The Spirits #29: The Mai Tai

~ Orgeat, Baby! ~ the faux-Polynesian Cocktail Super League ~ Oh Happy Day ~ 90% of Everything ~

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~ THE MAI TAI ~

60ml dark rum
~20ml lime juice (i.e. one lime)
15ml orange liqueur
15ml orgeat (see below)
Dash sugar syrup to taste

Place all of your ingredients - including the spent lime shell - into a shaker with a big old scoop of ice (crushed is best). Give it a nice sloppy shake and then pour the whole lot unstrained into a fancier glass than the one I used. A mint sprig garnish is customary but hey, cherries, oranges, pineapple fronds, gardenia blossoms, all good here.

Some Mai Tai notes

1) The classic Mai Tai recipe demands 30ml aged rhum agricole (that’s French-style rum, distilled from fermented sugar cane juice) and 30ml dark Jamaican rum (which is made from molasses). I used Trois Rivières from Martinique + Appleton 8 Reserve from Jamaica. As ever, use what you have - but the notes you’re ideally chasing are grassy funk and deep treacle.

2) Aesthetes will notice that my drink is an outlandish colour! This is because I used blue, yes blue curaçao in place of my usual Cointreau as the orange liqueur. It’s not strictly accurate. But if you can’t use blue curaçao in a Mai Tai what is the point of anything?

3) For orgeat, see text, but corner-cutters who keep a good booze shelf might like to know that Amaretto can be used as a sub in a tight spot (either the liqueur or the coffee syrup) and so too can basic sugar syrup plus a couple of dashes of almond extract.

4) This one’s pretty punchy. A drop of water might help if it’s a bit too much for you on a spring afternoon.

WELCOME TO THE COCKTAIL SUPERLEAGUE. Lovely day for it. Some MUSIC… and breathe. Mmmmm.

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You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and this here is the full archive of weekly specials. Do please share the Spirits with anyone who might like it - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram or Twitter. Also scroll to the bottom for what to get in for next week! 👇

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HOW TO MAKE ORGEAT

Orgeat, pronounced “orgeat” only in a French accent, is a seriously useful cocktail ingredient. It’s almond-milk-flavoured syrup, essentially, and it shares an etymology with the Spanish/Mexican plant-milk horchata, both deriving from the Latin word for barley, hordeata (orge in French). See also: English “barley water”. Suffice to say that the concept of infusing water with grains/nuts/etc to make plant milks wasn’t invented in 2014 but has a long and rich lineage of which orgeat might just be the Dauphin, i.e. the Crown Prince. Being French, it’s a little more sophisticated then mere almond syrup, with a floral note (from a dash of rosewater or orange blossom or both) but also, a nutty-creamy mouthfeel that changes that texture of a cocktail and imparts a certain milky opacity.

You can buy commercial orgeat for about £7 or so and it’s perfectly OK. But I find myself making it more often than not because I’m that peculiar combination of too disorganised to order some online and dogged enough to spend a Monday evening doing weird things with soggy nuts. The reward - 500ml of handmade orgeat! - is more than worth the washing up.

There are about 37 different ways of making orgeat, including a method that involves simmering the syrup, almonds and all, but here are the two methods I tend to use:

INVOLVED METHOD: Buy some ground almonds… or else smash up your own with a pestle and mortar, liquidiser, or hammer of some sort. If you go for blanched (skinless) almonds you’ll end up with a sweeter syrup but I quite like the more austere skin-on variety. I also usually ‘toast’ some of them first in a dry pan for an extra layer of nuttiness. Anyway. Combine these mashed up nuts with an equal volume of water and leave to sit out for a few hours, ideally overnight. Pass through a muslin cloth or similar, really squeezing it to ‘milk’ out all of the precious liquid. If you’re feeling really effortful might want to recombine the liquid and solids for another hour and do the same again to extract all of the oils from the nuts (and then again!). Then use the nut milk to make a basic 2:1 sugar syrup: gently warm in a pan with two parts golden caster sugar, stirring until fully dissolved.

EASY METHOD: You can dispense with the first part of the process and simply buy commercial almond milk and make a sugar syrup with that. A handy shortcut! But be warned, this isn’t always so successful and I’ve known it to curdle on contact with lime, possibly as a result of all the chemicals they put in that stuff. The Rude Health company make something called Ultimate Almond Milk which is just nuts and water - use that if you can find it.

In both instances, the syrup is improved by a dash of rosewater and/or orange blossom water. A dash of Amaretto won’t go amiss too and a tear of almond extract will make it that bit more marzipan-like. It should keep in the fridge for at least a month, hopefully more - tot of brandy (or rum) too will preserve it that bit longer. The oils will separate over time by the way - this is normal! So just give it a good shake each time you use it.

