4 Tiki Cocktails that are EASY to make

Today I'm going to show you how to make four easy tiki cocktails. Now I planned on making five but I figured I myself would take it easy. Now generally speaking tiki cocktails can seem intimidating to the uninitiated or even if you're into this you might not be in the mood to acquire and make and drink something with 10 to 15 ingredients but the misconception is that all tiki drinks are complicated which they're not. So today's drinks will feature real recipes that have not been paired or dumbed down and all contain five-ish ingredients or less. Now there is a book out there called Easy Tiki which features many great tiki cocktails and riffs on those cocktails. Now I believe the book only shows cocktails with six or less ingredients so this is a great resource if you want to find some paired down recipes. Many of the drinks in the book are new recipes or riffs on other versions of drinks but some of them call for special syrups or ingredients so the ease is going to be subjective. Now I would argue that the drinks that I'm going to share today are all ingredients that you should have or should get if you want to be making tiki or tropical cocktails and there's nothing today that is too complicated. But as a little nod to the Easy Tiki book we will feature one of the recipes from that book today. Now a couple years ago now I shared a video that I called Five Tiki Cocktails for Beginners and in that I made a zombie, a maitai and a few others and that was really about pairing down the ingredients and using only a couple of rums and not so much about the ease. But regardless of that video today's video has four different drinks. So we will begin with one of my all-time favorite cocktails which is the Demerara Dry Float and the original recipe is from Don the Beachcomber. The only problem is that it contains six ingredients including the Divisa Maraschino liqueur but the version from the Maikai in Fort Lauderdale, Florida is a simpler version and we actually don't know the real recipe to this as created by Mariona but we do have a very well resourced recreation, a tribute recipe from Jim Hayward at AtomicGrog.com which we will make and every time I do one of these Maikai Atomic Grog drinks and say the word tribute I can't help but think of the greatest song in the world. Now whether you make the Don the Beachcomber version or the one I'm about to share both drinks call for an ice shell to serve the drink in and there is nothing easy about ice shells so we'll skip that. Negative points for the presentation from us but it'll still taste great. While some recipes call for drink mixers everything today will be shaken to make it easy. I'm going to start with two dashes of Angostura bitters, three quarter ounces of fresh lime juice, three quarter ounces of a passion fruit syrup, and one and a half ounces of a lightly aged Jamaican rum. I'm using Appleton Signature here. While it's not authentic to the drink I'm going to garnish with some mint just to make it look nicer for you and then we can't forget to the side over here we're going to pour ourselves one ounce of a Demerara rum using Hamilton 86. This will be the float part of this drink. All right let us try the Demerara dry float from the Maikai from the Atomic Rock. You can choose to add in your float on the side right now or you can save it for later or you can just drink that on its own but let's try it as is first. Cheers! If you've ever had the Don the Beachcomber variety you know that is a tart, tart drink. I like it. It's not something you would drink all the time or more than one of because there's so much tartness to it. This has a lot of that tartness but not as much. It's mainly tartness from the amount of passion fruit we used. If you are relatively new to this genre of cocktail and don't know where to start besides the rum then the syrups is probably the most important thing. I have a whole video I'll link to right here about the eight essential syrups for Tiki and Tropical Cocktails. We went through a bunch of books and we found out the syrups that were called for the most often picked out the top eight of them and they're in that order and passion fruit is at the top. I think it might be number two. This is not including simple syrups or Demerara syrups but the flavorful syrups you get. I make my passion fruit a certain way using Ataya passion fruit pieces. I have videos on that but it's also in that syrup video but that is like a cheat code to get yourself into tropical flavors. Passion fruit, coconut, banana that will transform you right now into tropical drinks. This right now on its own without the float it's great but it's maybe like a touch sweet, a touch tart. I'm going to go ahead I'm going to add a little bit. You can add the full ounce from your float. You can add a little at a time. I'm just going to add a little bit. A great combination of rums is to use Jamaican rum which we did here as well as a Demerara rum. Do it all. It's better. Cliche. Yeah it dries it out having more rum in there but