you're going to wear?" Sometimes, admittedly, I put one on just to elicit this response. I never said I was not mischievous. Photographer Douglas Dalay will more blatantly lean in closer to me, cup one hand to his ear, and make the most pained expressions when he sees me wearing such a shirt. "What?" he'll mock-shout. "What?! I can't hear you over that loud shirt."

So with those two in tow, I dropped by Rogue Ales to take a load off and try to catch up with distiller John Couchot. John was offsite that day, so we visited him at another Rogue property, but not before discovering that Rogue, too, had a Tiki Tuesday. The deal was that anyone walking in wearing a Hawaiian/tropical shirt would get a free beer. Mine was locked away in the rental car a block away. Ah, well. After much travel, it felt good to sit and enjoy a cool beverage and I wasn't about to go get it.

Dalay had other ideas. Not one to pass up a good deal, he asked for the keys and disappeared. About five minutes later, who should stroll through the front door talking smack about free beer? I wasn't sure because I had one hand cupped to my ear, leaning in, and trying to make out what he was saying over the loud, loud shirt.

Goes well with:

• Simbre Sauce, the pre-batched cinnamon-allspice-vanilla-bitters syrup we use at home for Nui Nuis, ice cream, over granola, etc., is named after Douglas Dalay.
• Rogue Ales. There are several venues for Rogue, but the one we dropped in that day for Tiki Tuesday was at 1339 NW Flanders in Portland, OR [(503) 222-5910]. They also host a Bacon Wednesday. At least, that's what the sign by the host station read. I didn't have a shirt for that.  
• Other Portland stories include Remember the Maine? Hell, I Barely Remember the Walk Home and Pok Pok's Chicken Wings (with recipe).   

Hellz Yeah: It's Tiki Oasis Time

When I was a kid, one of the best things about having been born in August was that I never had to go to school on my birthday. These days, I have something else entirely that captures my attention at the tail end of the summer: Tiki Oasis.

Every August, as they have since 2006, tikiphiles gather in San Diego for a four-day extravaganza of Polynesian Pop madness. Rum, obviously, plays into the long weekend, but I will say this about a tiki crowd: no other group of drinkers is as open, friendly, and welcoming.

According to the official history,

Originally conceived as a fundraiser to support the rehabilitation of the Palm Springs Caliente tropics Motel, Tiki Oasis outgrew its original 88 room location and Southern California-centric following and in 2006 moved to its current location in San Diego where the event sells out a 400 room hotel and draws over 2500 attendees from all over the world.

The theme this year is South of the Border. From 18-21 August, revelers will lounge around the pool, attend educational sessions, buy and sell tropical-themed merchandise, and enjoy a musical lineup that explores the Latin roots of exotica music, a cornerstone of tiki culture. I'll be busy with birthday shenanigans during Tiki Oasis, but some of them may just have to shift over to the hotel. After all, it's about three miles from my house — how could I pass up the chance to spend time with such a fun crowd?

 Goes well with:

• The Tiki Oasis website has all the official details, schedules, musical lineups, and more. Check it out here.
• Find Tiki Oasis on Twitter here.
• Finally, be sure to check out my piece on Salon.com about last year's anniversary punch made by San Francisco barman Martin Cate. Recipe — and enormous fireball — included.

Chris Hannah’s Mardi Gras Punches

For the last few years, New Orleans bartender Chris Hannah has pushed a grocery cart around the French Quarter. Has he lost his home? His faculties? Not at all. He doesn't push it year-round, but during Carnival, when such sights are commonplace. Like so many others in Quarter and along St. Charles Avenue, Hannah uses the cart to haul around a cooler sloshing with beverages on Mardi Gras day. Each year the contents change, but the last three times he’s made what’s growing into an institution, his bright orange cooler held tiki punches made with rum.

There’s been the Nui Nui, an orange and lime concoction with allspice, cinnamon, and vanilla — and rum. In 2010, Hannah made gallons of Chief Lapu Lapu, a sweet/tart punch made with passionfruit, orange, lemon, simple syrup — and rum. This past year, he handed out cups of good cheer in the form of Pago Pago punch with orange, lime, grapefruit, honey — and rum.

