The Search for the Ultimate Mai Tai
Traveling the Bay Area and beyond to find the best Mai Tai in the world! Tiki, cocktails, and adventures by Kevin Crossman
A Blue Hawaiian riff I came up with a year ago and decided to revisit. This version has less Pineapple Juice and uses a lightly aged “gold” Jamaican rum rather than a dark one.
Enjoy!
Blue Caribbean
½ oz Lime Juice
1 oz Pineapple Juice
1½ oz Coconut Creme
½ oz Blue Curacao
1¾ oz Unaged Rhum Agricole
¼ oz Lightly Aged Jamaican Rum
Shake with crushed ice.
Took another shot at a ready to drink cocktail, and even made a fresh Scorpion to compare to. Ingredients are rum, brandy, orgeat, tropical gimme, fresh pineapple, orange, and lemon juice. So, this looks overall like the right list of ingredients.
Unfortunately this one had a weird and funny taste and wasn’t very good. Plenty boozy at 28% ABV.
Truth be told I do find the actual Scorpion to be too heavy on the citrus and leans too much on light rum.
Scorpion (Trader Vic’s)
2 oz Orange Juice
1½ oz Lemon Juice
½ oz Orgeat
2 oz Light Rum
1 oz Brandy
Flash blend with 8 oz crushed ice.
Regular readers will know it is totally off-brand for me to do the DIY thing in the kitchen, but given I saw a couple of videos on YouTube this week it seemed easy enough. Though, in typically GNF fashion, this was not meticulously measured for the first go.
Hot Buttered Rum Batter
¾ cup Butter
1½ cup Brown Sugar
Add in tiny bits of Vanilla Extract, ground Cinnamon, ground Nutmeg, ground Cloves, ground Pepper, pinch of Salt.
Melt the Butter in a saucepan and then add in the Brown Sugar, stirring and folding. After fully mixed, add the dry ingredients and simmer/stir for 15 minutes. Pour into a container and let cool, then seal and put in refrigerator overnight.
Hot Buttered Rum
2 heaping teaspoons of Hot Buttered Rum Batter
1½ oz Jamaican Rum (Denizen)
6 oz Hot Water
Put batter and rum into cup, then add water and stir until the batter is dissolved. Garnish with a Cinnamon Stick and ground nutmeg.
This turned out pretty good, nearly as good as the Hot Buttered Rum I’ve had served at bars. If I were to do it over I would lean more on the Cinnamon side and consider adding Allspice and Molasses.
Happy Holidays!
I picked up Portland Syrups Spiced Cranberry Syrup at an art/food store in Santa Cruz last month and thought it would be a good time to try this in some cocktails. The syrup has a good cranberry and spice taste, however the syrup is very thin. Like less than a 1:1 sugar to water ratio, it seems.
I tried this in a number of cocktails, basically simple sour riffs with Bourbon, Gin, and Scotch. In no cases could I really taste the cranberry syrup, even when I used more of the syrup than I normally would use in these cocktails. The cranberry taste was totally lost.
I had the same experience when making a Spiced Cranberry Manhattan, a recipe from the Portland Syrup website. It looked pretty but tasted like … a Manhattan. Not a Manhattan with cranberry.
Bah humbug.
We worked hard at Ultimate Mai Tai Headquarters to come up with a great Mai Tai using Kuleana’s rum expressions. With four Kuleana rums to work with it was difficult to hone in on the right formula, but after exhaustive testing this one really stuck the landing. The cocktail has complex and fruity flavors that will remind you of the islands, but still remaining true to the original Mai Tai formula.
I wanted to use at least two Kuleana rums, especially their Hawaiian Rum Agricole that I find delightful. But that rum has such as unique taste it can overpower other rums, even Kuleana’s premium aged expression Hōkūlei. So we dialed the Rum Agricole back and added Kuleana’s lightly aged rum, Nanea.
To give the cocktail a tropical twist, we replaced the ¼ oz of rock candy syrup with liliko’i/passionfruit syrup. Because sometimes you want the flavor but not the foam.
Ultimate Kuleana Rum Mai Tai by Kevin Crossman
1 oz Lime Juice
¼ oz Passionfruit Syrup
½ oz Orgeat
½ oz Orange Curacao
½ oz Kuleana Hawaiian Agricole Rum
½ oz Kuleana Nanea Rum
1 oz Kuleana Hōkūlei Rum
Shake with crushed ice and garnish with pineapple and cherry
Products used: Small Hand Foods Passionfruit Syrup, Latitude 29 Orgeat, Pierre Ferrand Dry Curacao.
If you have these rums, give this recipe and try and drop a comment with your impressions.
Interestingly, these same rums are used in the Kuleana Mai Tai at Kuleana Rum Shack. Wonder what the proportions are, and what’s in Kuleana’s “secret mix” in that Mai Tai. Hmmmmm.
The bottles were provided by Kuleana but this is not a sponsored post.
Regular readers will know we have Mai Tais all the time and love to play with using different rums. Some are better than others, of course, but you rarely get a dud when doing a Mai Tai that’s been formulated to support the rum in the cocktail.
With more complex cocktail recipes you’d think switching out a little bit of rum for another wouldn’t make a difference. Well, for this one I did find that the swap was definitely noticeable and for sure not an improvement.
I didn’t have any limes the other night so I made this cocktail by Laura Miller that uses lemon juice. I’ve made it before and it is a delicious blend of flavors.
Monkey Business by Laura Miller
¾ oz Lemon Juice
½ oz Pearl’s Hideaway Falernum
¼ oz Dry Curacao
1 oz Giffard Banane du Brésil Liqueur
½ oz Hamilton Pot Still Black Rum
1 oz Plantation 5 yr Rum
2 dashes Forbidden Bitters
Ideally, garnish with banana wedge, dehydrated lemon wheel, and plastic monkey.
I subbed the Plantation rum with Real McCoy. I don’t have Forbidden Bitters myself but used 1 dash each of Angostura and Peychaud’s.
Regarding the aforementioned rum swap, when I made a second round I used Doctor Bird Jamaican Rum in place of the Hamilton Pot Still Black from Jamaica. Both rums use Worthy Park distillate and are known to be flavorful and funky. I thought that maybe the higher ABV Doctor Bird would be a possible improvement. It turns out that it really left the entire cocktail a little flat.
I don’t know if this is a credit to the flavorful Hamilton rum or something about Doctor Bird’s Moscatel cask finish, but for sure it was a noticeably poorer experience. Who would have guessed that half ounce would make a difference?
Saw a reference to this vintage pamphlet cookbook produced by McKesson Liquor Co. in the early 1970s, so I had to get one for myself. Discover Gold includes a host of recipes featuring Galliano liqueur, with its unique but “undefinable taste.” The Harvey Wallbanger is here, of course, but so much more.
I gave the Mai Tai a spin, because I’m fancy like that. With a full ounce of Galliano, you’re not hiding the taste – especially when paired with a lightly flavorful White Rum. Otherwise, it’s a pretty standard Mai Tai recipe.
Galliano Mai Tai
1 oz Galliano
1 oz White Rum
½ oz Lime Juice
½ oz Orgeat
½ oz Orange Curaçao
Put all ingredients into an ice-filled rocks glass, stir, and garnish with mint.
If you love Galliano in a Harvey Wallbanger, like I do, even you probably won’t like this. Far too much of that unique Galliano flavor here, and it totally overwhelms the cocktail. I could barely taste the other flavors especially the scant ½ oz of lime juice. Maybe this would be better if paired with a bolder rum and inverting the lime and Galliano ratios. Maybe.
I don’t need to tell the Galliano haters that this is cocktail is a hard pass for you.
