Mai Tai Cocktail Recipe

The Mai Tai is without doubt one of the most well-known tropical drinks on the earth. Composed of rum, orange curaçao, recent lime juice and nutty orgeat, it’s beloved by a long time of cocktail aficionados and Tiki fans. It even loved a star flip within the Elvis movie “Blue Hawaii.”

The Historical past of the Mai Tai

Like many cocktail origin tales, the Mai Tai’s is murky. Victor “Dealer Vic” Bergeron is commonly credited with inventing the drink at his San Francisco Bay Space Dealer Vic’s bar within the Forties. However it’s additionally possible that Donn Seashore laid the groundwork for the well-known recipe throughout the Nineteen Thirties at his Don the Beachcomber bar in Hollywood.

The unique Dealer Vic’s recipe featured Jamaica’s J. Wray & Nephew rum. As soon as Bergeron ran out of his provide of that singular Caribbean rum, he moved to mixing rums in an try and create an analogous taste profile. One of many constant hallmarks of a superb Mai Tai has been to point out off the sharp charms of fine rum. As Martin Cate, founding father of the legendary Smuggler‘s Cove in San Francisco has stated, the Mai Tai is “the right foil for an enormous number of rums.”

Whereas the Mai Tai was created as a approach to showcase the flavors of good-quality spirits—as had been so many different basic drinks—the Mai Tai took a incorrect flip over the following a long time as bartenders employed bottled juices and mixers. These yielded neon-colored or overly candy cocktails, with not one of the centering of the nice rum itself. Luckily, a renewed curiosity in Tiki cocktails has returned the Mai Tai to prominence as a recent, balanced, rum-forward cocktail.

Why the Mai Tai Works

At this time’s bartenders proceed the custom of mixing rums, aiming to search out the optimum mixture of taste, depth and complexity. Some barkeeps make the most of a crisp white rum alongside a darkish overproof rum. Others play with high-ester Jamaican rums and grassy rhum agricole. There isn’t one proper reply, nevertheless it’s useful to contemplate 4 traits when creating your individual rum mix: ABV, age, manufacturing strategies and the uncooked supplies used to make the rum. Discover concord in every of these 4 particulars, and also you would possibly create the subsequent nice Mai Tai.

For the orange aspect, select a dry orange curaçao. The title refers back to the orange taste, not the colour. The colour must be a light-weight tawny orange. Blue curaçao has its place. However that place is just not in a Mai Tai. The orgeat—that floral almond syrup so prevalent in a sure faculty of Tiki drinks—ought to style of its central substances, almonds. And, after all, the recent lime juice enlivens the cocktail within the recent means solely it may possibly.

As soon as the drink is shaken and served over ice (crushed is greatest), it’s time for the garnish. Go wild, for those who’re feeling inventive. Some Mai Tais characteristic every part from pineapple wedges to cherries on prime. However for those who’d wish to preserve the presentation cool and basic, a lime wheel and mint spring are a fantastic, admirable alternative.