Can we get this guy a sponsor? Zaya, you rock out in a Nui Nui. Appleton Estate, why not contribute some bottles and throw a little cash his way to gussy up the cart? Next year, I want to see a grocery cart-sized float and the Chris Hannah Mahalo Gold Dancers.

From Jeff Berry’s Tiki+ app, here’s a more modest-sized version of the1960's era punch from Tucson's Pago Pago restaurant. Scale up if you require more.

Pago Pago Punch

1 oz orange juice
¾ oz fresh lime juice
¾ oz grapefruit juice
¾ oz honey mix*
1 oz dark Jamaican rum
1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake well with plenty of crushed ice. Pour unstrained into a pilsner glass.

*Honey mix is a 1:1 mix of honey and water, more readily mixable than straight honey.

Goes well with:

• Taking a Tiki Shortcut with Simbre Sauce, our own take on the Nui Nui which we have been known to drink in such quantities that we require a pre-batched spiced syrup dubbed (around here anyway) Simbre Sauce.
• Mardi Gras with Rowley, Wayne, and Chris, a short post on bumping into Hannah and writer Wayne Curtis on Mardi Gras last year. The photo above is from that day (with Curtis in the exterminator getup).

Rumaki and Rum

Sometime around the middle of the 1920's 

I seem to remember my first 

bacon-wrapped snack, 

served to accompany bathtub gin martinis. 

Good bathtub gin was not without its merits,

but it needed food to keep one in shape 

for the second or third drink, 

so snacks became more hearty. 

James Beard

James Beard's American Cookery (1972)

There's a story my mother tells. It was the mid-'60's. The setting was a swank cocktail party with hip hors d'oeuvres. My father was destroying round after round of a particular tasty bacon-wrapped specimen. At one point, another round came by. The host asked "Would you like another chicken liver, Joe?" Well, that was the end of that. My father was not to be tempted by liver.

Click to embiggen

My father had been eating rumaki, a snack popularized by "Trader" Vic Bergeron and others who opened tiki bars across the country in the middle of the last century.  Several versions of the snack exist, but each is essentially a short piece of bacon wrapped around a bite-sized filling, then the whole thing broiled. Whole water chestnuts are the most common filling, but one also finds the aforementioned chicken livers or chunks of pineapple. I make them with water chestnuts because I enjoy the contrast of their crispness and hot smoky bacon. But on occasion I've been known to cut livers into small pieces and tuck a piece in with the water chestnuts.

It's also made from things I tend to have around the house, so it can be put together in pretty short order, especially if someone else breaks out the rum and tackles the tiki drink making. Adapted from James Beard's James Beard's American Cookery, here's my take on

Rumaki

One 20 oz can of water chestnuts
1 lb/500g thick-cut bacon, sliced in thirds
½ cup soy sauce
¼ cup vegetable oil
3-4 garlic cloves, minced
1 Tbl fresh ginger, grated
1 Tbl brown sugar
1 tsp Aleppo pepper

Drain the water chestnuts, rinse, drain, and pat dry. Wrap each in a short bacon slice. Secure with a toothpick. Set in a large shallow dish and repeat until either all the water chestnuts or all the bacon is gone (but it should even out).

Position an oven rack under the broiler and preheat the oven o 350°F/180°C. Whisk together the remaining ingredients in a bowl, pour it over the pork bundles, and let marinate while the oven warms. Remove the rumaki to a broiler pan with a drain pan (or some other shallow pan to catch drippings) and cook until the bacon is crisped at the edges and well-browned. The final cooking time depends on the thickness of the bacon's cut, but start checking around 10 minutes.

Discard the marinade. Serve the rumaki while it's still barely sizzling.

If you were doing a chicken liver version (closer to Beard's original), just trim and cut into halves about a pound of livers and marinate them in the above mix about half an hour (they get overly salty if left in too long), then slice a half dozen whole water chestnuts into small coin shapes. Tuck a slice onto each liver, wrap in bacon, and proceed as above.

I Blew the Ass out of My Jeans This Week

A little extra weight

Would never

Look no nicer

On nobody else

But you.

~ Violent Femmes

It is a lie that nothing tastes as good as thin feels, but consider this: I blew the ass out of my jeans this week.

When we moved to San Diego in 2006, I had a tan line and weighed 86 kilos. Five years later, the tan is gone and I tip the scales at 104 kilos. For those more accustomed to pounds and ounces, that rounds out to around two and a half new ounces each week for the last 5 years.

