Beachbum Berry on the Invention of the Mai Tai

Tiki culture. He in fact, he's the living authority on all things Tiki, having unearthed numerous recipes from the golden age of Tiki and helped to bring about its comeback from obscurity and stagnation. His books include beach Bumberri Sip and Safari and beach Bumberries Potions of the Caribbean, which is an excellent, excellent illustrated breakdown of Tiki history and the book that made me decide that we needed to

reach out to the man for Invention. Now, Robert, you're the one here that has definitely got a passion for this weird cultural artifact of this period known as like the Tiki craze. What in short, what is the Tiki Craze? Well, it's weird, you know because it's like, uh, you're dealing with with what can be an extremely delicious, rich and complex cocktail that is also delivered in this kind of

faux uh Polynesian um uh, you know, rapping. And of course all cocktails are you know, like fifty percent ingredients presentation at least it may even you know, depending on how you look at it, uh, that the percentage of presentation is even greater. Um. And yeah, they're also they feel like an artifact of the past. At the same time, Now, this is gonna be somewhat different than a lot of episodes we've done before that we've looked at a lot

of different kinds of takes on the word invention. Usually we're looking at something more like a technology, like a piece of hardware that does something you can hold in your hand. But today we're gonna be looking centrally, I think mostly at a an iconic recipe, the invention of a recipe for a drink. The my that's right, the signature really the the the superstar of tiki cocktails. If no matter what how little you know about tiki, you

probably know the Ma Tai. You've probably at least seen it on the menu somewhere Uh so, Yeah, we're gonna be quizzing beach bum Berry about the history the invention of the ma Tai and in doing so, you know, get I think to the the invention of tiki, but also just what we can what we can take from the invention of the ma tai and apply to invention and technology in general. Uh so, Yeah, I'm excited to have have a beach Bumberry on the show. I've been

a fan of his books for for a while. I'm a fan of his restaurant in New Orleans, Latitude twenty nine, which you'll find in the French Quarter. And if you want to check out his website, uh, it is beach bum Berry dot com. So, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. All right, welcome to the show. Uh, Jeff,

would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners. Yeah, my name is Jeff Barry aliens speech by Barry, and I write books about Polynesian drinks and food and I own a restaurant and bar called Latitude twenty nine in New Orleans. All right, Well, we're going to be discussing the origins of tiki drinks, how the signature my Tai came to be and how America fell in love with the Tiki cocktail. But first, how did Jeff Barry fall in love with

tiki and become the beach Bump. The way I fell down the Tiki rabbit hole was about oh man, I must have been eight years old, maybe younger. UM and my parents we looked in the San Frando Valley UM just outside of Los Angeles, and at that time, in the sixties, just about every town or city had at least one UM, you know, Polynesian themed restaurant or bar. The fad had to sort of hit its peak in the sixties. And the place they took me to was called a Fongs and it was just a Chinese restaurant.

But what they had done was they had taken over a failed business called the Bora Bora Room. The Bora Bora Room has spent so much money on the core that they went out of business. They couldn't recoup their costs. So the place was beautiful. It was full of like running waterfalls and a canoe hanging from the ceiling, and there were these dawn to dusk lighting changes with this little miniature island diorama behind the bar, and you had to walk through the bar to get to the restaurant.

So I noticed that, and I just became a Polynesiac at that point. And this faux Polynesia, this sort of like little movie set Polynesia, actually made me want to go to the actual Polynesia, which I did. And of course, when I got old enough to drink, I wanted to find these places so I can actually drink in them. And that was and they were starting to disappear. The fat was over, so you could there were still a

couple of places left. Um the tik Et, a little tiny place UM was which is actually still there with their generation owners, and then Trader Vix was still there. So I went to the places that were there and try some drinks, and they kind of blew my mind. I mean, the good ones were really really good. And this was at a time when uh, this was the cocktail dark ages. You couldn't get a good drink anywhere. Um.

Nobody was using fresh juices. Everybody was using mixes from a can or a squeeze bottle, and Um Tiki places were the only places that were still doing drinks the way they made them in the thirties, forties and fifties. They were using fresh juice they were using, you know, um house made syrups and premium RUMs, and they were mixing all these complicated, um, teasingly elusive flavors. And basically what they were doing was they were doing craft cocktails,

like seventy years before that term even existed. UM. So I kept going to these places, not just because I love the interiors, um, loved the decor, but because the drinks were so good. And it wasn't until like the nineties that I actually tried to figure out how to make these drinks. Because you could not find them in

cocktail books. Um. They were top secrets. They were industrial secrets, basically trade secrets and very very jealously guarded because you didn't want rival teking places making your drinks and stealing your market share. Uh. And so you couldn't find them in a recipe books. You couldn't find them in a newspaper articles, when you went to the library and looked up things on microfilm, you couldn't find them. Basically anywhere. You could find bad ones. Money of bad ones were printed,

but the good ones were just still secret. And when you talk to the old timers who were making them, um, you know, by the nineties, there were very few of them left. But when you talk to them, they wouldn't tell you anything. You know, You'd say, well, what's what's in this drink? It's greating and they go rumman fruit juice, sort of like you know, you you knew immediately that that was the last question you were going to ask them, you know, So that sort of started me on this thing.

I'm trying to find, um, find find how to how to make the drinks, which I had to do of necessity because all these places are going into business and eventually if I wanted to have a ticky drink, I'd have to be able to make it at home. Now I know way less about a tiki drinks and tiki culture than than Robert does, so I might ask the neophyte questions. This might be a stupid question, but is it possible to patent to drink recipe? Can you try

to enforce intellectual property rights on that? Or is that just you know, you can't even get started. That's an excellent question, actually, and it's a question that's still being debated. Um. There's one cocktail book writer, Philip Green, who writes books about Ernest Hemingway and drinking in the twenties and all that.

