This cocktail takes the Daiquiri’s triumvirate of rum, lime and sugar and adds elements from several sours (including the Sophisticate, which was a major influence on this spec) in the Sloppy Joe’s bar manuals from the ‘30s: crème de cacao, vermouth, and egg white. I absolutely love the way this drink turned out, and it’s extra versatile because there are two garnish options: the perennial bitters design or cold weather-friendly dusting of cocoa powder.

Longtime Club members might remember this one from the beta test month I ran back in August of 2020, wherein this drink was called The Tall Man from Havana. It has since become a Gigantic classic, where it began traveling under the name Havana Moon (named for the Chuck Berry song). The inspiration was the “Sloppy Joe’s,” the bar’s eponymous drink that combined brandy, port, pineapple, grenadine, and Curaçao. A very good example of the pre-tiki tropical genre.

The Mary Pickford appears in the Sloppy Joe’s books–a mix of rum, grenadine, pineapple, and maraschino liqueur. I took that inspiration, subbed crème de cacao in for the maraschino, added lime for acid, and a small measure of Cognac for vanilla and dried fruit notes. Pickford was a movie star, director and producer; I named this after her little sister, Charlotte, who was also an actor.

This is a little-known Mojito riff dating from the early 1930s at Sloppy Joe’s. It has everything you’d expect from a Mojito–rum, lime, sugar, mint, and soda–but adds a little bit of “French vermouth,” which I interpret here as blanc (or bianco if it’s an Italian producer). This small change adds a slightly floral note and bolsters the lime’s acidity. I like the channel-knife lime peel garnish here along with a big bouquet of mint, of course.

The Mai Tai didn’t originate in Hawaii, but in the archipelago’s postwar tourism boom, the drink was quickly adopted into its hotel and bar culture. The drink developed into a fruitier, less strictly-defined subgenre unto itself, with orange and pineapple popping up frequently. Our version opts for passionfruit (which I love), layered over my own Banana Mai Tai recipe.

I noticed this description under a Hawaiian Room drink called the Okoolehao Sling–“A zingy sling of gin and juice in a real coconut”–and took it as a prompt. I wanted to create a fruity coconutty flash-blended drink with a gin base and I couldn’t be happier with the results! Though it does appear in tiki drinks, I see coconut as belonging more to the non-tiki tropical canon we’re (mostly) focusing on this month.

The Halekulani–a whiskey-based sour with lemon, orange, pineapple, demerara sugar, grenadine, and bitters–has always intrigued me. Another non-rum tropical drink from Hawaiian hotel history, this one originated at the House Without a Key Lounge at Waikiki’s Halekulani Hotel. I decided to turn this into a stirred, spirit-forward drink–the result is a tropical Improved Cocktail with a nod to all of the original elements, plus our banana mix and a touch of absinthe.

This drink originated at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu and is a prime example of the non-tiki tropical canon. I wanted to improve the recipe while also playing up the pre-WWII orgeat sours that came before it, like the Cameron’s Kick and the Army & Navy. I did so with bitters and an absinthe rinse–the latter touch is reminiscent of the Corpse Reviver No. 2 and the Rattlesnake.

This drink appears in the 1938 book New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em. I chose it to kick off Margarita Month as an example of an early tequila sour. We had this on a classics menu at Gigantic, where Ned King and Kris Kirkland tweaked the spec to create this fantastic, slightly smoky riff on the original. It’s fun to do a tropical presentation with this drink (crushed ice, mint garnish, bitters dashed atop), as it’s akin to an agave-spirit Daiquiri.

I got the idea for this odd-but-delightful deconstructed drink from “Cocktail Bill” Boothby’s 1890s book, American Bar-Tender. Though this source comes over forty years after the gold rush began, it’s a testament to how San Francisco remained a locus of cocktail culture and has remained so, though not necessarily continually, to this day. I based this on Boothby’s Dude Cocktail, which is a simple sweet soda or lemon soda laced with lime juice and crème de vanille.