Cringed when I saw this printed in the local paper

The result? 230 pounds of Rowley.

Whether you think in grams or pounds, there’s no denying: I’ve grown obese.

As an adult, I’ve never been particularly concerned about my actual weight. For better or worse, I’ve always been able to define my own space in a crowd. Standing 6’ tall with size 12 shoes and broad shoulders, I can pull off 210 muscled pounds and feel confident enough to peel off a shirt while working in the yard. But let that muscle atrophy and the fat balloon? It’s no wonder my pants couldn’t take the strain.

Since childhood, I’ve wavered between husky, thick, muscled, and, occasionally, flat-out fat. My father, on seeing me for the first time in a year, recently remarked, “Looks like you’re not missing any meals.” It’s true. I’d tapered off going to the gym in 2009 and, sometime in the last year, just stopped altogether. I did not, however, stop eating like someone who worked out regularly.

In addition, work has kept me increasingly tethered to computers — and chairs. With the onset of a sedentary life, the tan faded. My waistline inched up. That San Diego is extremely casual and few meetings call for suits or ties let me easily overlook the fact that several of my suit jackets no longer close and my old shirts won’t button at the neck.

Drinking hasn’t helped. Unless it’s for work, I don’t drink alcohol during workdays. But the fact is, I write about and for distilleries and their products. Sampling spirits and cocktails at distilleries and bars is what I do. Even on an off night at home, my preference for tiki drinks — pumped with fruit juices and syrups of passion fruit, ginger, cinnamon, vanilla, almonds, pomegranates, and more exotic tastes — means that I consume an enormous quantity of calories in cocktails alone. Lately, I've reverted to my old habit of after-dinner whiskey. Just whiskey.



I am tired of being fat; of snoring at night because the flesh of my neck now interferes with normal breathing; of getting winded after running up stairs; of rotating through the same four pants because only they fit; of catching despondent looks from my family who clearly worry about my health and whether I’m going to be around in five years, much less 20 or 30.

So. Spring cleaning, physical and mental.

With a deep and resigned sigh, I cleared the fridge of most of the syrups, poured them down the drain, and dropped the bottles into the recycling bin. No more homemade raspberry, black pepper, marshmallow, or chocolate syrups. Threw out my beautiful golden schmaltz and the blessed bacon fat. Tossed the homemade ice creams and 86’d the frozen coffee cake.

Because the intense California sun can cause irreparable skin damage, I got a skin cancer screening this morning (all clear) and renewed my membership at 24 Hour Fitness. Tuned up my bike. Shaved off my beard (although skinny guys can have — and look great in — beards, it’s far too common for us fat bastards to hide our spreading jowls behind fur).

There are very few things that give me such unbridled pleasure as good food in good company and I dread — absolutely dread — the cooking I’ll be doing in 2011. But I do want to be around to see the end of the year. And of 2012. And of every year after for as long as I can.

Say hello if you see me at the gym. But please don’t laugh if I blow the ass out of my shorts; I’m working on it.

Fez Monkeys

I am, sad to say, fascinated with fez monkeys. Have been for decades. You know what I'm talking about. You've seen them. Chimps, spider monkeys, organ-grinding monkeys, monkeys dressed in human clothing or just behaving as humans do, but always with a red fez on their little heads. They've been used as pencil tops, calling card holders, windup toys, wall sconces, and countless other decorative arts.

C'est si bon!

The imagery is old and fabulous in the word's truest sense. Animals have since before Aesop been used to illustrate the best and worst of human behavior and monkeys, so human in their stance and demeanor, are no exception. With rare exceptions, monkeys wearing red fezzes are bad monkeys, indulging in alcohol, smoking, and other human vices.

I've found old French porcelain statuettes of simian gentlemen in finest 18th century garb, aping humanity. When the fez in particular came into play, I haven't been able to tell. My gut tells me that for the answer to that, we should look to French-occupied North Africa — Tunisia, Morocco, or Algeria — but I don't yet have the resources to track down earliest examples.