And he's also a trademark lawyer and he actually did a whole seminar about that, because everybody wants to know that now during this whole cocktail renaissance, when you know, drinks have become currency again for people's careers, and the short answers, no, you can't. Um, you can. You can trademark a drink name, um, and but you can't actually copyright or recipe and people can just do what they want once the recipes um out there. It's the same

thing with food. I mean, there are plenty of chefs and restaurant owners out there who would love to be able to copyright dishes and only serve them in their places. But UM, I don't know all of the legal intercreases of why you can't. But but you can't. Now, there have been there have been drinks that have copyrighted or or trademark I'm not clear on which their names, like the Dark and Stormy UM, Gosling's Rum trademark that drink name which is basically just Ginger beer and Goslings Rum.

They want you to use Goslings Rum and Goslings Ginger Beer So if you are a bar and you serve a darkened Stormy and you don't use their products and you call it a darkens Stormy, they could conceivably come after you and see you for trademark violation. So that's about as close as it gets to being able to

protect a recipe. But of course people will do what I do at my bar, which is, um, I'll just call the dark or in stormy or you know, something like the same thing happened with a very popular drink served in a lot of t bars called the pain killer. Oh yes, um, yeah, they the pusters rum trade marked that one. So you have to use pushers rum and you're a pain killer, or you can't call it a painkiller,

so people call it, you know, all kinds of different things. Um. But they did actually, um send a cease and desist letter to a bar in New York that was calling itself pain killer. Um. And if the bar was using pushers rum, Pusses would have had no problem with it, but they weren't, and it got kind of heated. The owners of the bar got all New York and said, hey, we're gonna do what we want, and then pusses rum

said no, you won't, and they basically force them. The trade there changed the name of their bar and all this other stuff. So people still remember that actually from that was about almost ten years ago. Now, you know, the fact that you can't enforce intellectual property rights on a recipe makes me wonder if like more complicated cocktail recipes could be a business decision in addition to being a culinary decision. Uh well, the um it does except yes and no. Um, yes, you're right. The more you

can make something difficult to reverse engineer. For example, if you have got a drink like the Zombie, which has all kinds of like twelve ingredients in it, and it's nine four and the drink is a sensation, it's like the cosmos halt in its day. Everybody's writing about it. Um, And you go to down to Beach Commerce bar and you try and figure out how to reverse engineer by watching them make the drink. Um, well, good luck to you,

because the bottles don't have anything on their labels. What they did to try and stop people from ripping off his recipes was they, uh you know those twelve bottles they used, they had like numbers or letters on them, so the people who mix the drinks, all they knew was like it's a half an ounce of number four or a dash of number two, and um, you know, if if the if the guy tries to fire away that bartender and bring him to his bar and say okay, now make these really profit trends for me, and I

goes okay, fine, and he looks at the back bar and as well, where's your number two? Where's number four? There's nothing I can do. And this actually, this was the thing Dona did do this. The other thing he did to stop people from figuring out how to make his drinks was he had all of the complicated tropical drinks made um in the service bar. So if you go into his bar and you order a martini, the bartender yesterday and or yesterday, and he'll make it for

you right there in front of you. But if you order zombie, he'll open up a little door um behind the bar, open it up a zombie, close it again, and then you know they're the team of elves in the back bar where nobody who noted that you can see, will make that drink. Then they'll open the door again and hand it to the bartender and you can still see this being done. Um if you go to the Macai restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, which opened in fifty six and was um it's amazing sort of preserved an amber

mid century Polynesian palace. That's the way they make their drinks at the bar. You don't see anybody doing anything so um. But but the no part of the answer about making drinks complicated is that it's it adds to the poor cost. So the more complicated dish or a drink is, the more ingredients you have to have on hand, um, which you have to pay for, and the more labor it takes to do it, which you have to pay for. So um, it's a tricky sort of balancing act there.

But it's a that's a good question. Though. I want to come back to a restaurant you mentioned earlier, Tiki t I believe is that the Tiki restaurant in l A that is next to currently next to a large

scientology center. Okay, when I went there about a year ago, we were out there for business, and we we made a point of like looking up like where did fo we go, uh, you know for fertiki in l A. And and so we got to experience that place, and it was certainly for me un guinny tiki restaurant, Tiki Monity, they serve food tiki bar that I'd been to because it was just so old and kind of kind of divy. Would you say, yeah, it's it's a neighborhood bar that

I mean, you went to basically my local. I used to live not far from the Tik t in Los Aelas and when when the Scientology building was a KSET public television station, and that place was still one of my favorite bars in the world. I love that place. And yes, it is sort of like a you know, very low um, low fi neighborhood bar that just happens

to serve tiv drinks. It's also a legendary bar that it was opened the n by a guy named Ray Bowen, who had worked as one of the original bartenders at Donna Beachcomber, one of those guys who was behind them, you know, the wooden door, and worked at almost every famous tiki place in Eli before he opened his own bar. And um, you can still have drinks the way they were made them, the way they were making them in

the thirties and forties. If you go to the tiki t raised Raid put his own spin on the recipes. But they're very, very close um And then his son took over and and now his grandsons and his son are running the place. And it's just a fun, friendly neighborhood bar. I can get pat If you go at the wrong time of the day, there'll be a line outside. And uh, you know, it's a tiny place. Yeah, I remember when we were there. There were people who I just got the feeling they had been regulars for decades.

Oh yeah, and everybody has their own area too, Like when I was there. When I was going there like twice a week or whatever, UM, I was expected to sit at a certain part of the I would sit near the blenders so I can watch them do what they do. But the one time I moved up to the other side of the bar to say hello to some people and had to see it there looked at me like, what did you do? You just crossed into North Korea. You know, it's a really weird kind of thing.

So I I definitely want to come back to um to to discussion of of modern and past tiki bars, and especially Don the Beach Comber and uh and and Trader Vic. But going to back up a little bit first, in your in your book Portions of the Caribbean, which is a wonderful, just beautiful volume that I recommend to anybody interested in the topic, you chronicle five hundred years of tropical drinks, taking us on a drink citrinc journey through the history of Rome and colonialism in the region.

As a self professed tiki nerd, when did you realize that, despite all the South Seas trappings, the history of tiki is a history of the Caribbean. Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words about the book. Um and uh, the the answer to that is far too late. I've been into tiki for years and years and years and years before it finally hit me that, hey, all these drinks are basically based on the Planners Punch from Jamaica. It wasn't. It wasn't until really the probably the twenty

one century that I that I realized that. I mean, of course, you know that when you go to a tiki place, there's going to be drinks like the Martinique Swizzle or the Barbados Punch or so yeah, you get the idea that these are you know, their Daqirie variations from Cuba. So you know that some of the drinks are tropical drinks from the Caribbean, but they all have names like Newik Newi and Tahitian Punch and things like that.

