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The Mai Tai is the quintessential Hawaiian cocktail
but it turns out
it's not actually Hawaiian.
In fact, more often than not, when you order a Mai Tai
you're not getting THE Mai Tai,
at least not the original Mai Tai from 1944.
So today we are making that original Mai Tai, or at least as close as we can get.
We'll also tackle the controversial history of its creation and I'll do so from Hawaii.
The Mai Tai this time on Drinking History.
So I am here at Kuleana Rum Works on the Big Island of Hawai'i
not that far from where they actually distill the Kuleana Rum.
They are carrying on a tradition of making rum here on the island that goes all the way back to
King Kamehameha the first.
An early Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau said
"The first taste that Kamehameha and his people had of rum
was at Kailua in 1791 or perhaps a little earlier,
brought in by Captain Maxwell."
But while they may have had the main ingredient available it took another 150 years
for the Mai Tai to wash up on the shores, but when it did
it was the 1944 recipe from Trader Vic.
"Two ounces Wray & Nephew 17-year Jamaican rum,
1/2 ounce orange curacao, a 1/2 ounce orgeat syrup, a 1/4 ounce white sugar syrup,
juice of one lime, shake well with plenty of crushed ice.
Pour unstrained into a double old-fashioned glass.
Sink your spent lime shell into drink. Garnish with a mint sprig."
And we can pretty much make this exact drink with one notable exception.
You are not likely to find any Wray & Nephew 17 year old Jamaican rum.
There are a few bottles still left in the world but usually they're sold at auction
for about $50,000
so I'm not using that today.
Now Vic himself described the rum as "surprisingly golden in color, medium bodied,
but with the rich pungent flavor particular to the Jamaican blends.
The flavor of this great rum wasn't meant to be overpowered with
heavy editions of fruit juices and flavorings."
And even Vic himself didn't use the rum for very long because just a few years into making his Mai Tais
he had gone through the world's supply
of that rum so he switched over to the 15-year and by the mid 50s he'd gone through all that too.
So then he switched to his own blend of aged Jamaican rum and rum Agricole
which is a rum made from fresh sugar cane juice typically made in Martinique or Guadalupe
so while I wasn't able or willing to shell out $50,000 for a bottle of rum
most everything that I am using in this cocktail is available on Curiada,
and I'll put a link in the description to where you can order that.
So for my dark rum I'm using this Appleton Estate 12 year.
It's the oldest distillery in Jamaica and is now owned by Wray & Nephew,
and for my rum Agricole I'm actually going to be using Kuleana's rum Agricole because you know, when in Hawai'i.
The other ingredients I'm using are Pierre Ferrand Dry Curacao which is a bitter and sweet orange flavored liqueur,
and the Liber & Co orgeat syrup.
So orgeat is a sweet and a little bit bitter almond syrup
that often has some botanicals usually rose or I think this has a little orange blossom.
I'm actually going to try a little bit.
It's like marzipan in liquid form.
Absolutely delicious and you really can't make the original Mai Tai without it.
Then just some simple syrup and the juice of a lime, about one ounce worth.
Then we give it a shake with crushed ice and pour the whole thing into a glass.
Then garnish with a sprig of mint.
He also says to put the lime shell in there but unless you have a bigger glass
and a smaller lime that's not really going to work and that's okay.
Here we go.
It's very different from so many Mai Tais that you get.
It's not nearly as sweet,
it is sweet.
I mean it's still a tropical Tiki drink but you're really tasting
the flavors of the rum and the orgeat.
You're getting- it's so much more complex than when they just make it with a bunch of fruit juice and rum,
and I definitely prefer it this way.
It's basically like a Hawaiian vacation in a glass.
But there are so many newer versions of this drink.
It has a long and complicated history
and I'm going to give you a short history right now.
The year is 1944 Victor Bergeron had been proprietor of a bar for ten years in Oakland California,
originally called Hinky Dinks. The bar had gone Tiki recently and he changed the name to Trader Vics.
Now Vic had found some success with the bar but things were getting a little stale,
it was time for a new cocktail.
So one night he went behind the bar and grabbed that bottle of Wray & Nephew, 17 year old Jamaican rum
and made the first Mai Tai.
"I stuck in a branch of fresh mint and gave two of them to Ham and Carrie Guild,
friends from Tahiti, who were there that night.
Carrie took one sip and said, 'Mai Ta'i - Roa Ae'.
In Tahitian this means 'Out of this world - the best'.
Well, that was that, I named the drink 'Mai Tai' ".
But is this how it actually went down because Vic was kind of a spinner of tall tales.
Often he would take a fork and stab it into his wooden leg and tell people that he had lost the leg to a shark,
when in reality he lost it to tuberculosis when he was six years old.
But frankly the Mai Tai story just doesn't seem that far-fetched so
I don't see why he would have made it up,
but there is one man who claimed that it was made up,
Donn Beach the originator of the Tiki bar.
See Donn told people that Vic had based the Mai Tai off of a punch at the Beachcomber.
"The Q.B. Cooler was the basis for a drink he took with him and he called it the Mai Tai."
And it is known that Vic was a big fan of the Beachcomber and took a lot of inspiration from the place when he opened Trader Vics.
Though Fred Fung, Vic's assistant for 41 years, swore that while Vic may have taken a lot of ideas from the Beachcomber.