I do, however, collect images of these red-hatted monkeys behaving badly when I travel. About ten years ago, I wandered into a postcard shop in Paris. Cartophilia was jammed, floor to ceiling, with boxes of old postcards. They were organized by themes familiar to those who prowl such shops: hotels, railroads, clowns, butchers, etc. When I entered, the owner was engaged in low conversation with another old man. I smiled. "Bonjour." He looked me over and turned back to his conversation with a polite but dismissive "Bonjour, monsieur."

I had been weighed and measured — and apparently did not meet standards. The two continued to talk, paying no further attention. A younger woman in the shop glanced up and smiled at me, then went back to her box of old cards. My French is self-taught and far from perfect. But I hauled it into use.

"Excusez-moi, monsieur"

He looked up. "Oui?"

"Je suis à la recherche d'une carte postale."

He thrust out his chin, gave his shoulders a shrug, and indicated the hundreds of boxes around him like I was an idiot for not seeing them myself. "Oui?"

"Je suis à la recherche d'une carte postale," I continued, "avec une image de singes..."

"Les singes?!" he exclaimed ("Monkeys?!"). Whoever heard of such a thing?

"Oui." I plowed on. "Oui, mais...mais les singes avec des chapeaux rouges." Monkeys with red hats. He looked at me, a face filled with incredulity. An imbecile stood before him. Impossible to conceive that such a thing did or ever could exist.

"No." He turned back to his conversation.

At that point, the pretty young woman cleared her throat. In lightly accented English, she asked "Are you looking for monkeys wearing fezzes?" I admitted that I was.

She turned to the old man. "Papa. Un chapeau tunisien."

"Ahh!" His face lit up like fireworks. "Un chapeau tunisien!" Monkey with a red hat he'd never heard of, a conceptual impossibility, but a monkey with a Tunisian hat? Well, that's a different story entirely! One was located within 2 minutes.

I bought my postcard with its bad booze-drinking monkeys and learned that when I return to France on the trail of these fez monkeys so popular with the tiki crowd, I shall hunt for les singes avec des chapeaux tunisien.

But I'm sure something else will be wrong.

Lemon Hart 151 Demerara Rum Update

Demerara rums — that is, rum from Guyana made of fermented molasses — are some of the workhorses of the tiki set. They aren't, as some suggest, made from dark demerara sugar, but are named after the former British colony of the same name now in Guyana. Tiare Olsen summarizes the history and characteristics of the rums on A Mountain of Crushed Ice. It is all — every drop of it — made by Demerara Distillers Limited. Other DDL brands include Belmont Estate and the widely distributed El Dorado. Drop by Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco and you may find private label Demerara as well.

Expect a new label

A minor panic set in last year among tikiphiles and rum aficionados when stocks of one brand in particular began to dry up after its US distribution was axed: Lemon Hart. In particular, the 151-proof bottling. We (erm, uh, "they") snapped up bottles wherever they could be found. I spoke to one California bartender who located a case in Connecticut and had it shipped to Los Angeles at no small expense. I myself scoured mom & pop liquor stores for overlooked bottles — and managed to score several at nice prices from store owners who didn't realize that they could have doubled the price and someone would still have bought the rums. Maybe not me, but someone surely.

Well, the dry spell is nearly over. Ed Hamilton, owner of Ministry of Rum, has begun importing Lemon Hart 151 into the United States again.

On his Facebook page this morning, he posted a note with the full skinny:

The first shipment of Lemon Hart 151 Demerara Rum left yesterday afternoon from NJ headed to California. Expect to see it on select store shelves in about 12 days. Don't expect to find this rum at BevMo, it won't be there. I'll post store names as I get them from the distributor.

There are pending pickups for Colorado, Illinois and Louisiana. All good things take time.

Washington DC and Hawaii should also ship next week. Still waiting on the paperwork from the NYSLA before I can schedule a shipment across the Hudson River to the great state of NY.

WA and OR are in the works while I try to figure out how to ship single cases for less than $32 a case which translates to about an additional $4.80 per bottle on your liquor store shelf. Bear with me, I'm working on it. Since distribution was interrupted, LH151 fell off the 'listed' spirits lists in those states so this will be a special order product until the demand is again recognized and the states can order more than single cases. If this was easy, it would already be on the shelf.

Idaho is going to be delayed until the new bottle and label are approved.

In Texas, a distributor is going to talk about this and other rums at their sales meeting in two weeks. Wish I had better news for my friends in Texas.