And then the other thing is, um, they were all invented by this guy in Hollywood on the Beast Comber and another guy in Oakland, Trader vic Um. So it's not like the Caribbean roots of all these drinks really shows. It's only when I really really got into Don the Beast Comber's secret recipes um, which took me forever to get a hold of. But when I finally got some of them around two thousand four two five, Um, this major d named Richard Santiago. His daughter Jennifer had his

personal effects he had passed on. But he had a little telephone book size. Nope, only when I say telephone, but I mean like a dress book because in your shirt pocket. Um. So he had like a little notebook full of all of Dawn's original recipes from the from So I got ahold of that, and I was able to study it and pour through it and compare it to the drinks that I've had in actual restaurants and the resties already knew about, and you start to see patterns.

You start to see, well, everything is um a variation on the Planners punch, which is the simplest drink in the world of sweet, sour, strong, and weak. As the old recipe goes. You know, um, one of sour, tube, sweet, three of strong, four a week. Um. I mean different proportions than that, but that's the old poem from the nineteenth century. Sour being limes juice, sweet being sugar, strong being you know, a Jamaican rum, and weak being either

water or ice. So Um. What Dawn did was he took that very basic formula and I figured out that about thirty three of the seventy drinks he invented were based on the Planners punch. That was sort of the building blocks for almost everything you did. And that didn't occur to me until fairly deep into my obsession with this stuff. I think I'd written four books by that and then that's and that sort of grew into Potions

of the Caribbean. Was like, well, in order to really explain this twentieth century post prohibition phenomenon, you have to go back to you now, now, this book, like any book that I guess these days, that that covers the history of of drink is going to it has some recipes in it, but unlike you'll find recipes in potions, Unlike any recipes you'll find another books, you start off by taking us back to things like the Kalinago syphilis cure, as well as pre Columbian Mayan hot chocolate and in

various other like centuries old mixed beverages. Uh and uh and and these these recipes are I'm hesitant to actually try any of them, but but or the early ones anyway, But I have to ask, did you did you? Don't I don't recommend the syphilis cure. That was gonna be my question. Did you did you try all of them? What? What was the cyphilis cure like? And uh? And then what is the oldest mixed beverage you've come across that

you would actually consider good? Oh? Okay? Um? I yes, I tested and um and retested and tweaked just to make them as good as I thought I could make them. Um. Almost every recipe in the book, with the sole exception the only one I didn't taste and and make myself was the syphilis cure um a because I couldn't find pox would um and be because we have you know,

penicilla now. But um. The earliest recorded recipe for um what we would now call a tropical drink is I think it was from two and it was a French priest called Parallel Bat and he wrote down a fragment of a drink recipe calling for Barbados rum, lime, juice, sugar and spy used with cinnamon, nutmeg and clove. And that when I said, you know, that's a fragment, it's a recipe fragment, so I had to reconstruct it, so

liberties were taken. Um. But that's the earliest one that was that's actually been written down to the point where I could recreate it. Um. There were other ones, like you know, the pre Columbian beverage atole a, but that's not really a tropical it's not really what we call it a precursor to a tiki drink because there's there's no citrus in it. It's more of a breakfast drink. Actually.

The hot chocolate was another thing that I know. Basically all of the ingredients had been cataloged by various Spanish explorers and monks and and uh and there was enough there so that I could try to concoct a version of it um so, you know, to give you an idea of the flavors that went into it. And I started off with a um an actual chocolate recipe and then started adding the things that they would have put into to it back and ye know the con stored

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I want to get back to one of my favorite aspects of of TK history and something you write a great deal about in your books, and you've already you've already got into discussing some of it here already, and that is of course the t k d Ama and the wars between the various wizards of tiki during the golden age of you know the umbrella drink. Can you introduce us um to sort of reintroduce us, I guess to Don the Beach comber Beach, and it also introduces

to Trader Vic. Yeah. The tea bar was kind of single handedly invented by Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gant, who opened up a place called Don's Beach Cafe the day after prohibition was repealed in December ninety three, and it became a sensation with the Hollywood crowd because of what he called his rum rhapsodies, which were the drinks he served. So he not only invented the tiki bar, he invented what we now call the tiki drink. He called them rum rapsies, which were these um really complex layered um

tropical punches rum drinks. And by nineteen thirty seven he had a hundred and fifty copycats across the country and he would be suing he had to sue some of them. There was one guy named Monty Roser, a nightclub impressario in New York, who opened up a chain of restaurants called Monty Proser's beach Comber, and he used the exact same font for beach Comber that Dona beach Comber had, and he claimed that he he was the home of the Zombie, which was a drink that Don Beach was

most famous for. So Don actually had to sue him, and he would sue other places too, and so he wasn't happy about being ripped off on such a grand scale. Um, other people wanted to cash in on the immense popularity and newsworthiness of his place. I mean, when you had, um, you know, Marlena Dietrich and the Marx Brothers and Howard Hughes and all these like Hollywood Royalty coming in and going nuts over Don's drinks, and of course the press

also went nuts over it. Um, So everybody wanted to get in on that, and he had he had people

like um. Here was a guy called Joe chast Deck who just round some kind of a deli in in l A and he changed his name to Zamboanga Joe chast Deck and ripped off Dawn's drink menu and other Suggie, you know, Harry Sugarman open a place called Sugi's Tropics and Beverly Hills, and um, right down there, you know, three blocks away from Dawn's, this guy Bob Brooks opening up the seventh seas so everybody was ripping him off.