Basically just taking the entire concept of the Tiki bar along with a lot of other things
when it came to "the Mai Tai, he did concoct that, and Carrie Guild did name it."
And you kind of got a side with Vic on this because the Q.B. Cooler had 10 ingredients in the mai tai only had 5,
and of those ingredients they only shared two and it was lime juice and rum and it wasn't even the same kind of rum.
So I say Vic gets the credit for the Mai Tai but it didn't really matter at least for the first few years
because it wasn't that popular outside of his place in Oakland
but when Vic partnered with Matson Cruise Line in 1952 he put together a cocktail menu that featured the mai tai except
that it was actually way low on the list below the Zombie and Planter's Punch
but it was there on the menu and it was made on their ships and at their hotels including the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki.
And it was there that the Mai Tai really took off.
And throughout the 1950s other hotels in Hawaii decided to cash in on the drink's popularity,
and added the Mai Tai to their menus.
Unfortunately the recipe was a very well kept secret and so these other places
were just making their version of the Mai Tai and this is when you start to see
orange juice, and pineapple juice, andgrenadine being added and
the dark rum float on the top which is very common still today
but whether it was the original or one of these knockoffs the Mai Tai was a hit with tourists,
and they took it back to the mainland when they went home.
There they served it at the many Polynesian themed parties
that were all the rage in the 1950s and 60s.
In 1962 the Deputy Secretary of Defense threw a lūʻau in Washington DC
with guests as illustrious as ambassadors, White House staff and even Senators including Robert Kennedy,
and afterward Washington Society columnist Betty Beale wrote
"Don't say black tie, say Mai Tai."
And the Mai Tai subsequently became the most popular drink in the country for several years,
and as its popularity grew its association with Hawai'i actually began to irk Vic
because the drink had been made at his place in Oakland,
and so he started to put up signs at Trader Vic's that said 'The Home of the Mai Tai'
and he cashed in on its popularity by bottling the drink to sell at stores,
but he wasn't the only one.
See around 1970 another bottled Mai Tai began appearing on the shelves,
and it said that it was the original Mai Tai.
Who would have the audacity?!
Well of course it was Donn the Beachcomber.
See the rivalry between the two had been growing for years and in many ways
Vic had won not necessarily because he was doing better but because Donn had
not done so well with the business. He had had some money problems, some problems with several ex-wives
and so his first ex-wife now owned all of his restaurants.
And I think that this bottled my time might have just been a way for him to get some of that dignity back
but Vic didn't really care and he sued him and won but
in doing so Vic had to put the original recipe for the Mai Tai in the public record
which is why we have it today so I can make it here.
And I'm sure glad because it's absolutely delicious.
This is- this is still my first one I swear
but it won't be my last. Now
I've already tasted this and usually I do the tasting at the end of the episode,
but I wanted to taste that earlier because I wanted to actually taste the rum Agricole from Kuleana and
this nanea which I've actually already tasted,
and it's fantastic but I want to taste them side by side it's a bit more of an aged rum.
So this is the Agricole and it's a hundred percent sugar cane juice grown here on Hawai'i
on their farm and that is what we used in the cocktail.
So I'm going to try it solo.
It's nice it's very just kind of neutral.
There's a little bit of a
fruitiness in there, like maybe pineapple or something like that.
It's actually very, very nice.
This is made partly with this and it's then aged in cognac barrels for 18 months
and then blended with several other rums so going to be a little bit more complicated uh
kind of the goal here is to
make it more like a- like you would have a tasting whiskey
that you taste. This is going to be more in that vein. Let's give it a try.
I love it. I just love it. It's so smooth.
The burn is it's almost an afterthought. An afterburn if you will.
And so you're just getting the flavors. It's really, really wonderful
and I think could go
and be used in cocktails but doesn't need to be. It's really is just lovely for sipping,
maybe a little bit chilled you know just because it's hot in Hawai'i.
Fantastic.
And they have lots of other rooms, well a couple other rums
that are absolutely worth trying so if you want to check out Kuleana I will put a link to their website
so you can see where you can buy them online or somewhere in your state.
Thank you to Kuleana for for hosting me here and
for Hawai'i for being just the best place to take a vacation and make wonderful cocktail.
Wait wait don't go away yet because we are not quite finished since I filmed that video in Hawai'i
I found this wonderful quote from Trader Vic himself.
See Vic was a teller of tall tales and he liked to build up his origin story but
in the 1960s after he had made most of his money
he decided to kind of come clean on his famous origin story.
He was being interviewed by Barnaby Conrad who sounds like a fascinating character himself because
not only was Barnaby a celebrated author and artist, he was also a nightclub owner, boxer,
and a bull fighter.
Go figure.
Anyway he was interviewing Vic and he asked him a little bit about the Tahiti part of his origin story.
How long he had been in Tahiti and Vic admitted
"I went to Tahiti last year for the first time, and I hated the goddamn place.
Here all these years I've been promoting South Seas Cuisine and South Seas products,
and I go there and see it for myself, and it rains all the time and the girls have bad teeth
and the food is crummy and I can't wait to leave.
It's the pits. It's a boil on the ass of creation that place, I'll tell ya!"
Quite the charmer and essentially he was promoting a product he had never even tried before
so that makes me glad that I have gotten to try these service from today's sponsor Squarespace.
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and I will see you next time on Drinking History.
thank you