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
The Search for the Ultimate Mai Tai
Join Kevin Crossman for an informative and humorous presentation describing the hunt for the ultimate Mai Tai. Topics include newly uncovered historical details, best and worst Mai Tais, and how to get the perfect Mai Tai at your local watering hole. Advice and lessons for the home bartender will be provided, including finding the perfect rum blend to impress your guests.
We’re pleased to return to Mai Tai Day at Trader Vic’s Emeryville to present a seminar called the Search for the Ultimate Mai Tai.
This will be an informative and humorous presentation describing the hunt for the ultimate Mai Tai. Topics include newly uncovered historical details, best and worst Mai Tais, and how to get the perfect Mai Tai at your local watering hole. Advice and lessons for the home bartender will be provided, including finding the perfect rum blend to impress your guests.
Tickets for Mai Tai Day are still available and the event includes other seminars, vendors, live music and DJs, and an art show. Plus plenty of Mai Tais, making this the best day of the year.
As previously posted, I set out to recreate the Trader Vic’s Mai Tai Rum that was issued in the 60s-80s. Comprised of mostly Jamaican rum, plus Martinique and Virgin Islands rum, this rum was used the Mai Tai, Suffering Bastard, and other Trader Vic’s recipes of the era.
As we’re want to do, we did a little comparison test with this rum and our our Ultimate Mai Tai rum blend, a bold and boozy four rum combo of Appleton 12, Smith & Cross, Planteray Xaymaca, and Planteray OFTD. The two Mai Tais were made with common ingredients including shared pool of juice.
These are actually pretty close, but both Mrs. Mai Tai and I preferred the Ultimate Mai Tai blend.
Heading to Tiki Oasis in San Diego by way of the San Jose Mineta Airport, so I made sure to arrive early for some drinks and food at Trader Vic’s SJC to get into the mood. It was still before 10:00 am so while I could get a Mai Tai I couldn’t order off the lunch menu yet. No trouble, the Tahitian Toast with Salmon was quite filling, but I asked for the jalapeño spread to be omitted as spicy is not my thing. The waiter asked if I would like some avocado with it and after saying yes it arrived with avocado. “Some” avocado indeed. It was delicious and totally filling too.
My Mai Tai was just great and the Guava Tai I ordered was just as good. I enjoy the little bit of tropical juices that Trader Vic’s adds for these Tropical Tais. As seasoned mixologists know, a little bit of mango or pineapple or guava go a long way and Trader Vic’s doesn’t drown it with these juices like some places do. It’s the perfect amount.
The prices at Trader Vic’s SJC are not too bad these days, either. All drinks are $18.39 including tax, which isn’t cheap but no longer expensive when you account for the tax being included. We’ve seen Mai Tais and other cocktails well over $20 that aren’t nearly as good, which is amazing for a bar at the airport. Trader Vic’s SJC is a treasure.
I found this one in Trader Vic’s Helluva Mans Cookbook and in Trader Vic’s Rum Cookery & Drinkery (both 1970s). It is a classic cocktail riff that uses rum rather than whiskey.
The specified rum is Trader Vic’s Mai Tai Rum, which we wrote about yesterday, a blend of rums from Jamaica, Martinique, and Virgin Islands. I remade this rum at home using currently available rums and used it in this cocktail.
From Trader Vic’s Helluva Mans Cookbook:
“If you like a good pungent rum that’s got a good flavor, you’ll find this a very nice drink. We blend this Mai Tai rum from five or six different rums from different islands.
Mai Tai Rum Old-Fashioned
1½ ounces Trader Vic Mai Tai rum
½ ounce water
2 dashes maraschino cherry juice
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
Pour first 4 ingredients into a 10-ounce old-fashioned glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well. Add a twist of lemon peel. Decorate with a fruit stick and fresh mint.”
Tasting Notes:
Sadly, this wasn’t one of Vic’s greatest hits. It tastes like watered down rum with little hints of sweetness and anise because, well, that’s what it is.