We don't know how close they got to reproducing his drinks, except for the fact that there were people like Ray Bowen from the t k T eventually of the TIKT who started off at Dawn's. He was making thirty five dollars a week at dawna beach Commers in ninety seven, and Bob Brooks said to him, Hey, why don't you come over the seventh season make those drinks for me and I'll pay you another fifteen bucks a week. So like we did that. And this is one way. This

was before Don implemented that code. You know, this is when he still trusted his original employees. But enough bartenders lefts with that secret knowledge so that they can start spreading it around in different bars and making a four you off of it. Um, knowing these recipes gave you a lot of power as an employee. Later on, you could dictate terms. When tiki became a huge phenomenon after

World War Two. I talked to a couple of bartenders who told me that when they would apply for a job at a restaurant that wanted to serve these drinks but didn't know how they would make a deal like, Okay, I'll make these drinks for you, and I'll tell you what to order, you know from your suppliers and and and all that. But if I don't like it here, um, I'll leave and I'll take my recipes with me. I'm not going to tell you what the recipes are. And

that gave bartenders an extraordinary or about of leverage. So anyway, everybody was using this these secrets to their advantage if they knew them, and ripping down off. There's only one tiki impresario who decided that he wasn't content with industrial espionage. He didn't want to just steal away the don's bartenders or try to reverse engineer strengths. He wanted to create

his own original ticky drinks. And that was Victor Bergeron, who came down to Dahn's in thirty seven and like all these other people, thought Wow, this is great as a land office business. I want to get in on this. So he went back up to Oakland and turned his barbecue shack inky dinks into Trader Vix, and he turned himself into Trader Vic Bergeron and he did with a

lot of people. Did he Um copied Down's sort of rafish South Seas persona character like Don dressed like a beach comber, like a South Seas guy with a straw hat and ripped pants and all that. And Vic took on that same persona without ever having actually been to the South Seas the way Don had. And he's at first he started serving the same drinks Don did. Um. You know, he tried to make a zombie, failed miserably. It was it's a terrible drink. His version of his

zombie he wasn't even closed. But the difference between Don and Vic and all of the people who are ripping Don off was that Vic was a chef and he had a really, really really good palette and he used that to try to create his own style of tropical drink as opposed to just you know, stealing other people's.

So he Um he went to Cuba, and he went to Trinidad, and he went to Jamaica, and he learned about tropical drinks the same way Don had, and he learned, you know, he got his education and sweet Sower, Strong and Weak, and came back to Trader Vix and created his own drinks and the three most famous ones of the Scorpion, the fog Cutter, and of course to my time, Um, those were ripped off by hundreds of restaurants the same way that all of Don's drinks, like the Zombie and

the Navy crogh tohhitand Punch and all of us. Just as they had been ripped off, people started putting vixed drinks on their menu too, um. And that's a lot easier for the to do because Vic, unlike Don, actually published his recipes. He started. He was sort of the first real post World War two celebrity chef um who made a fortune with his own food product line, you know, for grocery stores. And he put out cookbooks, and he put out drink recipe books, and he put his drinks

in there. Now, not the my tie though, because that was his signature drink, just like the Zombie was don signature drink. Um. But he published his fog Cutter and

Scorpion recipes. In his case, it was a smart business decision because people could go to their local grocery store and buy Trader Vicks Scorpion mix and Trader Vicks fog cutter, um well, not focutters, but Trader ViXS ort syrup to put in the fog cutter, and Trader of Vicks white rum to put into the drink or uh, you know, Trader of Vicks gold rum or Trader Vis brandy to put into the scorpion. So he was, you know, having it both ways. Um the my tie, though, he kept secret.

If you wanted to make a Trader Vic my tie at home, you bought a bottle of Trader Vic my Tai ram and a bottle of Trader Vic my Ti mix. He wasn't going to tell you what the actual recipe was that they made in the restaurant. Um. So those two guys had a quite a rivalry over the course

of their careers. Um Don really resented when Vic kind of stole his thunder and became the most famous tiki impresario, largely because of the my Tai which really took off and became you know, it replaced the Zombie as the most famous sticky drink. Um And Vic was a bit

of a better businessman than Don. He opened up a chain of restaurants across the US and eventually Um Europe, in the Middle East and Tokyo, and he got a lot more pressed than Don did because Don ended up going to Hawaii and was sort of like out of the mainland public eye as much as vic was Uh And to Don's dying day, he claimed that he invented the my Time. It always really bothered him. The trader vic Um was famous for creating the May Time, and

that gets into the heart of the little war they had. Um. It gets really complicated and it turns into like a Gilligan's Island sitcom plot almost. You know, Don don Beach's widow, phoebe I talked to her um well, emailed with her and went back and forth on it, because she wrote when she put out a book of Don's recipes in two thousand and three, which was kind of a revelation to see that. But these were all much later versions of his drinks, you know, from like the restaurant was

still around in the eighties. She had a recipe for a may tie, which she said Don invented in nineteen thirty three, and I went, oh, well, that's interesting. So and then she said that he invented the my tie and you know, Trader vic didn't invent the may tie. So I made the drink and it didn't taste anything

like Trader Vicks My time. UM. And then as I got deeper and deeper and got more and more um research materials, when I got Dick Santiago's a little recipe book, for example, from NY seven, there was no my Tie in that recipe book. And when you see a nineteen thirty seven beach comer's menu, there's no my Tie on that, And there's no my Tie on any beach comer's menu until the Kennedy era, which is, you know, well after

the drink became very famous. So in order to stay current, he would have had to have put a my tie on his menu. Um it was also a fog hudn't a scorpion on his menu? By then, you know, he'd taken Vick's most famous drinks and put them on his menu. So what happened, Well, Don actually was a beach comer. He actually loved Tahiti, and he lived there for a while, you know, on the beach, and and he would have heard the phrase my time or more properly may take,

which means basically it's Tahitian for awesome. You know, oh that's great, mate, So he would have known that phrase, and it would have naturally been something that he would have named a drink. He called his drink the Ma Ta Swizzle. I believe um, And I kept pressing Phoebe about it, was like, well, why isn't it, you know, why can't I find any evidence of this drink served in his restaurants? Since she said, well, it wasn't one

of his favorites. So okay, so let's say let's take Phoebe at her word, and why shouldn't we She was married to Don. I never even met the guy. Um. So Don invents a drink he calls the Ma Tay swizzle or the my taliane um, and it doesn't end up on his menu because he's not one of his favorites.

