tiki — The Cocktails — Beyond Reproach

Serves 4 to 6 people

3/4 bottle (19 oz) Puerto Rican Rum
1 oz gin
1 oz brandy
8 oz lemon juice
4 oz orange juice
4 oz orgeat syrup
2 sprigs mint
1/4 bottle (13 oz) dry white wine

Combine all ingredients in a a large pitcher or bowl. Mix thoroughly and pour into a wide bowl filled with cracked ice. It’s best to let the ice melt a bit and replenish with more ice just before serving. Garnish with gardenias if possible. Otherwise garnish with fresh mint, edible flowers, and/or citrus wheels. Serve with long straws.

The Scorpion Bowl was invented by Vic Bergeron, one of the two men most famous for popularizing tiki culture, at his restaurant Trader Vic’s in Oakland California. According to Bergeron’s 1946 book “Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink”, he was inspired to come up with the Scorpion Bowl after he took a trip to Honolulu in the late 30s and was served a cup of a traditional Hawaiian punch called Scorpion at a Luau. He said it was made with a Hawaiian moonshine called Okolehao, along with handful of other ingredients including orgeat, mint, and a combination of fruit juices. He especially loved the presentation of the drink served in a large communal bowl. Inspired, he returned to his restaurant in Oakland and created his own variation using rum, since he couldn’t get Okolehao in the states.

The only problem with this story is that there was no traditional Hawaiian punch called scorpion and there never was. One historian trying to authenticate Trader Vic’s story dug back through all kinds of bar menus, recipe books, diaries, letters, and travel memoires, and couldn’t find a single mention of it. But just when he was like, oh okay Trader Vic is full of shit, he found a gossip column from 1938 that actually did mention the Scorpion. Not only that, but the column even gave a recipe. However, far from being a traditional Hawaiian drink, it turned out the Scorpion was actually something created by Hawaiian surfers who made their money showing tourists around Honolulu. Much like the famous tiki cocktail it inspired, the Scorpion Vic Bergeron was served in 1938 was a fake made to look Hawaiian specifically with the goal of separating tourists from their money. Whether he was really fooled, or he knew it wasn’t authentic and didn’t care, we’ll never know. What we do know is that he took the idea back to Oakland, tweaked it a bit, and created a tiki classic that’s still served in tiki bars around the globe.

This recipe was published in Oakland in 1946, just as GIs were returning from the South Pacific after WWII, and the whole West Coast was whipped up into a Tiki frenzy fueled by fruity, boozy, tropical cocktails like the Scorpion Bowl. Over the years, Bergeron continued to tweak, simplify, and perfect his recipe. If you order a Scorpion bowl at a bar today, you’ll likely be served a much simpler recipe, published in 1972, with fewer ingredients. This 1946 version originally served 12 people. I scaled it back for to serve 4.

This older version predated the invention of the tiki punch bowls we see in most tiki bars today, and instead would have been served in a large but simple punch bowl with 20” long straws. If you have a modern tiki bowl though, this scaled back version should fit well in it.

The Original 1944 Mai Tai

1 1/2 oz White rum
3/4 oz Orange curaçao
3/4 oz Fresh lime juice
1/4 - 1/2 oz Orgeat Syrup
1/2 oz Dark rum
Garnish: Lime wheel, Mint sprig

Add the white rum, curaçao, lime juice and orgeat syrup into a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice and shake to combine.
Strain into a double Old Fashioned glass filled with finely crushed ice (if available). Gently pour the dark rum over the top trying to float it on top.
Garnish with a lime wheel and mint sprig.

1953 Royal Hawaiian Mai Tai:

½ oz Curaçao Liqueur (Triple Sec)
1½ oz Gold/ Amber Rum
1 oz Dark Rum
¼ oz Lime juice
1½ oz Pineapple juice
1½ oz Orange juice
¼ oz Orgeat syrup
1 teaspoon maraschino cherry juice (red) or grenadine for color
Garnish: Orange slice, pineapple, red maraschino cherry

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice and shake to combine.
Strain into a large whiskey glass filled with finely crushed ice (if available).
Garnish with a wedge of pineapple, an orange wheel, and a maraschino cherry.

Tiki culture and it’s quintessential cocktails all started in 1933 when Ernest Beaumont-Gantt opened a Polynesian-themed bar and restaurant in Hollywood called Don the Beachcomber. The restaurant featured Cantonese food with a decor of flaming torches, rattan furniture, floral leis, and carved tiki masks and wooden sculptures of Polynesian gods.

This was also the first restaurant to ever focus an entire drink menu on mixing rum with flavored syrups and fresh fruit juices, which they originally called "Rhum Rhapsodies", but were later called Tiki cocktails. These drinks were usually served in fancy glasses, hollowed out pineapples, or drilled coconuts, and sometimes even giant fish bowl sized communal glasses with long straws for sharing.

Perhaps the best known and most popular Tiki cocktail ever is the Mai Tai.

It was originally invented by another restauranteur namedTrader Vic in Oakland California in 1944. Don Beach later accused Trader Vic of stealing the recipe from him, saying that his punch, the Q.B. Cooler, which he invented in 1933, was suspiciously similar. But even if it was inspired by the Q.B. Cooler, they’re very different drinks and the Cooler has almost twice as many ingredients. Vic Bergeron later wrote in his book, "anyone who says I didn’t create this drink is a dirty stinker."

The Mai Tai became so popular that within a few years of its invention, the world ran out of the aged rum called for in the original recipe, so most recipes today call for a mix of light and dark rum.

In the beginning, the Mai Tai was a simple and rum forward drink, but In 1953, a cruise company hired Vic Bergeron to oversee their cocktail menus at their hotels in Hawaii. He reworked the drink adding orange juice and pineapple juice to make it feel more Hawaiian and to sweeten the recipe, so it’d be more tourist friendly.

The Hawaiian version became even more popular than the original and now most people think that’s what a Mai Tai is supposed to taste like. Both versions are absolutely delicious, although they’re so different that they probably shouldn’t both have the same name.