Pisco Punch was a popular drink during the gold rush, especially at the Bank Exchange Bar which, if it wasn’t the drink’s birthplace, became the site of its popularization. This drink, which applied the already centuries-old punch template to a brandy all the way from Peru. I took a few liberties with our recipe, but the spirit of the original shines through.

The California gold rush created an incredible demand for all kinds of goods that the Bay area didn’t yet have the infrastructure and stock to provide. Coffee was one such commodity and its price skyrocketed as coffee merchants sought to make big profits off the miners’ newfound wealth. I imagine that the miners would have spiked their expensive coffee with a bit of whiskey and sweetened it with pricey sugar and vanilla, too.

This drink’s appearance in our ‘70s singles bar theme is meant to represent a whole slew of tropical drinks that were popular such establishments. The main inspiration was the Goombay Smash, which originated in the Bahamas and typically features aged rum, coconut and apricot liqueurs, fruit juices, and bitters. Our take Americanizes the formula a bit, building on a base of overproof bourbon. I named it after the street on which the original T.G.I. Friday’s was located.

This frozen Daiquiri riff brings us into the later twentieth century, when most people began to experience the Daiquiri in blended form and, often, with more in the way of artificial flavorings. Chain restaurants latched onto the Strawberry Daiquiri, as did tourist destinations in hot climates, like New Orleans or Key West. That said, the combination of rum, lime, sugar, and strawberries is exceedingly pleasing, especially when the strawberries have been roasted to concentrate their sweetness.

This version of the Daiquiri is based on a 1920s recipe (the “Daiquiri No. 3”) from the Floridita Bar in Havana. Beginning the following decade, the Floridita started serving these frappé with the use of electric blenders, which were a new invention at the time. In this recipe, I’m referencing an older frappé style, serving the drink over crushed or pebble ice. It goes without saying, but Ernest Hemingway was endlessly fond of this drink.

As we saw with our Proto-Daiquiri recipe, the trifecta of rum, lime, and sugar is a classic Caribbean combinatioN that long predates the Daiquiri. This version reflects new styles of rum that emerged in the late nineteenth century. To this classic-as-they-come spec, I’ve made a couple of subtle tweaks: the oils from a piece of lime peel add texture, while a pinch of salt provides a counterpoint to the sweet-tart profile of the drink.

This drink is one of my “cocktails that might have been,” i.e. a drink that could have existed even if it doesn’t survive in the historical records. My Proto-Daiquiri seeks to summarize the rum-based punches and drinks that were consumed at sea, many of which used the Caribbean trifecta of rum, lime (or citrus more broadly), and sugar. Eventually, this combination of ingredients gave us the Daiquiri.

The Improved Cocktail was a more complex take on the original formula of spirit, sugar, bitters, and water that first appeared in print in the appendix of Jerry Thomas’s 1876 edition. In 2021, I spent a lot of time with this genre and I produced a template from which I derived recipes for rye, genever, and Spanish brandy iterations. I was pleased to have the opportunity to design one with an aged rum base for this month’s theme.

The Sour is such a part of our culture that it’s hard to digest the fact that it was once a revelation. When it began to rise in popularity around the Civil War period, it was a convenient way to drink something like a Punch in a single serving, without all the fanfare of its more baroque cousin, the Fix. This version, perhaps the most “aperitiki” of our “tropitivo” drinks this month, reads like a pineapple Gimlet that’s ready for the piazza.

The Fizz as a category was popular in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth. This drink is based specifically on the Ramos Gin Fizz, which emerged in the 1880s at the Imperial Cabinet Saloon in New Orleans. Traditionally, it consists of gin, lemon and lime, sugar, orange flower water, cream, egg white, and soda. I saw an opportunity to play with the citrus, and use Aperol and banana liqueur that combine for a fruity profile, almost like creamy strawberry-banana.