you get that the intensity of like a dark brown sugar rum a little bit of like smokiness to it then you get a little bit of the fruitiness from the Jamaican rum and it's very simple so it is easy to make. You can actually just dump this in from the beginning. You don't have to float it on the side. It's simple, elegant, delicious and it captures all of the flavors that I want in a tropical or in this case a tiki cocktail. One of the very first ever frozen blender cocktails was the Missionaries Downfall from Don the Beachcomber but blenders are not really easy especially if just trying to make one drink and there happens to be a shaken Missionaries Downfall by Jelani Johnson which he created while at the Clover Club in Brooklyn. This recipe comes from the Easy Tiki book and contains five ingredients and then mint so technically six but I don't count the mint. Now the key to the Missionaries Downfall is not only mint but the combo of mint, honey, and peach and that means you need some type of peach liqueur. I like the Rothman and Winter brand and while this might seem specialty it kind of is and I'm going to use this today but if you are new to this and don't have any similar liqueurs and don't want to spend the money I would advise you to pick up the Apricot liqueur from the same brand instead. Now are peach and apricot the same? No but they are similar enough in a cocktail to get something that's very close if you don't want to spend the money on both bottles and you will find that in older historic cocktails that apricot comes up more often than peach. So let's make this thing. We are going to start with three quarter ounces of fresh lime juice, three quarter ounces of pineapple juice, this is also fresh, half an ounce of a honey syrup that's one part honey to one part water, half an ounce of a peach liqueur, and then two ounces of a light rum. I'm using Plantaray Three Stars and then let's not forget we are going to drop about 10 mint leaves into our tin. Then I will double strain this to get out any of the large pieces of mint and garnish with a little bit of mint. All right let's try a shaken Missionaries Downfall. Cheers! It is one of the most refreshing cocktails you could make. This is my first time ever doing a shaken version of this served up so it is quite a bit different because typically you're getting the actual shards of mint that you blend it in the blender plus it's in a blender slushy style cocktail so it is quite a bit different than that but because it is different you can taste more of this drink than you can the normal Missionaries Downfall so you can definitely taste the pineapple juice that combination of pineapple with honey as well as peach and the rum there it's in the background that mint and shaking the mint you know that much mint does add a little bit of bitterness which I find to be fine it helps balance out the sweetness of this Missionaries Downfall and I think this would be equally as delicious maybe some of you would like this more if you I'm not trying to tell you not to get peach I just know from a lot of historic cocktails and a lot of other tropical cocktails like for instance Tradewinds it calls for an apricot liqueur you're gonna find that come up more often than peach and peach is a little more rare but if you like peach then you can check out my rum barrel which is not easy it is over the top don't know how many ingredients on top of my head but there's a lot but we use a peach liqueur for that the apricot though is called for in other rum barrel recipes but this is absolutely delicious and while I said the Demerara Dry Float was elegant which I think it is this just is much more elegant to me serve it in a coupe serve it in whatever glass you like I believe this is some type of vintage sherbet glass but I don't know but just the look of it alone I just love it you get that beautiful color from the pineapple juice and the green that's coming from the mint and then you still get a little bit of that foam on the top I have covered the Saturn quite a bit here extensively and the original drink from J. Popo Galcini, an award-winning drink, is a relatively simple tropical gin drink served up for today's version I'm making Garrett Richards version of the Saturn which is pretty much the same except the ratios are slightly different we will serve this on ice his recipe does call for a passion fruit puree instead of a syrup which is what I will do but if you only have a syrup on hand then like the one we use for the Demerara Dry Float you can still use that it'll just be a little bit sweeter and you could adjust everything from there I will start with half an ounce of quarter ounce of quarter ounce of a passion fruit puree half an ounce of and then one and a half ounces of the garnish here is a cherry with a ring of lime around it all right before we try this version of the Saturn if you're interested in the history of certain cocktails and the history of this cocktail then I'll leave a video link right here I'll leave it in the description as well it is the biggest video