Boozehound (26 page)

8 dashes Angostura bitters

8 ounces sparkling wine

8 mint sprigs, for garnish

Combine the pear eau-de-vie, honey syrup, lemon juice, and bitters in a large glass pitcher. Add about 1 cup of ice and stir vigorously. To serve, fill 8 highball glasses with ice; divide the punch among them, and top each with 1 ounce of sparkling wine. Stir gently, and garnish with mint sprigs.

Recipe by Adam Bernbach of Proof, Washington, D.c
.

PISCO SOUR

Serves 1

This variation on the classic pisco sour is made in a blender and was adapted from a recipe by Eduardo Huaman Tito at Hotel Mossone in Huacachina, Peru. It was recently voted the best pisco sour in Peru. The blender helps achieve a nice froth; no shaking required. In Peru, the drink is made with 3 ounces of pisco, but I recommend 2½ ounces for the American palate. Be sure to use Key limes
.

2 ½ ounces pisco

1 ounce freshly squeezed Key lime juice

1 tablespoon confectioners’ sugar

1 medium egg white

1 dash Angostura bitters, for garnish

Combine the pisco, lime juice, sugar, and egg white in a blender. Process for 30 seconds, until frothy. Add a handful of ice and process for 1 minute, then pour into a highball glass. Garnish with the dash of bitters atop the foam.

Adapted from a recipe by Eduardo Huaman Tito of the Hotel Mossone, Huacachina, Peru

VICEROY

Serves 1

This cocktail was originally created for Campo de Encanto acholado (or blended) pisco—the pisco whose development I witnessed on my trip to Peru. The white-wine-and-citrus aperitif Lillet Blanc is a perfect complement to the grape-based pisco
.

1½ ounces pisco

1 ounce Lillet Blanc

½ ounce freshly squeezed lime juice

½ ounce
simple syrup

1½ ounces tonic water

½ Mint sprig, for garnish

Fill a highball glass with ice. Add the pisco, Lillet Blanc, lime juice, and simple syrup. Top with the tonic water and stir gently. Garnish with the mint sprig.

Recipe by Duggan Mcdonnell of Cantina, San Francisco

CHAPTER 8

OF POLITICS AND RUM

WHO CAN SAY ANYTHING THAT GIVES YOU THE MOMENTARY WELL-BEING THAT RUM DOES?

—
Ernest Hemingway

D
RINKING TRENDS COME AND GO
, but tiki will always be with us. It keeps returning every few years or so, like the mustache, or animal-print fabric, or knee-high leather boots. Tiki drinks occupy a space somewhere in the Venn diagram of the American psyche where escapism, irony, and kitsch overlap, cutting across so many cultural divides. Hipster wannabes with badly drawn tattoos love tiki. Shoppers at Urban Outfitters love tiki. Suburban cougars on the prowl love tiki. Guys in Tommy Bahama shirts who listen to “Cheeseburger in Paradise” love tiki. Marlene Dietrich loved tiki. Richard Nixon loved tiki.

Who doesn’t love tiki? Only one person immediately pops to mind: Donald Trump, who shuttered Trader Vic’s in the late 1980s after he bought the Plaza Hotel. He called the famed tiki bar “tacky.” Yes, Donald Trump called something “tacky.” You see, this is the strange sort of mind space we get into when we start talking tiki.

The late 1980s might have been one of the few times in late-twentieth-century America when tiki was decidedly out. So it’s odd that my first experience with tiki drinks happened during that period. But if you were a college freshman in Boston, as I was, and you didn’t have a fake ID, there is a good chance you and a group of friends might have ended up some night in a Chinese restaurant, perhaps in a part of town that was once called the Combat Zone. And you and your friends might have ordered a drink called a Scorpion Bowl, served in a large volcano bowl with a flaming shot of 151-proof rum in the center, from which you all drank with long straws. Perhaps you ordered more Scorpions, and there were races. Perhaps that turned into another one of your “bad night in college” stories. Anyway, because of my own Scorpion Bowl experience, I sat out the last tiki resurgence, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But wait long enough and tiki—much like my old, grunge-era flannel shirts—comes around again, as it did in the late 2000s. Some of the classic-cocktail crowd feel tiki is a classic enough genre that’s been overlooked. Luckily, this new generation of fine bartenders will be making sure that drinks such as the Mai Tai, the Zombie, the Navy Grog, and, yes, the Scorpion Bowl are made the right way, or improved as necessary.

The fact is, though tiki is often inseparable from tacky, tiki bars were conceived in the 1930s and 1940s as upscale nightspots. During their heyday, famous tiki joints such as Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood and Trader Vic’s in Oakland were the kinds of places where you put on your finest and hobnobbed. Don the Beachcomber, in particular, was the Spago of its day. Celebrities such as Bing Crosby, Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes, and Orson Welles dined on Cantonese cuisine, which Don termed “Polynesian.” (This was why, by the late twentieth century, lowbrow Chinese restaurants were the only ones serving such tiki drinks as Scorpion Bowls. At a certain point, Chinese restaurants realized they were already serving “Polynesian” food, and so they decided to start serving the drinks, too.)

