Ten tiki cocktails, and where they came from

Jennings Cox was an American mining engineer working the iron deposits outside Santiago de Cuba in the last years of the nineteenth century. The drink he made from local rum, lime, and sugar took its name from Daiquirí — the beach and the mine, not the man.

It reached the United States in 1909 by way of Rear Admiral Lucius W. Johnson, who tasted it in Cuba and started serving it at the Army and Navy Club in Washington. From there it spread through officers' messes and hotel bars, picked up a blender somewhere along the way, and spent most of the twentieth century as a strawberry slush machine on a cruise ship.

Made properly, it is the most exposed drink in the canon. Three ingredients, no bitters, no spice, nothing to cover a mistake.

Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt — who renamed himself Donn Beach — opened Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood in 1933 and effectively invented the tiki bar as a form. The Zombie is his masterpiece and the drink that made the format famous.

The house story is that he mixed it for a regular fighting a hangover before a business trip, and that the man came back days later complaining he had been a zombie the whole way. The two-drink limit was real, printed, and enforced by the staff.

Donn protected his recipes obsessively. Syrups were pre-batched into unlabeled bottles marked with codes, so bartenders could build his drinks without ever learning what was in them.

Grog is older than tiki by two centuries. In 1740 Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon — called "Old Grog" for the grogram cloak he wore on deck — ordered the Royal Navy's daily half-pint rum ration cut with water, and later with sugar and citrus. The dilution kept the crew upright; the citrus, unknowingly at first, kept them from scurvy.

Donn Beach took the name and built something considerably more serious than a ration: three rums, two juices, honey instead of sugar, and a soda lift. It is the driest drink on this list and the one most likely to convert a whiskey drinker.

The signature is the ice. Donn's bar froze water in a cone around a length of copper pipe, then slid the pipe out, leaving a channel for the straw. President Nixon drank these at the Beachcomber in Washington, reportedly several at a time.

During the Second World War, whiskey was scarce and rum was not. Distributors made bars take large quantities of rum — by most tellings as many as fifty cases — to earn a single case of whiskey. Pat O'Brien ended up with a cellar full of product his French Quarter customers did not want.

So he mixed it into a passion fruit punch, poured it into a glass shaped like a hurricane lamp, and handed it to sailors. The glass became a souvenir, the souvenir became a landmark, and the drink has been carried up and down Bourbon Street ever since.

Its reputation suffers from what it usually is: premix, red dye, and a long night. Built with real passion fruit and fresh citrus, it is a legitimately excellent rum punch with a genuine claim on the canon.

In 1944 Victor Bergeron reached for a seventeen-year-old J. Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum, added lime, curaçao, orgeat, and rock candy syrup, and handed it across the bar to two friends visiting from Tahiti. Carrie Guild tasted it and said "Maita'i roa ae" — Tahitian for roughly "out of this world, the best." Vic said the drink named itself.

It is a dry, almond-scented rum sour with an enormous amount of rum in it, and it looks nothing like what most bars serve. There is no pineapple juice, no orange juice, no grenadine, and nothing red.

The original rum is gone — the world drank the entire supply of aged Wray & Nephew chasing this drink — which is why the modern move is a split base of aged Jamaican rum and Martinique rhum agricole to rebuild the funk and the grassiness together.

The name means "strained pineapple," and it is older than the cocktail — nineteenth-century Puerto Rican references describe a piña colada as a simple pineapple cooler with no coconut in sight.

The version the world knows required a piece of food science first. Coco López, the shelf-stable cream of coconut that makes the drink possible, was developed in 1948 by Ramón López Irizarry, an agricultural professor at the University of Puerto Rico, as a way to make coconut cream usable at scale.

Six years later, bartender Ramón "Monchito" Marrero spent roughly three months developing a house drink for the Caribe Hilton in San Juan and landed on this. Puerto Rico named it the official national drink in 1978.

In 1957 a sales representative from Bols walked into the Hilton Hawaiian Village and asked head bartender Harry Yee to build something around their blue curaçao. Yee took a few days with it and came back with this. He named it for the 1937 Bing Crosby song — the Elvis film came four years later, in 1961, and took the name from the same place.

Yee's larger contribution to the drinking world is the garnish. He had been finishing drinks with a stick of sugarcane, and guests kept chewing it and abandoning the pulp in the ashtrays. He switched to a small paper parasol, and the entire industry copied him.

It is the most photographed drink in tiki and the least respected, which is roughly what happens to anything that photographs that well.

The Soggy Dollar Bar sits on White Bay on Jost Van Dyke and has no dock. Boats anchor offshore, guests swim in, and the bills they hand across the bar arrive wet. That is where the name came from and it is still how it works.

In the 1970s, owner Daphne Henderson served a house drink and would not give up the recipe. Charles Tobias of Pusser's Rum reverse-engineered it across repeated visits, standardized it around his own navy rum, and trademarked the name.

Which is why "Painkiller" on a menu is a legally defended term — Pusser's has enforced it, memorably against a New York bar of the same name in 2011 — and why plenty of bars serve this exact drink under some other title.

This is the Florida one. In 1972 the Holiday Isle Tiki Bar in Islamorada had a back bar crowded with blackberry and banana liqueur it needed gone before a new delivery arrived, and bartender "Tiki John" Ebert cleared the shelf into a glass.

He named it for the Prohibition-era smugglers who ran liquor up through the Keys from Cuba and the Bahamas — a trade the Keys have never entirely stopped being proud of.

It became the signature drink of the Upper Keys and it still is. Every bar between Key Largo and Key West has a version, and no two of them agree on the proportions.

Not Caribbean and not Californian. The Jungle Bird was the welcome drink at the Aviary Bar in the Kuala Lumpur Hilton in 1978, served in a ceramic bird to guests as they checked in.

It vanished when the hotel's tiki era ended and would have stayed gone if Jeff "Beachbum" Berry had not printed it in Beachbum Berry Remixed in 2002. It has been on the ascent ever since.

The trick is Campari. Bitterness cutting across pineapple reads as a very contemporary idea, and it is nearly fifty years old — which is most of the reason this drink became the bridge between the craft cocktail world and tiki.