The Quest for the Excellent Mai Tai

What’s to not love concerning the Mai Tai? The straightforward concoction of full-flavored rum, lime juice, almond orgeat syrup, and orange curaçao, neatly garnished with lime and mint, is a crowd-pleaser. It’s tart, fruity, a bit nutty, rum-forward and undeniably refreshing. The Mai Tai is the right drink for a sizzling summer season day poolside and is nearly synonymous with a tropical trip. 

This pleasant and unassuming drink has one way or the other discovered itself on the middle of a small however very devoted following. The near-religious fervor for the drink has even led some adherents to dedicate their life to the seek for the last word Mai Tai. Others pore over outdated cocktail guides and historic paperwork. They deal with menus from long-shuttered bars like historic texts to be deciphered. All are attempting to glean some type of hidden information concerning the cocktail, its historical past and the legendary rum on the coronary heart of its creation. If these devotees have been sporting hooded robes as an alternative of Hawaiian shirts and Panama hats, there could be no mistaking this loosely-knit group for what they’re: a cult. 

The Creation Fantasy

To know why the Mai Tai is so honored, it’s vital to know the story of its creation and the mysterious rum that looms over its historical past. 

The Mai Tai was created in 1944 by Victor “Dealer Vic” Bergeron on the unique Dealer Vic’s bar and restaurant in Oakland, California. As a deal with for pals visiting from Tahiti, Vic took a bottle of J. Wray & Nephew 17-year rum down from the again bar and combined it with orgeat, lime juice, rock sweet syrup and dry curaçao. Certainly one of Vic’s pals exclaimed in Tahitian: “Maita’i Roe A’e!” which roughly interprets to “Out of this world. The Greatest.” Thus, the unique 1944 Dealer Vic Mai Tai was conceived.

Shortly after the beginning of the Mai Tai, the success of Dealer Vic’s led to enlargement. A casualty of this success was the unique J. Wray & Nephew 17-year, which had already gone out of manufacturing. “He burned by way of the 17-year after which set his eyes on the Wray & Nephew 15,” says Martin Cate, who began his bartending profession at Dealer Vic’s and is the creator and proprietor of the lauded tiki bar Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco. 

The change to the Wray & Nephew 15-year, which was the closest to the 17-year out there on the time, was the primary time Vic swapped out the rum used within the Mai Tai, nevertheless it wouldn’t be the final. As the availability of J. Wray & Nephew 15-year began to dwindle, Vic created his first mix of rums. Often called the “First adjusted Mai Tai method,” this combination used 50% J. Wray & Nephew 15 and mixed it with 25% Crimson Coronary heart and 25% Coruba, which have been each darkish Jamaican rums. “He was on the lookout for one thing that approximated pot nonetheless Jamaican rum,” Cate says. 

“By the mid-50s, Vic had utterly run out of the 15-year,” Cate explains. This led to the creation of Vic’s “Second adjusted Mai Tai method.” In accordance with Vic, this mix used a pot nonetheless Jamaican rum together with a rum from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Martinique is finest recognized right now for rhum agricole, that are rums distilled from contemporary cane juice, not molasses. 

However the rum that Vic used was nearly actually not a rhum agricole. “On this period, Martinique made nearly completely molasses rum,” says Cate. It’s doubtless the Martinique rum on this mix was a molasses-based, pot-still rum much like these made in Jamaica on the time. The model of Vic’s rum mixtures has grow to be the blueprint that the majority trendy mixologists use as a guidepost in emulating the long-extinct J. Wray & Nephew 17.

The Darkish Ages and the Renaissance

Because the twentieth century got here to an in depth, the Mai Tai fell into darkness. The recognition of the drink led to many imitations, lots of which didn’t know or didn’t care concerning the unique recipe. “It turns right into a recreation of phone with a nasty sign,” Cate says. “It bought so removed from Vic’s Mai Tai. You begin to see individuals use pineapple juice and rum floats.”  Someday throughout the Nineteen Sixties, pineapple juice began to sneak into Mai Tai recipes. This was adopted by the addition of grenadine and a shot of darkish rum floated on the highest of the drink. 

