The Mai Tai is one of the most well known cocktails from the "Tiki" era... Or is it? Chances are good that if you've ever had a Mai Tai, you haven't had it the way Victor "Trader Vic" Bergeron intended it.

Video Transcription

Mai Tai, a wonderful drink and you probably ordered in the past. But chances are you never had made it properly. [Music Playing] Aloha! And welcome to the Cocktail Spirit from a Small Screen Network. I am your host Robert Hess. I remembered Mai Tai’s has a drink that I would have at different bars and each time I had it, it taste little bit different. One time I ask a bartender how do you make your Mai Tai? He said of Roman a bunch for juices. The problem is that is where a lot of bars make it. The reason being a lot of the exotic drinks from the Tiki era of down the beach comer in trader Vic were secret recipes and so bartenders in other bars they do not know how to make a drink like a Mai Tai. You are going to the Trader Vic’s and you have a Mai Tai, you say my god! That is a wonderful drink! Go down in the street to another bar couple weeks later, ask that bartender of Mai Tai they do not know how to make it. But they want to help. So, with you providing some inputs, they eventually come up with a drink that you think taste kind of like to drink you remember having it Trader Vic’s the week before. And from that point on, that is about bartender’s version of a Mai Tai. You can imagine time after time, this evolution if you want to call that goes on from bartender to bartender, and the drink changes repeatedly. Today, you are going to see Mai Tai recipe that include pineapple juice and passion fruit syrup and grenadine and orange juice and all other sort of things like that, but none of them really capture the true Mai Tai the way you Trader Vic who originally intended it. The Mai Tai is an excellent drink, but very few bars served it properly. I am going to make you one the real trader Vic’s style. As a matter of fact, I made and used trader Vic’s cocktail shaker for it. Now, the drink is simply made. We start out with one ounce of light rum. One ounce of gold rum, A half ounce of orange curacao, orange curacao is kind of like a triple sec. It is kind of a pre cursor that triple sec normally, it is kind of a darker and amber color, avoid blue curacao because the only purpose for that is blue drink some quite frankly either as far as I am concern are not any -- have many good blue drinks here, far better off by next stuff. We then have a half ounce of orgeat. I am using the Fee Brother Orgeat. It can be difficult to find. A lot of places are going to have it vividly and I got mine from kegworks.com, it is very easily available on line. It is basically almond syrup with a little tiny bit of orange flower water added to it, and it usually a cloudy color as suppose to clear like almond syrup it is going to be. So, that is both the orange curacao and the orgeat there. And now we add half ounce of fresh lime juice. It is really important to use fresh lime juice, not those bottles I am uses stuff like that. I am going to take in squeeze mine fresh with this nice little plier style squeezer. They work really well. Squeezing and straining out the seeds. Limes traditionally do not have seeds, but works really good for lemon like that. These are also available in kegworks.com, and we just need the half ounce of that as well. See if we go there, half ounce there. Notice also, I am actually building this in the glass. One of the handy things and most important is I actually know whether not the glass getting it fold up with a drink or not. We now have the ice. Now, pour that into the shaker and this particular shaker is designed to fit this glass nicely. It is a little bit bigger in the standard Boston shaker. Put that straight in the glass again, and now I am going to tap it with an ounce of dark rum. This is an optional step. It is not necessary one of the nice things about doing it like this especially when you are sipping it through a straw. The drinks going to take and dilute itself as you drinking it and by the time you get into the end, the dark rum flute is actually going to increase the flavor and help it long. Now for garnish, use a pineapple spirit of a cherry, a little sort picked thing over the edge, and a litt