Post #539288 by Hurricane Hayward on Sun, Jun 27, 2010 11:34 AM

I suppose it's time for a bunch of Post-Hukilau musings:

The wife and I revisited more than a dozen classic cocktails, some multiple times, over the course of three nights at the Mai-Kai and had the opportunity to order many of them from the preferred back bar, which tends to have the more experienced mixologists. (That's why sometimes the drinks seem better when you're at a dinner table. Not always, but on average ...). Our research yielded two stand-out drinks that I'll probably elevate to higher positions on my list: the Cobra Kiss (pictured below at left with the Special Reserve Daiquiri) and the Deep-Sea Diver. Both are very complex, flavor-packed medium drinks that never failed to deliver.

Chip, I made it a point to revisit both the Derby Daiquiri and Floridita Daiquiri and I'm afraid both continued to fail to wow me. Fine drinks, no doubt. Spectacular, no. However, I was able to make a Hukilau hook-up and landed some silver and gold Havana Club rum from Cuba, which both of the above were most likely originally made with. I suspect they use Bacardi now. My first home experiment with the Floridida Hemmingway recipe from Grog Log yielded some nice results using the 7-year gold, as suggested by Jeff Berry. Further experimentation with the Havana Club is definitely on the agenda. Many of the early Mai-Kai recipes were most likely made with this fine rum, before the embargo.

arriano: The Yeoman's Grog has been somewhat of a disappointment lately and that's the one drink I may lower on my list. I too was under the impression that it was based on the Colonial Grog but I just discovered at Hukilau from a reliable source that it's actually a descendant of Don Beach's Navy Grog (see Beachbum Berry's Grog Log). The Colonial Grog was actually a forerunner to the Samoan Grog, which is on the Mai-Kai's mild menu. Also a very good drink but not as strong as the Navy/Yeoman's.

Of course, most of the more complex Mai-Kai drinks are almost uncrackable. Only a few legitimate recipes are available. Most of what we have to go on are the Donn Beach originals that have been published. However, as documented in Beachbum Berry's Sippin' Safari, original Mai-Kai mixoligist Mariano Lucudine renamed and reformulated those classics into what is still served today using the same secret coding, in-house spices, syrups and secret ingredients that not even the people making the drinks can identify for sure.

Ah, the mystery and magic of the Mai-Kai ...