Tweaking a line from New Orleanian food preservationist Poppy Tooker, we have to drink it to save it. So, save Lemon Hart 151 by scoring a bottle (or six) and raising a glass to rum savior Ed Hamilton.

Cheers, Ed. And thank you.

Ungarnished: Beachcomber’s Gold

I often dispense with garnish in food and drinks. In the case of a little parsley sprig on my steak, it's a matter of no significance whether it's there or not. In drinks circles, especially among the tiki crowd, some regard omitting garnish as heretical. For them, the garnish is itself part of the point of the drink. Those tropical drinks in particular can take on such decorative excess that they bring to mind birds of paradise, a Wal*Mart dressing room disaster, or Carmen Miranda's botanical headgear.

Beachcomber’s Gold with ice shell

Sometimes garnish — say, freshly spanked leaves in a mint julep — does make a real difference to the drink. When you bury your nose into a bunch of mint leaves, the aroma of mint is unmistakable. And pleasant, as long as you like mint. But so often, chunks of fruit are merely dropped in the glass with no thought of what they're supposed to do. Pineapple and maraschino cherry on a toothpick? Gives you something to munch on, but doesn't have much impact on the drink itself. Likewise, the unsqueezed lime wedges slipped into undistinguished rum-and-Cokes don't contribute to the taste of the drink. Squeezed, though, to get that lime juice and all-important lime oils in the glass, and now you've got a nice Cuba Libre. I don't drink rum-and-Coke, but I do like a Cuba Libre now and then.

To my mind, garnishes look pretty but ingredients actually contribute to the taste and smell of a drink. Consequently, visitors find very little garnish around at the Whiskey Forge; no Thai orchids, no spears of pretty but practically odorless pineapple leaves, no little fez-wearing plastic monkeys capering on the edge of their glasses.

Beachcomber's Gold sans ice shell

So when I saw the recipes for Beachcomber’s Gold in the Tiki+ app calling for re-frozen crushed ice formed into a sort of shell-like overhang, I knew I wouldn't be doing that. I'm not saying I'd never make one — just not for the first time I'm taking a new drink out for a spin. The Beachcomber’s Gold can be made a few different ways depending on which recipe you follow, but the one below is my favorite. The bitter Pernod and unmistakable almond extract with a trio of rums make it a complex mix of homey and exotic tastes. Now that we've made it once and I know it's worth adding to the Whiskey Forge drinks opus, I'll give it a shot with the ice shell.

The original 1937 Don The Beachcomber recipe from Jeff Berry's Tiki+ app follows. To make it my way, eliminate the pre-formed shell and blend it a bit longer.

Beachcomber’s Gold

1 oz gold Puerto Rican rum
¼ oz gold Jamaican rum
¼ oz dark Jamaican rum
½ oz fresh lime juice
½ oz sugar syrup
6 drops Pernod
4 drops almond extract
2 oz (¼ cup) crushed ice

Put everything in a blender. Blend at high speed for no more than 5 seconds. Strain through a fine-mesh wire sieve into a saucer champagne glass lined with an “ice shell” forming a hood over the glass. Serve with short straws.

ICE SHELL: Place a generous amount of finely shaved ice in the center of a chilled glass. With the back of a spoon, slowly press the ice up the sides of the glass, forming a hood that projects over the glass. Freeze glass overnight.

Did I type out that recipe? I did not: I emailed it to myself directly from the iPhone application. Nice feature. The illustration is a screen grab from the app that I cropped on the phone with Photoshop. And for the record, I actually love little fez-wearing monkeys. Just not so much in my whiskey.

Goes well with:
I talk smack about garnish, it's true, but that doesn't mean I hate it and turn my nose up at drinks that have...decorative touches. Some blogs where the writers aren't afraid to spend a little time purdying up their dranks that are definitely worth checking out:

• A Mountain of Crushed Ice
• Kaiser Penguin
• Sloshed!
• RumDood

See if any of them will do that monkey thing for you.

Taking a Tiki Shortcut with Simbre Sauce

Last summer, I uncovered a stash of underpriced Zaya Gran Reserva rum in a coastal mom and pop liquor store. I rolled away with a single drink in mind and half the stock in my trunk. This aged rum from Trinidad and Tobago is big-flavored, slightly sweet, and a lot of my friends use it as a sipping rum. In my book, though, Zaya shines as a mixer, especially when it’s one of multiple rums in a drink. In fact, the odd snifter and Mai Tai aside, we’ve used almost all of it mixed in a Depression-era tropical concoction: The Nui Nui.