Traitor Vick the story. He tells us that he invented the my Tai one night at his bar in Oakland in ninety four with his head bartender, Fred Frank Poult, and they named the drink because a friend of his, Carrie Guild, who lived into heat He came into the bar and he handed her the first um. You know, the final version of the strength, and he'd been working all day on with his bartender and she drinks it and goes, oh mate, which is you know Againtsian for awesome. Um,

so you've got a sitcom coincidence here. Um, Don the beach Comber claims he invented the may Tie, it is true. Trader Vic claims he invented in my time. This is also true. Um. But the whole truth is that Don invented a drink called the may Tie, put it in a drawer, nobody ever knew about it, and Trader Vis ma tai is the my tie that we all know. And um, you know, he can certainly claim that that's his drink, I think, but it it was really a

source of tension between the two of them. Um. I mean, Don gave an interview to some Honolulu paper when he was well into his eighties and uh still claimed that he invented the may Tie and has really pissed him off. Now when one of the things you write about concerning them tie is that when it when it first came out, it didn't have that initial splash like uh. I think you mentioned there was a particular menu where the zombie was still very much at the top. The m tie

was towards the bottom of the page. Uh. And it didn't get like the same press, at least initially that the Zombie got. How did them tie ascend to become this just dominant drink, This this drink that everyone at least has some surface level knowledge of. H. That's a great question. Basically, Um, as you said, the zombie was immediately successful. UM. Part of the reason being that it was, you know, advertisers, being a very strong drinked on set. It was great at marketing, he said, only to to

a customer because it's so strong. So radio comedians started to um tell jokes about the drink and how strong it was, and travel riders said, you have to go to ton of beach combers and when you get out of the train and the central station downtown and go have a zombie down the beach Combers is the first thing every tourist has to do. So it was huge from the very beginning. Uh. Trader Vic says he invented in my time in nineteen four. But nobody's written anything

about it. There's nothing in the historical record, nothing in newspaper databases. Nobody's talking about it um and um. It obviously was not a hit right out of the gate. There is proof that it was on his menu as early as nineteen fifty that's the that's the earliest menu I have from Trader Vicks that has the my tie on it. But there are earlier menus I don't have which might have it um at any rate. In nineteen fifty two fifty three, vic Is hired to do the

cocktail list for the Matson Cruise ship lines. Uh and these were luxury cruise liners that went to Hawaii. This is before you know commercial jet travel, so most people went to Hawaii on a cruise, spent a week on a boat, and got into um Montolulu Harbor. So he's doing the drinks for the boats, you know those ship bars. And Mattson also owns the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and a couple of other hotels. Me why so he does the

same drinks for these hotel bars. The whole idea of being that Mattson wants you to pay to take a cruise in their ships and then to pay them to stay in a Madison hotel. So to build a better mousetrap, Well, let's make let's get trader Vick to do these drinks for us. One of those drinks that he puts on them in you is the my Tie. But as you say, it's all the way at the bottom of the cocktail list. I've got a nineteen fifty three Royal Hawaiian menu and

it's like second from the bottom. I think even the planners punches above it. So obviously it was not a famous drink at that point, but it became famous in Hawaii. Uh. I think several reasons. One was that it had a great Hawaiian name um, I mean Cetaitian name, but it just sounded really Polynesian and really romantic, and the drink name was great, just like the Zombie was a great drink name. I mean, names are very very important for

a drink. Is half the selling point for them. The drinks started to spread violally through the islands as a lu Ou drink um. Everybody went to a hotel Luau, every tourist um and they all you know, sat there and eight uh you know, kalu a pork and loumie loumi salmon off the banana leaf mats and everything, and my Ties became the default drink at these luous. Whether or not they had Vic's formula, um they were, they would improvise if they didn't. Sometimes a ma tie would

just be pineapple juice and rum as terrible company. You go to Hawaii even now and you have terrible Mae ties that there are no relation to Vix, but the name worked for them, I guess. So the first people who start writing about the may Tai are travel writers, and they're writing about traveling to Hawaii. UM. And it's like fifty three fifty four when people, you know, people start writing about a drink. They I don't know why

I called them Maye Tai. What really sends the mine tie over the edge is night teen nine is the year Hawaii becomes a state and not just a US territory. And it's also the first year of commercial jet travel UM passenger jet travel. The Boeing seven oh seven makes his debut, and all of a sudden, you can get to Hawaii from the west coast of the mainland in a matter of hours, you know, four or five hours. If you wanted to take a plane. Before you had to take a prop um prop plane that took about

twelve hours to get there. And they had little berths that you slept in um or most people just went by boat. So all of a sudden, travel to Hawaii becomes very easy and affordable. And it's a state. So even the most xenophobic American from the Midwest or the South or whatever it says, oh, well, it's part of the US, I'll go there. And tourism blows up in Hawaii.

Um it goes from thousands of people to tens of thousands of people a year, all going to lue hours, all having a my tie and the drink just blows up. And by the by the Kennedy era, it's just all it's all over the place. It's just the rage. And even non tiki bars are serving it or effect similar other if they didn't done the rescue. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. And we're back, all right. So let's fast forward to today.

So you you have beach Bumbarri's latitude twenty nine in New Orleans. Has it changed the way you feel about any of the figures in tiki history? And uh and and what is your own relationship with with secret recipes? That's great question. Yeah, it's really funny. To go from writing about tiki drinks and researching tiv drinks to serving

them to people. And it's given me a whole new um perspective on people like Don and Vic and all the bartenders who used to work for them and with them, UH, a whole new level of respect for them because it's running a restaurant's hard. Fortunately, Mrs Bum takes care of most of the work that she's the one with all the experience. She kind of dragged me kicking and screaming

into opening the place, and I'm glad she did. It's been great, but UM, you know, there's there's a lot of work involved, a lot of people to deal with, and um, a lot of things to deal with it I never thought about when I was just writing about drinks and restaurants, things like insurance, plumbing, electricity, UM, you know, payroll, tax um. It just goes on and on. Permits goes on and on and on and on and on, and it has nothing to do with how great a drink is.