This rum was a multi-island blend produced by Trader Vic’s starting in the late 1950s and commercially issued through sometime in the 1980s. I found some recipes that call for this rum, which of course was also specified in the Mai Tai of that era. So I tried to replicate it using currently available rums.
The breakdown of components is:
70% Jamaica
20% Martinique
10% Virgin Islands
That Virgin Islands rum is basically used to lengthen the product and to reduce the overall cost, but only by a little, in contrast to the Jamaican rum that would have aged for some time. Vic also sold 15 and 8 year Jamaica rum bottles.
The Martinique rhum used here is the subject of debate. Here’s how Trader Vic describes rhum from Martinique:
“Martinique rums are similar to dark Jamaica rums because they are dark and pungent in flavor and aroma. They are especially suitable for flavoring sweets and for making rum punches of the heavier variety.
Some of the Martinique rums are distilled and bottled in Martinique for export to us (Rhum St. James); some are distilled in Martinique, shipped to France for aging, and reshipped to us as French rum (Negrita). These French rums are extremely dark and carry more of a molasses taste than the Martinique-bottled rum; the French like them in wintertime hot grogs.”
Trader Vic’s Rum Cookery & Drinkery
This doesn’t sound like a rhum agricole to me, but “smoky and funky” sound a lot like Worthy Park 109, so I’m using that in place.
In recreating the rum, I used:
4 parts Worthy Park Single Estate Reserve (aged 6-10 years)
3 parts Appleton 8
2 parts Worthy Park 109
1 part Cruzan Aged
This is a flavorful rum, though not one that I would quite call pungent, so perhaps I could have omitted the Appleton in lieu of more Single Estate Reserve.
In any case, it sure makes a great Mai Tai, just like the Trader said it would.
The International Bartenders Association (IBA) was founded in the U.K. in 1951. The trade organization is made up of chapters in over 60 countries and through the decades has hosted cocktail and bartending competitions.
The IBA publishes an officially codified cocktail list, first compiled in 1961, with the intent to provide an authoritative recipe for 102 of the most important cocktails. The official list of cocktails expanded every few years starting in 1987 when the Mai Tai was added.
The Mai Tai is a somewhat curious entry, since it calls for both Jamaican and Martinique rum but also specifically describes the Martinique rhum as coming from molasses, a recipe nominally similar to the Trader Vic’s 2nd Adjusted formula where Martinique rhum is used. The idea of this rhum being molasses distillate came from the 2016 publication of the Smuggler’s Cove book where authors Martin Cate and Rebecca Cate question the type of Martinique rhum used and suggesting that then common use of the sugar cane juice-based Martinique Rhum Agricole in a Mai Tai isn’t historically accurate.
The split base of rums in the IBA recipe actually dates back many years when simply “dark rum” and “light rum” were listed. Worse, these earlier entires included only a scant third of an ounce of lime juice with everything thing else in typical Mai Tai ratios.
There seems to have been a recent attempt to bring this recipe up to contemporary standards, yet they learned the wrong lesson from the Cate’s book because rather than just call for an aged rum or a Jamaican rum they instead went back to the version published in Trader Vic’s books in the 1970s where Jamaican and Martinique rums were paired. They tried to please the Beachbum Berry camp by including both types of rums and the Cate camp omitting an Agricole – and therefore essentially painted themselves into a corner.
As it stands this IBA official recipe is basically impossible to make, because molasses-based Martinique rhum is not widely available. Even worse, in the IBA’s glamour video demonstrating how to make the cocktail they simply use a Rhum Agricole anyway.
What a mess.
IBA Mai Tai
30 ml Amber Jamaican Rum
30 ml Martinique Molasses Rhum*
15 ml Orange Curacao
15 ml Orgeat Syrup (Almond)
30 ml Fresh Squeezed Lime Juice
7.5 ml Simple Syrup
Add all ingredients into a shaker with ice.
Shake and pour into a double rocks glass or an highball glass. Garnish with pineapple spear, mint leaves and lime peel.
* The Martinique molasses rum used by Trader Vic was not an Agricole Rhum but a type of “rummy” from molasses.