The straightforward, balanced recipe of high quality rum, orgeat, curacao and lime was changed within the common consciousness with one thing that didn’t resemble the unique Mai Tai in any respect. “It sort of turned the unofficial drink of Hawaii,” says Garret Richard, founding father of the cutting-edge tiki bar Sunken Harbor Membership and co-author of the e book Tropical Commonplace. “And it turned related to holidays.” The Mai Tai in its stunted kind turned synonymous with candy, fruity, beachside drinks. “Mai Tai” now not meant “The Greatest.” It was used as a catch-all time period for any low cost drink containing rum and fruit juice.

Fortunately for the Mai Tai devoted, the craft cocktail renaissance of the early 2000s introduced extra consideration to well-crafted drinks made with contemporary components. Tiki archaeologist Jeff “Beachbum” Berry and Cate at his bar Smuggler’s Cove, together with a handful of different stalwarts, had already begun sharing the gospel of the tropical drink. After all, the common-or-garden Mai Tai was entrance and middle on this revival. “It’s about taking the Mai Tai again to respectability,” Cate says. “It ought to be thought-about a part of the basic cocktail canon.” 

Because the 1944 Mai Tai recipe returned to the cocktail world, it turned a rallying level for true believers within the tropical cocktail motion. “It was the flagship recipe of tiki and it’s a recipe that we as a group determined to take a stand on,” says Matt Pietrek, co-author of Fashionable Caribbean Rum. “Look, it is a good basic recipe. It’s simply nearly as good as another basic cocktail.” Pietrek has written at size concerning the sanctity of the Mai Tai on his web site. “No one would go right into a bar, order a Manhattan and need it to be served with pineapple juice and grenadine,” says Pietrek. “Why is that okay for the Mai Tai and why ought to we let anybody say it doesn’t matter?”

Many bartenders who specialise in tropical cocktails see presenting the Mai Tai appropriately as an obligation. “We’ve all the time had a 1944 Mai Tai on the menu,” says Kevin Beary, bar director at Three Dots and a Sprint and the Bamboo Room. “That is the unique recipe, and that is the way it’s meant to be loved.”

“The genius of the unique spec is that it’s a showcase for a great spirit,” says Richard. “The unique Mai Tai ran on the thought of utilizing an superior rum,” he continues. 

Richard, together with most bartenders who make the Mai Tai right now, sticks to the blueprint Dealer Vic established with the second adjusted Mai Tai method — a mix of rums from Jamaica and Martinique. The recipe permits for a excessive diploma of experimentation with the bottom spirit and a few bartenders, like Richard, have developed very exact blends of a number of rums designed to completely mesh with the opposite components. However regardless of which rums are used within the Mai Tai, there’ll all the time be one rum that’s exalted above all others.

Liquid Gold

The Ark of the Covenant, The Holy Grail and J. Wray & Nephew 17-year — few spirits have ever reached such legendary standing. The mixture of its mythology and shortage has turned a subset of rum and cocktail fans into obsessive fanatics.

There’s not a lot recognized about this fabled spirit. Fortunately, Dealer Vic described the holy grail of rum in his personal phrases: “I took down a bottle of 17-year-old rum. It was J. Wray & Nephew from Jamaica; surprisingly golden in coloration, medium-bodied, however with the wealthy pungent taste explicit to the Jamaican blends.” It’s no surprise individuals have been dying to strive or recreate the rum — it sounds completely scrumptious.

Pleasure Spence, the long-time Grasp Blender at Appleton Property, is a legend within the distilling group. Appleton Property at the moment manages the J. Wray & Nephew model and produces the unaged Wray & Nephew rum generally seen behind the bar. “Each time I might train a masterclass, the primary query was all the time ‘When are you bringing again the J. Wray & Nephew 17,” Spence says. “I might all the time inform them, ‘Quickly come.’” 

Individuals have gone to nice lengths to strive the J. Wray & Nephew 17 or one thing shut. In 2007, the Service provider Lodge in Belfast got here into possession of a few of this legendary elixir. Naturally, they used it to make Mai Tais which set the world document for the costliest cocktail at $1,457. Which will look like an absurd worth, however the demand for this rum could be very actual — allegedly the Service provider Lodge ran by way of their bottle in lower than a 12 months.