It's just keep the place open and keep customers happy. The other thing that was really interesting to me about opening a place is um, I no longer after we've been opened five years now, and for me, the most important thing to hear when I'm walking through the dining room and touching tables and asking how everything is is when not when a customer says, oh, we love this drink, this is a great drink, thank you so much. It's when they say, oh, um, you know, we love Sam,

or we love Alexandro, we love um Brad. They're they're great and those are our staff. So if a server or a bartender is making them, first of all, if they know them by name, and if they're raving about them to the boss like that makes me happier than anything they could say about the drinks. It was like, if you have a good experience and if our people show you a good time and make you feel welcome and happy, that's you know, a loha bartending, if you will, Um,

that's something that you know that's very very important. I never really grasp that when I was just a customer at these places. Um. But so there's so many more dimensions to dealing with with the drinks and with the creation of the drinks as well. UM. One technical note, one of the things that was very eye opening to me was when I was researching recipes or tweaking recipes or trying to reverse engineer them based on you know,

bartender's notes or whatever or fragments. If I wanted to spend half an hour to make a drink, UM, I could do it. And if I wanted to spend eighty dollars on one particular bottle of room that would taste best in the drink, I could do that too. And you can't do that when you've got customers who want to be served. You have to work out. I had to look at every single recipe that I wanted to

put on my menu at lata UM. You know, first of all, they were like three I wanted to put on, but I had to cut that down thirty because you can't have too many recipes on your menu or your bartenders can't do them, they can't be executed and also will get just get confused. I think, UM, thirty is about as much as you can cram onto the menu anyway. UM.

That was part of the learning curve as well. But when I was doing revamping the recipes for service for actually being served at leut to twenty nine, I had to go through every single one of them and rebalance them and retweak them because I was no longer just trying to make the best possible drink. My goal when I was writing the books was just a very singular goals,

like how do I make the best possible drink? Well, that becomes like three dimensional chess from Star Trek when you're trying to I realized that that's that's what I had to do from watching other cheeky places, other new two places like if it took ten minutes to get a drink, no good, you know, and and if a drink costs twenty that's also no good. So I had to go from first level, how do I make the best possible drink? Too? How do I make the best

possible drink in the least amount of time? And then the third thing was how do I make the best possible drink in the least amount of time for the least amount of money, um, not without sacrifice and quality, but still making it so that I could afford the drink and I could afford to not charge people on arm and a leg for it. So I had to work out systems and one of them was as you as you know if you've made any of the drinks from these books, they were all. Most of these drinks,

especially don the beast Comers drinks were flash blended. In other words, um, they would be put into a you know, a top down Hamilton's beach mixer with a certain amount of crushed ice and blended for like three to five seconds, not to make a slushy drink, but to sort of swizzle it in a way that no human possibly could without Marvel superhero strength. Um. And it gives the drink a very unique texture, and it dilutes instantly, and it

chills instantly, and it's it's much better than shaking. But the problem is that when I was making doing the drinks for the book and guests saying how much crushed ice to put into each drink, because that was never indicated on any of the old vintage recipes that I had nerved, UM, I had to guess at it. And some drinks tasted good with four ounces of crushed ice, like a half a cup. Some drinks tasted great with a cup and a half like twelve ounces of crushed dice.

Some were perfect with one cup of crushed ice. And if you look at my books, that's the way they are. I mean, they all call for a different amount of crushed ice. Well, the first thing I realized was that's going to slow down the bartenders if they have to a remember how much crushed ice goes into every drink as well as remember this complicated recipe. Um, that's not good.

So what I did was I had to rebalance each drink so that they all used the exact same amount of crushed ice, so the staff never had to think about the amount of ice they were putting into the blender. I just went into a restaurant supply store, got a long handled, six ounce scoop, and I rebalanced every drinks so that they all worked with six ounces of crushed ice. And that's all they have to do now is just like dip the scoop into the ice, well, level it off,

put it in and not think about it. And things like that shave precious time off the making of a drink. And also it eliminates mistakes. You're not gonna guess, you're not gonna get the wrong amount of crushed ice in there because you don't have to think about it. And that's just one example of some of the things I was doing on that second level of how to make a drink in the least amount of time, um, and the least amount of money. Part is you know you want.

Of course you're using quality ingredients, but you're not going to use a bottle of twenty year Appleton Jamaican room to make your my tie. But it's just not you can't do that. You can't charge people fifty dollars for my time, UM. So you have to come up with other RUMs and mix, you know, mix less expensive RUMs. They're still going to give you that depth of flavor. So it's just a couple of, you know, examples of

the kind of uh much. You know, you could go much much deeper and much broader into this whole phenomenon than I ever did when I was just writing the books, when I would look back on some of these recipes and see things that had never occurred to me before I owned a restaurant, before I ever had to make

a menu for a for paying customers. If you look at Dawn's early recipes from that ninety seven book, they're all in very jagged proportions, at one and a half ounces of this, um, quarter ounces of that, three quarter

ounces of this, half an ounce of that. And if you look at that same recipe from a notebook from the nineteen sixties, you know, thirty years later, when he had thirty years more experienced that same drink, he real he refigured it, reconceived it with the same ingredients to be three quarter rounds, three quarter rounds, three quarter rounds, three quarter around, three quarter rounds, all the way down the line, and that speed. He did that purely so

that the drink could get out there faster. Because he was dealing with a more high volume situation instead of making a drink at his tiny little bar in Hollywood, he was he had to come up with recipes that could be made, you know, serve seven thousand drinks a night. So you see that he wasn't just thinking about taste

and flavor. He was. He was thinking about those things, but he was also thinking about speed, which was kind of a fascinating revelation which I which never would have occurred to me if I hadn't actually done a menu

from my own place. This is funny how well it parallels a lot of inventions we look at that are more traditionally the kind of thing you think of as an invention, you know, a new piece of technology where when we think about invention in a zoomed out way where you're you know, not looking at it very hard. We tend to think of invention as the space of, you know, discovering what's possible, whereas when you zoom in on the process of invention is it is much more

often about what is practical? Yeah, absolutely, that's that's a perfect way to encapsulate it. Um, And that was my learning curve. It's like, and you're absolutely right with whether the invention is uh, you know, uh, the internal combustion engine, whether the invention is a zombie cocktail, um, whether the invention is like a paper cutter. It's all about, yeah, okay,

you've invented this thing. Now you have to be able to replicate it, you know, and you have to be able to make it faster and cheaper and uh and streamline it and you know. So yeah, you're absolutely right, it's the same process. I never thought of it that way until today. Now you you have also invented some cocktails. So I'm curious, like, what is what is your your

mindset like today? If you're if you're seeking to to come up with a new cocktail, are you doing are you engaging in this exercise as Jeff Barry the the the author and UH and tiki historian, or is it more in the mindset of of Jeff Berry the restaurant owner. Um, that's a great question. Um, it's all of that has to be thrown out of your head when you're trying to create something. Um. I mean I used to work in UH screenwriting and journalism and advertising other forms of writing.