The drink dates back to the late 1930’s and is credited to legendary self-promoter and tiki forefather Don The Beachcomber. How much do we like the Nui Nui? So much that we’ve downed three bottles of Zaya since this summer — and each drink, the way we make it, calls for only an ounce. The other ingredients are just fruit juices, Appleton rum, and a syrup we’ve dubbed Simbre Sauce.

We came up with Simbre Sauce because of the sheer volume of Nui Nuis we were downing. The sauce has perfectly legitimate non-boozy uses and sometimes gets drizzled on ice cream or yogurt and granola around here. But its real purpose is to cut down the time it takes to make a drink. Rather than pouring the various syrups and tinctures called for in the original recipe every time we wanted a batch, our friend Douglas pre-batched them as a single syrup to streamline the process. I dubbed the result Simbre (SIM-bray) Sauce after an old name in his family.

Simbre Sauce

350ml cinnamon syrup
175ml vanilla syrup
175ml pimento dram (an allspice liqueur)
5ml Angostura bitters

Mix, bottle, and store under refrigeration.

Ingredient notes: I use homemade syrups in the concoction above, but Trader Tiki’s range of tropical syrups make blending something like this a snap. If you do use Trader Tiki syrups, be aware that the cinnamon is strong and you may need to use a little less. This is good: it leaves more to go around. If you want to make your own, add 6 4” cinnamon sticks to 2 cups of water and 2 cups of sugar in a pot, simmer about 2 minutes and allow to cool before straining and bottling.

Trader Tiki himself crafting Nui Nuis

For the pimento dram, unless you're the sort to make your own, use St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram. Eric Seed of Haus Alpenz has been importing the stuff and since I bought my first bottle, I’ve never been without some.

And now, the Whiskey Forge variation of this old tropical drink. It lacks the traditional long orange peel and uses block ice rather than crushed ice. If you want to make one that adheres to the old method, see Kaiser Penguin’s take on it below.

Simbre Nui Nui

3 oz Appleton Estate V/X
1 oz Zaya
1 oz fresh lime juice
1 oz fresh orange juice
1 oz Simbre Sauce

Combine the ingredients in a shaker and shake with ice. Strain into ice-filled mugs. Sip. Smile.

Goes well with:

• RumDood looks at Zaya
• I show a few ways to make vanilla syrup.
• Trader Tiki’s Hand-Crafted Exotic Syrups
• St Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram at DrinkupNY
• Kaiser Penguin’s take on the Nui Nui 
• Beachbum Berry's Tiki+ App is Back

Rejoice, O ye Boozehounds: Beachbum Berry's Tiki+ App is Back

I’m happy with my iPhone again and it’s all Jeff Berry’s fault.

Earlier this year, I upgraded the old phone’s OS. And regretted doing so every single time I used turned the thing on. When once it was blazing fast, it had become maddeningly slow. There were other problems, but the most annoying of those was that my backup failed during the upgrade and all my apps just…vanished. They were not on my laptop, not on my phone, not anywhere.

I’m a Mac guy. That day, though, I learned to distrust Apple.

I’m digging it again. Tonight, the iTunes store is once more offering Beachbum Berry’s Tiki+ app. Tiki+ is a fantastic application. It’s a searchable database of tropical drinks recipe drawn from years of Jeff Berry’s field work sussing out the secret mixtures of old tiki bartenders. It’s the single best source of information about tropical drinks that will fit in your pocket. The next best option would be Berry’s books themselves.

When the old app disappeared, I went to download it again, only to find that it was no longer available. Berry told me that they were retooling the app and it had been delisted from Apple's online store. Well, now it’s out in a revised format. It’s $3.99 on iTunes and if you are at all interested in the rum-heavy drinks of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations — plus a few dozen new concoctions from the Bum himself — it’s the wisest $4 you’ll spend all year.

The deets:

• Over 150 drink recipes
• Mark your favorites for easy-finding
• Photos and old menu illustrations
• Add your own notes to the recipes
• Thumbnail histories of the drinks
• Like a recipe? Hell, yeah, you do: email it with a tap

Here’s Martin Doudoroff on the differences between the old and new applications and why the change.

