About

About myself and this website

I'm just a regular web developer with an interest in cocktails and, in particular, tiki cocktails and rums. My interest in rum and tiki drinks is relatively recent (as of the time of writing this in June 2022). I had kept a few staple rums around the house for a few years - Mount Gay Eclipse, Gosling's Black Seal, Don Q Cristal, and a couple which rum snobs will sneer at - Malibu or Captain Morgan's version of Coconut Rum and Sailor Jerry. At some point I made a Painkiller and I'm not sure why, but I feel in love. I continued mucking about with rum, coconut, pineapple juice, orange, and banana liqueur because it turned out it's pretty hard to not make a great tasting drink with these things.

In January 2022 my wife bought me the book "Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki" for my birthday. After that, I started purchasing ingredients for specific cocktails which grew to trying to have rums from all 8 of their core categories. That quickly spiraled out of control to trying to have rums from all of their categories as well as multiple rums from within many of their categories to compare the differences.

Now I've got a lot of rum, a lot of liqueuers and other mixers, and a lot of drinks I love or want to try but flipping through books to find a recipe which matches the ingredients I feel like digging out gets tedious. To speed up my search for cocktails fitting my whims, this site was born.

What this site is

This is my website for cataloguing and searching for cocktail recipes, primarily oriented at Tiki/Tropical drinks. It is just a collection of drinks I either enjoy or intend to make with filtering by ingredients done in a way which fits my needs. Most of the drinks here will be Tiki cocktails you will find in books and websites elsewhere, with credit given where possible. A few non-tiki drinks may find their way in here to make my life easier.

This is aimed at someone (ie. myself) just making a drink at home and keeping it simple. Many of the original recipes call for crushed ice and flash blending the drink rather than shaking with ice cubes. They rely on this for proper dilution and some of the drinks are a bit acidic straight out of a shaker. When I'm mixing up a drink to relax after the kids are in bed or something for my wife and I while we cook dinner I'm not dealing with that. It's loud, it takes up more space, it's more work to clean up. I throw everything in a boston shaker and open pour - almost always with large ice cubes. If following my lead you may want to let the drink sit for a few minutes and stir it to let the ice melt further, possibly with adding a couple extra ice cubes to the glass. Garnishes are also mostly ignored for this reason. Sitting at home in front of a computer I don't need my drink to look pretty or fancy and I don't want to tack on the extra time of cutting an orange peel "just so" or whatever.

What this site is not

This is not intended to be an exhaustive collection of every tiki cocktail and every variation of it out there. While it may grow larger than I intend in terms of exotic cocktails, it is most definitely not ever going to be a collection of every quality cocktail or one of those sites listing every cocktail any drunk 20-something came up with and gave a "funny" name to. There are already plenty of websites for both of those already.

About the ingredients

As a primarily tiki/tropical drink oriented site the most effort and thought has gone into the categorization of rum. Other liquors are included, but mostly only in as much as they are needed for the recipes I want to have here. Similarly, non-liquor ingredients are tropical oriented with an emphasis on the liqueuers, fruit juices, and syrups used in tropical drinks.

The rum categories themselves are influenced by the categories by Smuggler's Cove and Minimalist Tiki. I really enjoy the Smuggler's Cove way of categorizing rum and the reasoning for it, but it's also a bit much for what I want here. Because of that I have started with the somewhat simpler Minimalist Tiki categories and will add others more closely resembling those used by Smuggler's Cove as needed.

Matt Pietrek of Cocktail Wonk and author of Minimalist Tiki explains his categories here. He also discusses Smuggler's Cove categories with a great explanation of Martin Cate's reasoning for using them in his book here. There is also a great mapping of many rums to both Matt Pietrek's and Martin Cate's categories here, which I am using as a guide when adding recipes from or inspired by Smuggler's Cove.