Cate, who owns one of many few extant (and unopened) bottles of J. Wray & Nephew 17-year, as soon as hosted an occasion at Smugglers Cove the place he opened an vintage bottle of the 20-year expression from the identical vary for a choose group of consumers. “I bought 10 Mai Tais in 10 minutes at $2,000 every,” Cate says. “So it’s actual. There are individuals who care that a lot.”

The Bamboo Room, Beary’s elevated tiki bar in Chicago, is at the moment providing an $800 Mai Tai that makes use of a 15-year-old expression of J. Wray & Nephew. “We have been in a position to purchase a bottle that was a part of an property within the UK. Then we have been in a position to supply a bottle of French dry curaçao from the Nineteen Forties,” Beary says.

The Resurrection

Within the spring of 2023, fans caught wind of a stunning new TTB submitting from Appleton Property. After many years of clamoring for it, the Jamaican distillery was lastly bringing again the J. Wray & Nephew 17-year within the type of Appleton Property 17 Legend. “We needed to provide everybody a little bit style of this obsession,” says Spence. After 80 years, the fabled rum was lastly returning.

On-line rum communities have been abuzz with hypothesis. The label stated the rum was restricted to 1,500 bottles — was that the quantity allotted to the USA or was it the entire quantity produced? Was it a very new recipe or was it blended from marques that Appleton Property was already distilling? And the most typical query requested: How the hell do I get a bottle?

On Could 17, 2023, lots of these questions have been answered. The Appleton Property 17 Legend was constituted of the recipe initially used to create the rum exported to Dealer Vic’s. The distillery went again to the recipe e book and re-created the J. Wray & Nephew 17 from scratch, utilizing 4 new marques that have been distinctive to the Appleton Property 17 Legend. Spence and the group at Appleton Property additionally had a pattern of the unique rum to make use of as a reference. “We actually needed to work backward and dissect the pattern within the archive,” she says. It actually appears that this new expression is as near the unique because it may probably be.

However how does it style? And the way shut is it to the unique? Because of the shortage of the unique, it’s extraordinarily tough to find out how shut it truly is, however we’re in a position to evaluate it to different vintages within the J. Wray & Nephew line and different Jamaican rums from that period.

The Appleton Property 17 Legend matches Vic’s description of the rum from 1944 — “surprisingly gold in coloration,” with a lovely funky pungency. It’s surprisingly mild in coloration provided that it was aged for 17 years within the Caribbean. “We all know [the J. Wray & Nephew 17] was a reasonably mannered rum,” says Pietrek. “It was actually not as excessive as different pot nonetheless rums.” The trendy model displays that as effectively, with notes of caramel, vanilla and brown sugar balancing out the funky notes of ripe fruit frequent in a high-ester pot nonetheless distillate.

Cate hasn’t tried the unique 17-year expression, however he has had the J. Wray & Nephew 20-year. “There is a little more oak within the Legend,” he says. “But it surely’s similar to the 20-year. The important thing takeaway is that the marques on this are similar to those used again then, and so they’re not utilized in any Appleton merchandise right now.”

Stephen Remsberg is well-known within the spirits world for having amassed one of many world’s largest collections of classic rums. Sadly, Remsberg handed away not too long ago, earlier than the Appleton 17 Legend was launched, however effectively earlier than he did, he shared a few of his assortment of vintage Jamaican rums with Garret Richard. “It did remind me of the outdated bottles I tasted at Remsberg’s home,” he says. “It’s undoubtedly a hell of an effort and an enterprise. They did an awesome job.”

Sadly for a majority of the holy order of the Mai Tai, the Appleton Property 17 legend is restricted to 1,500 bottles globally. Spence swears they are going to by no means produce this rum once more. “The flavour profiles we’d have to realize on this fashion of rum, it’s important to make it in very small portions and we aren’t ready to try this from a manufacturing standpoint presently,” she says.

The holy grail of rum will proceed to be nearly unobtainable, however that received’t cease the Cult of the Mai Tai from looking for it.