“Tiki was a very unironic big night out,” said Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, who has spent the last decade researching tiki culture and writing a series of tiki books, including my favorite,
Sippin’ Safari
. “There wasn’t anything kitschy about it at the time. It was an escape. In the 1940s, people didn’t travel. A tiki bar was where the midcentury Organization Man went to escape his white-collar job, his big mortgage, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.” It’s no wonder Tricky Dick would drag the likes of Henry Kissinger out to the Trader Vic’s in Washington for Mai Tais.

Rum, of course, is the foundation on which tiki drinks are built. It makes sense, since rum also fuels so many aspects of the warm island fantasies that flow deep in America’s cultural veins. Rum is the drink of umbrella cocktails and Love Boat cruises, of steel drums and Club Med, of dreadlocks and sex on the beach. “Where I go, I hope there’s rum!” sings Jimmy Buffett and his Parrothead followers. Rum exudes romantic danger: think pirates and smugglers and guerillas and Hemingway and
la revolución
.

When I was visiting Hans Reisetbauer in Austria, after we’d finished the hours-long tasting of some the finest eaux-de-vie on the planet, Hans asked me, “Would you now like to taste something really special?”

“Special?” I said, dazed. “More special than the eau-de-vie that’s made from thirty kilos of wild raspberries picked by hand in Serbia?”

He smiled. “Would you like to taste a rum from the cellar of Fidel Castro?”

“Of course,” I said.

He left me in his tasting room and returned a few moments later, lumbering in with a heavy clay jug covered in straw. “It’s from 1928.”

As the story went, Hans had a friend who imported cigars from Cuba and had become friends with Fidel’s cellar master. Hans had accompanied this friend on a trip to Havana and was invited to tour Fidel’s cellars. The cellar master offered to sell Hans any spirit that caught his fancy, so Hans chose this jug of rum. It cost him five thousand dollars to finally bring it back to Austria.

Now, he poured two glasses. The rum, clocking in at 120 proof, was wild and smoky, yet totally smooth on the finish. “This isn’t a clear distillate,” Hans said. “It’s actually a dirty spirit. But sometimes it doesn’t matter. This is a classic. End of story.”

As we sipped, I thought about this rum from 1928. Presumably, Fidel had come by this rum somehow after La Revolución. Perhaps he appropriated it from one of the mobster-run casinos of old Havana? Maybe from the cellar of a wealthy elite who fled to Miami? Perhaps from the Bacardi family before they fled to Puerto Rico? Or maybe even from the cellar of the corrupt President Batista, whom he overthrew? Did he and Che have a swig of the stuff while they strategized?

Rum is always a short half step, or closer, to politics. Case in point: The Cuban government and Bacardi have been fighting for years over control of the Havana Club brand name, which Cuba sells internationally through Pernod Ricard. Of course, because of the embargo, Tio Samuel won’t let us have Havana Club, so I usually drink it in Europe.

Hans poured another glass of the rum. “Maybe Hemingway drank rum like this?” I asked, hopefully. I mean, if we’re talking Cuba and politics and rum, Mr. Hemingway can’t be far behind in the discussion. By now, we all know of Hemingway’s affection for the daiquiri, the “authentic” framed handwritten notes in Havana bars that read, “My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in El Floridita,” the pissing away of his later years on a barstool. We know it was post-revolution Cuba that finally broke Papa’s heart. Yet Hemingway’s Cuban period remains beloved of drinkers.

The poet Derek Walcott once wrote about this facet of Hemingway’s legacy: “The seaside bars from the Bahamas to Tobago are full of boiled executives downing drinks and looking out with unshaven machismo to the lather-line of the reefs, their scuba gear conspicuously heaped like infantry weapons. They grunt about groupers and fire coral, as if Hemingway weren’t dead and all the sharks and stingrays that never attack the locals hadn’t gone with him.”

I am not immune to this type of rum-soaked romanticism. I’ll admit it: When I was in my twenties, I fancied myself a vaguely Hemingwayesque character—so much so that some writer friends had teasingly referred to me as “young Hemingway.” It was not a compliment in grad school. Afterward, I spent a good deal of time in Latin American nations that were tottering shakily toward stability—Nicaragua, in particular.

It was during this period that I took up serious rum drinking. Bottles of Flor de Caña rum were three dollars for the white and only six dollars for the seven-year-old Grand Reserve. I remember stocking up during a visit in 1996, during the heated election between former Sandinista president Daniel Ortega and right-wing candidate Arnoldo Alemán. All the bars in the country were shuttered for three days while they tallied the votes. Rum was our only dinner one night when my friend Brian and I got caught up in a demonstration in Matagalpa, a Sandinista town in the highlands (we were escorted back to our hotel by police in riot gear, who told me, “Matagalpa is closed tonight,
jefe
”). In Granada, the day the bars opened our driver, Julio, met us at our hotel, so drunk on rum at 8:00 a.m. that we had to pile him into the backseat and drive him back to Managua. There, we drank rum and tonics with wealthy young men who were celebrating the Alemán win at a private casino in what seemed like someone’s house. Years later, Alemán would be convicted of pilfering over $100 million from the nation’s coffers.