In addition to cocktails - of which I’ll feature a few in the coming weeks - it’s just nice with a squeeze of lime, a dash of bitters and fizzy water. I call this Tiki Squash. You can also make orgeat with hazelnuts, pistachios, etc.

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ON COCKTAIL LAWSUITS

The Mai Tai has a special place in my suburban heart as it’s the first “named” cocktail I can remember trying and going HOT DAMN. I had a job as a bartender in a slightly peculiar but actually not all bad Thai-themed pub in Enfield sometime in the late 1990s and this was one of the offerings printed on our laminated sheet of “Cocktails”. When I say “not all bad” I mean the chefs were genuinely Thai and the kaeng khiao wan was excellent but the Mai Tais made by me were… well the 2021 Richard dreads to think. But the 1998 Richard liked ‘em!

The drink was invented by ‘Trader’ Vic Bergeron in 1944 at his Polynesian-themed restaurant in Oakland, California, which was just then becoming famous for its rum cocktails and vaguely racist décor. One night, he improvised a sour around a bottle of 17-year-old J. Wray Nephew Jamaican rum - plus a dash of curaçao, splash of orgeat, some rock candy syrup - and presented it to a couple of friends he had over from Tahiti. One of them said: “Mai Tai-Roa-Aé!” Which means something like ‘That’s fucking delicious!’ and the name stuck. The drink proved a hit at further Trader Vic restaurants in Seattle, Honolulu and then all over the world. There was still a Trader Vic’s underneath the Park Lane Hilton in London, last time I checked.

At some point, Vic’s arch-rival, Don the Beachcomber, added a Mai Tai to his menus and started putting it about that Vic had copied one of his old drinks, The QB Cooler. He even began to market his own Mai Tai mix. Vic sued him successfully in 1970 and seems to have been pretty bitter about it to the end. “We made the first Mai Tai,” he wrote in his Helluva Man cookbook of 1976. “A lot of bastards all over the country have copied it and copyrighted it and claimed it for their own. I hope they get the pox.”

What else can you find this but extremely funny? Two grown men arguing about whose idea it was to mix lime and rum and couple of other bits and bobs? There’s an overproduced Netflix series in that rivalry somewhere, surely.

The Mai Tai is one of the quintessential tiki drinks - the term that became affixed to the kitsch, tropical-themed restaurants that Don, Vic and a host of imitators built in mid-20th century America: Polynesian totems, Cantonese food, jumbo-sized Caribbean sours. Tiki is enjoying a revival of sorts but still occupies an awkward position in today’s cocktail world. On the one hand, there’s just something culturally appropriative, imperialist and just a bit Trumpy about white Americans drinking silly cocktails out of mugs shaped like the Gods of conquered tribes. Plus nothing I read by and about Vic and Don makes them sound particularly endearing; the general pedantry about who added which brand of rum at which restaurant is a bit dull; and all the skullduggery around trademarks s feels of a piece with the corporate overtones of the whole project. On the other hand, they and their imititators did create hundreds of rum-laced, fruit-forward tiki potions that are extremely worth making- and the fact that all of these tropical drinks have been long scorned and ignored by the cocktailing cognoscenti gives them a sort of underdog status. And it’s the populist choice too. Your average punter, presented with say, a Chief Lapu Lapu topped with an orchid is not likely to complain.

Concentrate on the principle rather than the letter of the drinks and you can’t go far wrong: rum, lots of fresh fruit, homemade syrups, mountains of crushed ice, mint, etc. And ideally credit the actual cultures that these ingredients come from as opposed to tryin to stick a trademark on your plastic colonial appropriation thereof? Happily a new generation of bartenders are doing precisely that. I look forward to delving into Shannon Mustipher’s modern Tiki book just as soon as I am able. And in the meantime here is the Mai Tai. It’s sweet. It’s strong. There’s not a whole lot to dislike.

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PLAYLIST

Rejoice! Expressions of wonder, surprise, delight, superlatives, hallelujahs. And one of my favourite Princess Nokia couplets:

Cook, cook, you know I like to cook
Cheffin’ in my kitchen, I don’t need no cook book

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. Here is an ongoing archive of past songs.

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WHAT I’M READING

How to save football. (The Guardian)

On languishing (New York Times)

John Lanchester on shipping, the real life internet of things - or at least 90% of things. (LRB)

Oliver Burkeman on how it’s impossible to do more than four hours of decent work per day (The Imperfectionist).

Oh and I interview Zachary Quinto and Jim Parsons about their new movie about Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. (The Guardian)

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SHOPPING LIST

Rye (or bourbon), orgeat, lime, Angostura bitters.

🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹

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