And the best piece of advice I ever got about writing anything was right with no attachment to outcome. Don't think about who's going to want to buy this or even who's going to want to read it. Just write it, just get it done and and then worry about all that other stuff later. And the drink making process has always been like that for me, and it hasn't changed. Owning the restaurant hasn't changed it. Um, you know, writing these books hasn't changed it for me. I wasn't. I

wasn't in many ways. Still I am an amateur in the in every sense of the world. I mean I an amateur as someone who loves, um, whatever it is they're obsessed about. So for me, it was a hobby. All this drink stuff, all through the es and nineties, and in writing these books until we actually opened Latitude, it was it was a hobby. It was it was I was coming at as an amate, tried no professional

training whatsoever. Um, you know, no mentors, no guide books, nothing to go on about how to make a drink that was that wasn't ye know? That was mine. I have plenty of guide books about how to make a drink that wasn't mine. But as far as creating a drink, that all started to happen kind of accidentally. UM. I

was researching these recipes. I was uncovering all these long lust drinks, and and very often the recipes were either in code, which we talked about earlier, and I had to crack the code UM, or there were fragments, or they were like bartender's notes to self. UM. We already used example of how they wouldn't indicate how the drink was actually put together, whether it was shaken or blended,

and if it was blended how much ice. So there was a lot of guesswork involved, and over time, without realizing it, bias mosis I was sort of like getting an education in tropical mythology just by trying to recreate these drinks. That already existed in one form or another. And it's gradually got to the point where I felt confident enough to try and invent my own stuff. But it was always just noodling around, you know. It was just like tinkering with something in the garage pretty much. Um,

I never developed a method for making a drink. It would always just be, Okay, here's this bottle, what's what's this stuff? Some very herbal charge troos is some very horrible ma cure sounds. What other drinks have been made with? Chartroose? Have looked at it? Okay, I wonder what it works with. And it would always just be messing around with no attachment outcome. It's like maybe something will happen, maybe it won't. And that's still kind of way I do things. It's

the only way I know how to do things. Um, I don't start with this. You know. Some some people have proportions in their head, like you will talk to some um bartenders and cocktail makers to say, well, there's a golden mean for um, you know, for a Jacii, or it's it's three quarter ouns, three quarter rounds two ounce, or it's half ounce, half ounce, one or half ounce stor its. I don't believe in that. It's just like, um,

it doesn't work. It just doesn't work for me. I just sort of like get in there and mess around and and just just make a mess and um and see what happens. Um. It's much more fun that way for me. Anyway, I would feel very constricted if there was some sort of methodology that you have to follow. Now. Of course, the fact is that I'm no longer making drinks just to drink for myself and my friends in my house and maybe put them in a book if they're any good. Now, whenever I make a drink, it's

for for a reason, you know. Either I have to go do a cocktail seminar somewhere and I have to use uh sponsor ingredients, so I have to come up with a drink that uses those, or maybe the latitude needs a new drink on the menu, or some magazine or newspaper wants me to create a drink for them. So that's a very specific outcome that needs to be met.

And that actually is helpful because when you have a frame, when you're put in a box and you have to do something that uses this or that ingredient, um, and it has to be done by such and such a date. Those limitations are very freeing, paradoxically ironically, because you can only go down that road and not down the fifty other roads that you might have ventured down and reached the dead end at um. So if you if you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of

like a writer's prompt imagine yeah. So um. I know I've been going on and about this, but of course it's it's always been an obsession of mine. And it's fun. I mean, it's fun to do it without any restrictions or worrying about outcome. But also you don't come up

with that many drinks that way, you know. It's uh, it's like I just did a bunch of drinks for this uh pure company called Real Real Sarah Coconut and Passion Food and all these are things, and and they wanted seventeen recipes, one for each one of their expressions, one of these one of their flavors. I thought, oh my god, that'll take me five years. You know, I

come up with one drink every three years. But having those restrictions just I zoomed through it like I did it in about five days and it was very freeing to be put in this box where Okay, you have to use this raspberry pure to drink um. You know that's that's that's job one. Uh, and you can't. You can't use rum and every single one of these seventeen drinks what will work with the raspberry isn't rum. So then you you have a different based spirit. You lock

into that and okay, what citrus works with raspberry? Does lime work? Does lemon work? What's the best one? So you get it done faster um, and it narrows your focus to the point where you can actually complete something. So one of my favorite facts that stood out from SS of the Caribbean was just this weird bit where you mentioned that I think it was Jackie Kennedy's recipe for a DACII involved frozen lime made. It was store

bought frozen lime made. UM. That makes me wonder do you have thoughts about and and again this is going to involve, you know, subjective things about taste, but from your perspective, what leads to the proliferation of bad recipes for things um? That's a great question. And in the case of Jackie Kennedy's dacherie, which was frozen lime maide and a few drops of flam rum. It's very often

um economics. Now, of course, Jackie Kennedy came from a very wealthy family and she was married at the president United States. They could afford fresh lime juice, They could afford to pay uh an in house chef to make their dacories for him. But you have to remember the times. This was during the beginning of the industrial food complex, where who had frozen TV dinners, frozen juices, frozen everybody had a refrigerator and a freezer and all the kitchens

