Post #816680 by BobH on Tue, Aug 19, 2025 9:01 AM

I have been using Google Gemini and Chat GBT as my research source. Here is what they say about the "Santiago":

There is a connection between Donn Beach and a person named Santiago, but it's not a direct connection to a "Santiago cocktail" as an invention of his. The connection comes from the discovery of one of his famously secret recipes.

In 2005, a woman named Jennifer Santiago came forward with her father Dick's drink recipe notebook. Her father had worked at Donn the Beachcomber's for 15 years and kept the recipes for many of the bar's famous drinks, which were kept secret and even encoded to prevent rivals from stealing them.

The notebook, which was discovered in Dick's shirt pocket after his death, was a critical piece of the puzzle for "Beachbum" Berry, a cocktail historian who had spent years trying to decode Donn Beach's recipes. While the recipes were still in a form of code, the notebook was instrumental in revealing the true ingredients of one of Donn's most famous creations, the Zombie.

So, while Donn Beach did not invent the Daisy de Santiago cocktail, a person with the last name Santiago was crucial in preserving the history and recipes of his famous tiki drinks.

Since my last post, I have refined my list with the following restrictions to make it manageable:

1. An original recipe by Donn Beach.
2. No adaptations of another's recipe, e.g. Dr Funk.
3. Not created by one of his employees.
4. Same drink with two names gets listed once with an "aka".

With that in mind my list stands at 28 cocktails and 3 mixes. I'll post the list next time.