Beam's Red Stag. I Confess, I...I Kinda Like It

Let me be quite clear: I do not, in general, approve of commercial flavored whiskeys. That’s not to say they don’t have their place. Leopold Bros, for instance, make a Georgia peach-flavored whiskey I like having around. And there are plenty of worthy infusions made in homes and bars across the country.

The problem with most whiskeys that come out the bottle pre-flavored, on the other hand, is that their tastes are artificial, their sweetness cloying. I’d no sooner pour one of these for guests than I would spit in their drink.

Yet at 9am Sunday morning, I stood in line at a local drug store with two bottles of Red Stag, a new(ish) cherry-flavored whiskey from Jim Beam. I blame The Tractor Room for this…uncharacteristic move.

We like to hit The Tractor Room for breakfast on weekends. The full cocktail list — one of San Diego’s better drinks menus — is available even at that early hour. Several weeks ago, we sat on the deck, powering through rabbit, biscuits & gravy, and a fried chicken benedict and basking in the mid morning sun. As the sun climbed in the sky, my habitual iced tea just wasn’t as cooling as I liked. So I ordered a snowball. A boozy one.

The Tractor Room’s snowballs are coupes of shaved ice, blessed with alcohol, that change as the menu switches out. That day, the offering was a cherry snowball made with Red Stag, housemade cherries, simple syrup, and lemon zest. What the hell, I thought. Let’s get one. I’d been seeing Red Stag around for the better part of a year, but my prejudice against flavored whiskeys stopped me from buying any.

It turned out to be surprisingly tasty. Red Stag is by no means a sophisticated sipping whiskey — it’s just not in the same league as Booker’s, Old Fitzgerald 12 year, George T. Stagg, or any of the van Winkle offerings. But as a mixing whiskey, I’m beginning to like the way it enlivens some drinks with dark cherry notes. From now until New Year’s, liquor will be on sale at heavy discounts. Red Stag retails for around $20/750ml. I’m not particularly interested at that price — for that, I can get 1.75L of regular Beam at Costco — but when it’s on sale at $13 and some change? I’ll lay in a small supply on a Sunday morning.

The Tractor Room staff make enhooched cherries in house for their cocktail menu. Sometimes the drink comes with lemon zest, sometimes not. It's better with. The fire engine red maraschino cherries so readily available aren't the same. If you don't have any, here’s my recipe for making them over at Tuthilltown Spirits.

Tractor Room’s Cherry Snowball

2.5 oz Red Stag cherry flavored whiskey
.75 oz boozy cherry juice from house made cherries
.25 oz simple syrup
2-3 house made boozy cherries
Lemon zest
Crushed ice

Fill a shaker with ice cubes and shake the whiskey, cherry juice, and simple syrup in it. Mound crushed ice in a coup, then slowly pour the iced mixture over it. Garnish with house made cherries and a few strands of lemon zested right over the stop. Serve with a short straw.

Purely on a whim one night, we swapped out Red Stag for the bourbon we’d normally use in an Eastern Sour. Hey, we’ve got to do something with it, right? The Eastern Sour was one taught to me by Jeff Berry at this year’s Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans and I’ve been making them on and off ever since. It's one of the few tiki drinks not made with rum. According to Berry, it's a 1950's recipe traced directly back to Trader Vic. Red Stag lends an additional layer of exotic-seeming fruitiness while still making sure there’s a definite whiskey kick. From Jeff Berry’s Beachbum Berry Remixed, here’s a twist on the Eastern Sour.

Cherry Eastern Sour

2.5 oz fresh orange juice
.75 oz fresh lemon juice
.25 oz orgeat
.25 simple syrup
2 oz Red Stag (original calls for bourbon or rye)

Shake with plenty of crushed ice. Pour unstrained into a double old-fashioned glass or short-stemmed goblet. Sink spent orange and lemon shells into the drink.

The Tractor Room
3687 5th Ave
San Diego, CA 92103-4218
(619) 543-1007
thetractorroom.com


Jeff Berry (2009)
Beachbum Berry Remixed: A Gallery of Tiki Drinks
248 pages, paperback
SLG Publishing
ISBN: 1593621396
$24.95