with appliances. Suburbia was growing and convenience was the order of the day, and food companies responded to that. So all of a sudden everything was frozen. Everything was pre mixed and in a bottle like Trader Vix, Trader of X, my time mix. You know, why why mess around with all this other stuff, Just pour two ounces of that into your glass. So convenience um industrial mass production methods for food and drink. And that's really what killed the cocktail,

was this um uh the convenience. It was killed by convenience. It was killed by like canned and bottled mixes and by frozen this and frozen that. And you know, every restaurants realized they could cut their costs tremendously by not using fresh citrus um and by you just not having to buy five ingredients, just buying trader Vicks My TIMEX. You would go into a lot of places in the seventies and eighties and you would see Trader Vicks My Time mix behind a bar of even a really good,

expensive restaurant. They would just use that stuff. Um. Great for Vick, not so great for the Well. Yeah, I'm not an expert at this, but I mean, am I correct in thinking that citrus juice just does not age well? That is not something that that sits around on the

shelf and stays good. There's a There are a couple of um bartenders in New York who are very very scientific in their approach these things, Donne Lee and Dave Arnold, and they have conducted tests under laboratory conditions, UM trying to figure out what the shelf life of fresh queeze citruses and when it's at its peak and UM, I don't remember the specifics, but I think after four hours it starts to lose its Christmas and it's uh, it's you know, it's best flavor. I've found that you can

keep it refrigerated fresh juice for two or three days. Um, but it's not going to taste the same the third day as it did when you fresh squeezed it. It's kind of interesting oxygen oxygen eating it. Um. Like there are other bartenders to say, well, I don't think fresh squeeze juice is that when when you're taking when you're cutting a line open, when you're making a jackary for example,

round line and sugar. Um. Okay, if you're at the bar, you cut a line open, you're squeezing it into the shaker, so it's as fresh as you could possibly get. It's just been cut and squeeze. Um. There are bartenders who will tell you that that doesn't taste as good as lime juice that's been in the well for about two or three hours, which is ox which is oxygen eated

a little bit. Um. You know, So it's a there's a there's actually a lot of You scratch a bartender, You scratch any bartender, and you're gonna find somebody who was a medical student or an architecture student or um. You know, a science whiz. Um, there are people avotate to bartending for all kinds of reasons. But you people get people with a technical bent and with a scientific background have really really gotten into this stuff. It's kind

of cool to see. I basically flunked chemistry in high school, so for me, a lot of the stuff just goes right over my head. But but it's fascinating to see that approach being taken to something like cocktails. So is it safe to assume that the pre mixed Trader Vix My Time Mix was bad? Is that? Is that the case?

You know what, That's a good question because I've actually used it when I'm on vacation, like in Hawaii, for example, you go into like the ABC store, which is like there's seven eleven or uh, you know, convenience store, and they all have Trader Vick My Time Mix uh in there for tourists who want to make my kind of hotel room. It's not bad, it's actually okay if that's

what you've got to work with. Um, you know, when you're when you're staying in a hotel and you're a tourist in Hawaii, it's the only game in town, Like It's either that or you're gonna have to try and track down orege out syrup on you know, orange curse ow and all this other stuff and just start turning your hotel into a bar room. Um so um hey, you know when in Rome's I do not wish to

um to dis trade to Vix my time makes. It's one of the better ones out there, But um is it as good as a fresh made in my time? I don't think, you know, not even Trader Vick would argue with me there all right? Uh, Jeff the beach bum Barry, thanks for coming on the show and chatting with us about tiki history, my Thai history. Uh. The books are all out there. The app total tiki is excellent. I I am proud or ashamed to admit that I

use it almost in a daily basis. And uh and and also I'm a huge fan of of your restaurant. I only make it down to New Orleans once a year, but when I go, I make sure it come by for at least a couple of drinks. But what else is going on in the world of of of the beach bumb What do you have coming up? Or anything else you want to Uh? Tell our listeners about. Well, the one thing which it's a little early to talk

about is it just ended. But I've partnered up with Cocktail Kingdom about doing some pop up bars UM Sip and Santa's serf Shack, which they've shortened just to Sip and Santa. It's a mash up of Christmas decor and flavors and tiki de corn flavors, and we had twenty seven bars across the country this past season participating in it. So we come up with like, um, tiki drinks, tropical drinks, but have like what you associate with the holidays flavors, uh,

you know, cinnamon and cranberry and things like that. And then there's Christmas decor overlaid on top of TV. To course, we have two over the top uh decor themes graphed onto each other. And I mentioned it now because I start working on this pretty much in January, once Christmas is over. So when you're asking what's next to me, what's next is coming up with the sipes for the Sitting Sama pop ups, which aren't going to happen until

after Thanksgiving. But that's what's gonna be occupying me now. Um. And then it's just running latitude and uh, you know, trying to get in there whenever I can. And we've got such a great crew now um got our sea legs, which there's really not much for me to do there anymore, which I love. I'm basically just picking stuff up off the floor that you like, Oh there's a plastic monkey that fell from the table. That's basically my job now because everybody else has got it all together. Um so

so yeah, and a lot of traveling. I've been doing a lot of traveling, going to a lot of cocktail festivals, giving drink seminars. I'll be in UM Sacramento next week for the Sacramento Cocktail Conference, and I'm going to be in Atlanta actually UM for the March Tiki Festival in Awayle, I believe it's called UM, so you know, Florida than

London and all kinds of one of the places. It's interesting with the whole cocktail n usense that cocktail festivals and cocktail conferences sprung up everywhere, so I spent a lot of my time just going to those. At this point, awesome, well, we'll safe travels as you you make your way around the map for all of this and we'll be looking forward to Christmas. All right, all right, thank you, thanks,

all right, So there you have it. Thanks once again to Jeff beach bum Berry for chatting with us again. He's the author of several books that you'll find in print, including beach Bumberry Sip and Safari and at beach Bumberri's Potions of the Caribbean Again. His restaurant is beach Bumberry's Latitude twenty nine in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and if you want to check out his website, it's beach bumberry dot com. Oh and the app Total Tiki. That's the app that I use way too often, but

it's a wonderful app. It's you just right there on your phone. You have all these different um tiki cocktail recipes you can pull up, you can you slide through, like all the different versions of say The Zombie or the My Tai and they're right there your fingertips. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of i heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.