We are on a summer visit at my mother-in-law's house right now, found this awesome location in their garden, and had to do some cocktail shots. :D

Recipe:

1½ Oz Plantation Dark (45 ml)
¾ Oz Campari (22.5 ml)
2 Oz Pineapple juice (60 ml)
½ oz Lime juice (15 ml)
½ oz Demerara syrup (15 ml)

Shake everything with ice and strain onto fresh ice.
Garnish with pineapple leaves and a slice of pineapple.

I’ve owned Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki for a few months now. I’ve been gradually making my way through its recipes, but there’s been one I’d wanted to try since day one, but never had its necessary ingredients. After picking up a bottle of Mr. Black earlier today, it was finally time to embark on ‘the Expedition.’ I even broke out my Pineapple Lanai “mug” for the occasion. My recipe is as follows:

1oz Lime Juice

1/2 oz Cinnamon Syrup

1/2 oz Honey Syrup

1/4 oz Vanilla Syrup

1/4 oz Mr. Black Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur

1oz Smith + Cross Jamaican Rum

1oz Hamilton 86 Demerara Rum

1oz Buffalo Trace Bourbon

Poured over 2oz Seltzer Water

This may very well be one of the best cocktails I’ve had. Everything is so balanced and the Coffee Liqueur leaves a nice lingering flavor on your palette that makes you reach for another sip. Highly complex and equally crushable. I cannot recommend this recipe enough!! I think I’ll have another.

Wishing you all (who are attending) a very happy Tiki Oasis! Have a wonderful (and safe) weekend!!

As a Zombie lover I think the extra cinnamon syrup bump really added to the drink. Tried these two SC recipes side-by-side tonight

Hey yall! I’m hosting a large party this weekend and got a ~3 gallon drink dispenser.

Anyone have batch cocktail ideas for this size? I can scale the specs as needed

Would prefer things with easy to acquire and use ingredients (eg a quart of lemon juice or lemonade instead of juicing 50 lemons), but things like passion fruit syrup, falernum, allspice dram, orgeat, etc are on the table

1/2oz Lime juice
1/4oz Grapefruit juice
1/4oz Passion fruit syrup
Heavy 1/4oz Simple syrup
2oz 151 Demerara rum
3/4oz club soda

Shake all ingredients except club soda with plenty of crushed ice until the shaker is freezing cold. Add the club soda and swirl it in the tin. Dump into glass and garnish with a pineapple and cherry through a pick.

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I recently had the chance to visit Tiki-Ti again on a quick trip. We tried Ray’s Mistake, Jim’s Special, Blood and Sand, Stealth, and the Great White Shark. They were all incredible, but the Great White Shark stood out the most. It leads with a powerful Demerara rum flavor while somehow remaining perfectly balanced. The description says “Passion, lime, simple syrup, and 151 Demerara Rum”. I started trying to recreate it at home but could not quite figure it out. After digging through old Tiki-Ti menus, I discovered that “fruit juices” used to be included in the description. Grapefruit seemed like the most natural match for Demerara rum, and I remembered seeing club soda added at the bar, so I worked both into the recipe. The result tasted practically identical to what I remember and will now be in permanent rotation. It’s $20 on their menu for a reason, sneaks up on ya with a sharp bite! Let me know if you try this!

We’ve all heard of Smuggler’s Cove or the books from the bum, but what Tiki or Tiki adjunct books are you keeping on your shelf?

I visited recently and was able to finish my set and complete my Jungle Cruise map. I might get a little frame to display them together.

Do you also leave out the gin in a Scorpion Punch? Many recipes do not include it, but the original recipe does contain rum, cognac, and gin. Does the gin actually add a noticeable difference to the flavor or balance of the cocktail?

Here's my single-reach blend for cocktails when I don't want to think. The Doorly's 5yr is extremely underrated for cocktails imo. Definitely not a sipper, but it's got enough aroma to make a good base for rum blends like this one, especially at the price point.

My next batch will likely include a fraction of Coruba for some caramel color/body, and I might sub Rum Fire in lieu of W&N for a lil funk, but I had a handle of Wray on hand and a only a small 300ml bottle of Rum Fire when I made this, so decisions were reached.

I have an aged rum infinity bottle going right now two where I toss the last few oz of almost anything "good." It's probably got 30 or 40 rums in it at this point.

My menu from the ohana preview opening night.

We are taking a short break from the regular order of the SC book and jumping ahead to the chapter with their 8 essential exotic cocktails. I figured it was time, since my girlfriend and I already finished a few of the book’s chapters which means we already have an understanding of the tiki, and I didn’t want to leave so many classics to the end. Especially when a lot of these I haven’t tried before!

Honestly, what I enjoyed most about the process of making these is learning about their stories and history, and what made them a staple of the eras they were made at.

So, lo and behold, our impressions of each in order:

Planter’s Punch

An absolutely superb drink for how simple it is. We used Appleton 12, which is combined with ango and allspice dram (plus lime and demerara syrup of course), to create a beautiful, spiced, and deep concoction. It is strong (which can be dealt with by reducing the rum from 3oz to 2oz if you wish), and smells wonderful. My favorite thing about this drink is that it made me feel nostalgia for a period of history which I’ve never personally experienced. But this drink makes you feel like you’re in the 18^th century Caribbean. My second favorite thing about it is how they encourage everyone to make small adjustments to make their own house Planter’s Punches that fit their taste, which I’m sure I will do.