I have done and will ever do probably about two years ago about the history of the Saturn so let's try this version cheers I mentioned earlier I use the Bataya brand passion fruit pieces I keep that in my freezer all the time if I need to make more passion fruit syrup but because I do that I have the you know non-syrup version just the passion fruit pieces that's what I used here in just a small amount it has passion fruit flavor I think first and foremost but it's not as intense as the Demerara Dry Float just that the element of gin in here just completely takes it in a different direction and the Velvet Falernum which is a pretty mild liqueur from Barbados with a little bit of it's mainly lime there's other things in there maybe some spices as well as almond it is not the most impactful liqueur that you're going to find in these cocktails but it is something that if you get into this you will need yourself a uh a Falernum and while I like some homemade versions better the homemade version is just so much different than Velvet Falernum and most of the recipes you see that are shared by bars or in books are calling for Velvet Falernum pretty cheap pretty affordable and something that should last you a long time as well but the Saturn is delicious it is fruity it's just that combination of acidity, passion fruit, gin gin and passion fruit they go so well together this is really the only historic uh you know tiki cocktail that uses the base spirit of gin there are some true to pick ones that have multiple spirits but as far as like gin cocktails go if you like gin then this is as good as you're going to get. Now the easiest thing for me to do here for the final easy tiki cocktail would be for me to phone it in make a Mai Tai but we'll mix it up and instead make the London Sour as created by Trader Vic, made especially for the Trader Vic's in London. The official recipe has just five ingredients but it calls for a quarter ounce of orgeat and a quarter ounce of rock candy syrup and rock candy syrup is just a two-to-one rich simple syrup but I always find that just a quarter ounce of orgeat in these old Trader Vic cocktails is not enough for me so I like to use a half an ounce and then no rock candy syrup which is exactly how I make my Mai Tais. So let's make the eastern sour and I will start with half an ounce of lemon juice, half an ounce of orange juice, half an ounce of orgeat and then two ounces of scotch I'm using monkey shoulder. All right I'll add in my spent lemon shell before adding in the drink. Next I will garnish with some mint and an orange wedge on the side of the glass which I will add the stars and stripes and the union jack to. Cheers! It is not reminiscent of a Mai Tai but it is reminiscent of is it called the Honey Honey? I can't think of it off the top of my head. There's a the Mai Tai version that uses bourbon so it does taste like that. I mean it's obviously a a whiskey drink but the the change up here is instead of using an orange liqueur which you usually use in in Mai Tais you're using orange juice which is not the same. They do not taste the same. Orange liqueurs are obviously of alcohol but they're bitter orange peels usually so it's the essence of orange compared to orange juice. I think that this lends itself better to that juiciness because the scotch is pretty intense in a good and delicious way but it's more intense than your typical standard rums that you're used to in Mai Tais. Not counting the sort of super funky stuff that people like to use sometimes. But I actually think that this is great. It's just not something that you probably ever need to use a really expensive scotch for because it kind of just tastes like there's whiskey in here. There's not a lot of depth to that because we have the horchat, we have orange juice, we have the lemon juice. So there's just a lot of competing things. So don't break out your most expensive scotch here. Use something you want to mix with. But if you like whiskeys, if you like scotch and you're getting into this or you just want to try something different from your typical Mai Tai then you should definitely try the London Sour. So there you go everybody. Easy tiki cocktails. Four of them. And yes, easy is subjective but objectively it doesn't really get easier than this when you're talking about real tiki cocktails. Not talking about tropical cocktails. All tiki cocktails are in the family tree of tropical cocktails. So there are other tropical cocktails you can find inspired by the tropics that are probably easier than this but as far as tiki goes we're talking about stuff that comes out of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s California that spreads across the world. This is real tiki stuff right here. And just because they don't have 10 or more ingredients doesn't make them any less delicious than anything else. So if you enjoyed this video please give it a like below, consider subscribing to this channel, and if you want to support this channel more check out my Patreon page. Otherwise, see you on the next one.