Cocktail Q+A Jeff "Beachbum" Berry Remixed
Without the contributions of Jeff "Beachbum" Berry, cocktailians might be stuck sipping inaccurate versions—loaded with subpar ingredients—of classic cocktails like the Mai Tai, the Scorpion and the Zombie. With him, their world is infinitely richer. Berry is a hybrid of street-smart gumshoe, anthropologist and mixologist. We have reaped the benefits of his obsession with the tiki legacy, which has made the public take a second look at the enormous contribution to drinking culture that tiki's founders—Don the Beachcomber and Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron—have made.
In his new book,
Beachbum Berry Remixed, Berry has uncovered several recipes that should get the enterprising barman raring to tinker. We recently spoke by phone about his new book and more.
The new book is basically an update of two previous ones—Grog Log and Intoxica, which are both classics. Why the update?
Three things happened between the time the second book was published in 2002 and today. One was the craft cocktail movement, which did not exist on a national level. As you know, there’s has been an explosion of amazing drinkmaking talents driven by an obsessive farm-to-glass ethos, particularly here in L.A. But when I wrote those books most people were still suffering with red-wine spritzers and chocolate martinis.
Two was a tiki revival that had sort of been bubbling underground for a while and was propelled from being an underground hipster thing toward a more mainstream big-business thing, where tiki bars and restaurants were sprouting up again as they did in the grand period of ’50s and ’60s. The third thing was a rum revival, where you saw a slew of artisanal rums and rum bars flooding the market.
Let’s talk about rum. Obviously, there are some authentic tiki recipes in your book, but part of the problem is a lot of the rums Don the Beachcomber and Victor Bergeron used in the ’30s are obsolete. How do these artisanal rums today compare with the extinct rums of yesteryear—and can we ever really re-create these drinks if the primary ingredient no longer exists?
We aren’t able to completely re-create the drinks as they were. I think the old rums, like Dagger Punch, were ultimately better, and we’ll never taste them because the production techniques have changed. They were done in old wooden pot stills, which lends a very intense flavor. I have the good fortune to know some rum collectors, so I’ve actually been able to taste them—and they put a lot of the current brands to shame. But many of the rums being produced in South and Central America today—Zaya from Guatamala comes to mind—are producing some really interesting flavor profiles, and I think if Don and Vic were alive today, they would be turning to these rums as an alternative.
You’ve uncovered a lot of hidden recipes for your books, and I’m wondering how you go about doing that—are your methods more like anthropology, or do you have to be a bit of a Philip Marlowe?
Well, I would say it’s been mostly gumshoe work. I started this before the Internet, and it was all bookishness and going to libraries and looking up old periodicals. So I massed quite a stock of old trade magazines and used books, but I also learned from observing the bartenders at Trader Vic’s and then going home and reverse engineering what they made. I kind of reached a limit when I realized the problem was that Vic and Don guarded their drink recipes like trade secrets. They had a vested interest in not publishing them—and the best ones were never published.
I guess that’s when you had to call up the surviving family members of bartenders who worked for Don and Vic in the golden era and had these hidden recipes scrawled in their own drink journals. How did you get them to give it up—brass knuckles?
Exactly! See, after my first book was published, a lot of tiki bartenders who wouldn’t answer my questions realized I was serious and that I was approaching this with respect. They saw I wasn’t just ripping off people but sourcing all of my material. And in recent years, many of their relatives have even approached me.
Beachbum Berry Remixed has many previously unpublished recipes. Are there any bombshells we should know about?
Oh, yes, quite a few. I had some original 1930s recipes to replace some of the later 1960s ones that I got from guys like Stephen Remsberg, and they are far better. The biggest sort of motherload recipe was a drink called the QB Cooler.
That is big. Wasn’t the QB Cooler the drink that “inspired” Bergeron to create the Mai Tai?
The consensus is that Vic reverse-engineered the QB Cooler in order to make the Mai Tai, which is one of the most iconic drinks ever. Of course, there’s the long publicized row between Vic and Don over who invented it, and it went so far that they actually went to court—Vic ultimately won. But this recipe shows new evidence that perhaps Vic had a little unvolunteered help from Don for that drink.
I couldn’t help but notice you include a section on vodka. Isn’t kind of sacrilege? It seems vodka is kind of the “merlot” of the spirits world these days. It’s like cultural hemlock. Why?
Well, around 1960, vodka was making a huge inroad into the spirits business—it was sort of killing rum, as a matter of fact. It’s one reason there are so many bad rums today, in part because they were chasing the vodka market and losing all the true flavor from rum to make it mixable—or neutral, like vodka. So if you had an elaborate and really flavorful drink using fresh pineapple, mint, honey, lime and peach brandy—all these are strong flavors together, so back in the day, adding vodka would assure the bartender the flavor balance wouldn’t be thrown off.
It’s interesting how rum really became the spirit of choice for tiki’s founding fathers because it was so cheap back then. I’m also wondering what might have happened to tropical drinks if Don had never tasted a Planter’s Punch in Jamaica, which is really the prototype for all his tropical drinks?
That is true—it was the basic template for all of his drinks. And of course the Daiquiri is the short drink version of that, with simply rum, lime and sugar. In 1934, when Don was traveling, he didn’t just visit the Caribbean—he hit the Philippines, where they were mixing spirits with coconut. His trip also included Singapore, where he tried a Singapore Sling, which is a gin drink, of course. So I’m guessing we’d still have had tiki, but we’d all be drinking gin-based tropical drinks instead of rum. —Jod Kaftan
Q.B. Cooler
1 ounce orange juice
½ ounce fresh lime juice
½ ounce honey mix (see below)
¼ ounce falernum
1 ounce soda water
1 ounce gold Jamaican rum
1 ounce light Puerto Rican rum
½ ounce Demerara rum
2 dashes Angostura bitters
½ teaspoon ginger syrup (see bellow)
4 ounces crushed ice
Put everything in a blender. Blend at high speed for 5 seconds. Pour unstrained into a double-old fashioned glass. Garnish with several mint sprigs.
Honey Mix
Equal parts clover honey and hot water from your tap or a kettle, stirred until honey dissolves. Cool it and bottle it. Store in the fridge, where it will last several weeks.
Ginger Syrup
Cut a 2-inch long piece of fresh ginger into thin slices and place in a saucepan with 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water. Bring to a boil, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Lower heat, cover saucepan, and simmer for 2 minutes. Remove saucepan from heat and, keeping it covered, let sit for at least 2 hours before straining and bottling. Store it in the fridge.
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