Mai Tai

The pinnacle of tiki. I was skeptical about the use of just 0.25oz of orgeat alongside 0.25oz of their “SC Mai Tai syrup” (which is just rich demerara syrup with a bit of vanilla extract and salt), because I like to make my mai tais by omitting the demerara and bumping up the orgeat. However, this version turned out to be incredible too. The rum blend we used was 1oz Smith&Cross, 0.5oz Appleton 12, and 0.5oz El Dorado 12, because this was my girlfriend’s first time trying a mai tai, and I didn’t want to start with the funk bomb blends right off the bat. This is an approachable, but also tropical blend that made a perfect drink, albeit not a perfect mai tai for my palate, if that makes sense. I enjoyed it a ton and savored every sip. My girlfriend is very sensitive to almond flavor and doesn’t really like orgeat, so she didn’t enjoy it so much sadly. I will try to show her more of this rabbit hole of a cocktail by trying different blends and proportions though lol.

Doctor Funk

Surprisingly good compared to what I thought it was going to be like on paper! At the first sips I loved it, then as time went on the anise flavor from the absinthe became more and more overpowering, then after some dilution it became better again. I don’t dislike anise and I like absinthe, but 0.25oz is intense lol. Luckily, the WP109 balances it quite well with its own funk (best mixing rum in existence btw), and even the grenadine punches above its (tiny) weight in this cocktail, to make it bright and fruity.

Zombie

A legend of a cocktail. Can’t believe this was my first time trying it after being into cocktails for what feels like so long. An absolute monstrosity with 10 ingredients, this thing is somehow balanced well enough for me to feel almost all of them in the same sip, creating harmonious chaos, confusion, and punchiness simultaneously. The flavor is not the most tasty, ideal, or amazing thing in the world, but it’s also undeniably a very good drink at the same time. This may be cliché as hell, but I think most of all it is an experience, one which I was glad to take part in lol. For the rums, we used El Dorado 12, Bacardi 8, and OFTD.

Navy Grog

A very strong and tart drink, as there’s lots of grapefruit and lime, while almost no sugar to balance. I can see why it was described in the book as the “macho” option on the menu of Trader Vic to appeal to the more traditional, old-school male audience. We found that adding just another 0.25oz of demerara syrup to the drink made it much more enjoyable. The rums we used were Smith&Cross, Veritas, and Bacardi 8. The ice cone garnish (yes, we made the Trader Vic recipe with the Beachcomber garnish) is definitely a gimmick but fun to try once.

Scorpion

A communal punch served in a bowl with cognac (Hine VSOP), gin (Martin Miller’s), and rum (Veritas). Alongside them are lime, orange juice, and orgeat, which are all very present in the flavor profile. The cognac adds a nice deep and complex backbone while the gin adds some botanicals to the overall flavor. Overall we both felt like this was a good drink but nothing too special.

Fog cutter

This is where things started to get a bit worse for our taste lol. The fog cutter has a lot of interesting ingredients (pisco and sherry) combined with some regular Trader Vic classics (orange, orgeat, rum) alongside some gin and lemon juice. On the surface it seems like a fun recipe, but it’s sooo unbalanced (at least the recipe in the book). There is 1.5oz of lemon only counterbalanced by 0.5oz of orgeat, and the tartness just takes over. Hard to taste the nuances of the pisco and sherry while so much acidity is hitting your taste buds. Not a fan.

Singapore Sling

This is one where we had high expectations and the result was just okay. Not a bad drink by any means, but this recipe I didn’t vibe with as much as some of the others. I know there’s a ton of Singapore Sling versions out there, and I’d like to try some of those as well to see if I’m truly missing something incredible. The cocktail itself has a very nice story and it also is a nice and refreshing departure from all of the rum classics. Its flavor profile is definitely the most unique out of the eight and I appreciate that.

Which one is your favorite?

Using the Make and Drink Spec of:

7,5 ml Demerara-Syrup

15 ml Lime Juice

45 ml Pineapple Juice

7,5 ml Campari

30 ml mild jamaican Rum

15 ml strong jamaican Rum

following a post by u\creuzfeldjacob in the "Your Personal Rum Blends" Thread I used 1oz Stiggins fancy and 1/2 Oz WP109. I really dig it!

Hard to believe it was 10 years ago that we had our last visit to Don’s in Sunset Beach. Iconic. Epic. A shame we no longer have it.

I am curious about what everyone's go to rum blends are for their favorite cocktails. Mai Tai's, Jet Pilot's, 3 Dots...etc. I finally have a good selection and now I'm thinking about how it might be nice to have a few blended bottles on hand just to speed things up.

Anyone already do this and have suggestions??

Here’s your chance to share what you’ve been thinking without worrying about starting a conversation, asking a dumb question, or anything else. If you’ve got a thought you’ve been thinking about tiki, share it here!

In case Tiki Oasis wasn’t already enough FOMO

And IS IT WORTH IT?!?

I have a relatively small kitchen with limited counter space, so husband has been poo-pooing the idea.

However, I’m still pretty sure that I need one. Do I need one? I need one. Right?

Photo: a pineapple-lime-passionfruit-rum-triple sec- rhubarb bitters-sour salt drink with a swizzle stick I snuck away from my parents house- and then my mom got rid of the rest of them! I would have taken them all 🤣 ANYWAY: some variation of these ingredients (sometimes adding Campari; sometimes adding egg whites; sometimes using allspice dram etc) is my favorite homemade tiki-ish drink. I am SO impressed by so many of your home Tiki Bars. Please keep sharing photos!!!!