Island mighty

A brief history of tiki drinks

By BARBARA WEST, HANKY PANKY + PINKY GONZALES

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Chances are your experiences with tiki culture have been limited to scoring straw-filled scorpion bowls in a dark bar or procuring Easter Island Head mugs from a retro-minded boutique. During those encounters, you might have had some vague notion that fruity rum drinks and kitschy island décor originated in some long-ago era, like the '60s.

Try 1934. That's the year when Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, aka Donn Beach, opened the world's first tiki bar, Donn the Beachcomber, in Hollywood, Calif. This tiny establishment, decorated with trinkets Beach had collected on a trip to the South Pacific, quickly became a hotspot for celebrities and other trendsetters. Two years later in San Francisco, Victor Jules Bergeron transformed a luncheonette into Trader Vic's, the first of a series of ornate Polynesian restaurants that would become a tiki empire. With concoctions such as the Mai Tai and the Zombie, these two booze impresarios—and the bartenders who kept their recipes secret—started a cocktail craze that would last over 40 years.

Cheap and readily available in the years after Prohibition, rum was the chosen medium for the fathers of tiki. It came in many varieties—light and dark, aged and unaged, strong and stronger—that created layers of nuanced flavor when mixed with tropical ingredients like fresh lime, pineapple and passion fruit juices; almond- and cinnamon-flavored syrups; and more traditional spirits like Pernod and bitters. Unlike late-era tiki drinks, many of which are made with sugary, mass-produced mixes, these original cocktails were quite sophisticated. (Try the recipe below, and you'll see what we mean.)

Several historical and cultural factors propelled the tiki craze. With the sober years of Prohibition behind them, American drinkers craved cocktails, especially the inventive ones that Donn Beach and Trader Vic were serving up. The experiences of soldiers in the Pacific theater during World War II drew attention to faraway lands, as captured in James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning war novel Tales of the South Pacific, which inspired the hit Broadway musical South Pacific and, in turn, the popular movie.

In the post-war years, tourism boomed in Hawaii, which became a state in 1959. Enter hula girls, leis and Blue Hawaii, starring Elvis Presley. Ironically, the island aesthetic that appealed to tourists from the mainland was imported to Hawaii by none other than Donn Beach, who opened a large, opulent tiki restaurant in Waikiki in 1948.

From the '40s through the '60s, tiki bars spread across North America. In Boston, you could order a pu-pu platter and a Suffering Bastard at establishments like Aku-Aku, Bob Lee's Islander, the Hawaiian and, of course, Trader Vic's. But for the generation who came of age in the late '60s and '70s, tropical drinks were as square as their parents' Martin Denny records. By the '80s, most tiki bars had faded away.

As often happens, though, a new generation came along and revived tiki drinks and culture. Boston musician and cocktail historian Brother Cleve played a part. He and fellow members of the '90s lounge band Combustible Edison pledged their allegiance to "cocktail nation." Tiki reemerged, says Cleve, partly because it's "fun and kitschy," but also because "bartenders know how to make the drinks." For that, we have Cleve's fellow rum expert Jeff "Beachbum" Berry to thank, who uncovered lost tiki recipes and published them in his books Grog Log, Intoxica! and Sippin' Safari. Here's one of Cleve's—and LUPEC Boston's—faves.

Cin-cin!

SHRUNKEN SKULL | ADAPTED FROM BEACHBUM BERRY'S GROG LOG

1 ounce Cruzan Estate light rum (aged two years)

1 ounce Demerara rum

1 ounce fresh lime juice

1 ounce grenadine

dash of Angostura bitters

Shake with ice and pour into a skull mug. Top with 0.5 ounce club soda.

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