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Tiki Talk with Ben Willis: Caribbean Roots of Tiki · Mega Rock On Demand

• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's Friday afternoon, and that means it's time once again to light the torches for Tiki Talk on Mega Rock.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Ben Willis with you.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as much as we talk about tiki in reference to Pacific culture, Polynesian culture in particular, with those motifs, those carvings, the music, and everything else, you cannot discuss, of all things, tiki cocktails without bringing in the subject of the Caribbean Islands.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, because at its heart, the historical tiki book of, as Don Beach famously referred to them, rum rhapsodies, all go back in particular to his initial travels as a young man.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he did travel the Pacific, but he spent a lot of time in the Caribbean absorbing rum culture from Cuba, Dominica, Haiti, Jamaica, Curacle, Trinidad, Barbados, all of these islands, and there are so many islands in the Caribbean that have individual expressions of what they know to be rum and rum drinking culture.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Martinique, Puerto Rico, St.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: John's, San Martin, Virgin Islands.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, going up into the Bahamas, you could literally spend a lifetime traveling and sampling all of the different expressions of rum that are available in the Caribbean.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so many of these different rums made their way into our traditional tiki cocktails and tiki drinking culture.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Again, Don Beach based his most famous cocktail, The Zombie, on a very traditional Caribbean drink, the Planter's Punch.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, he split the base into several different rums, added several different juices, added several different modifiers to come up with the final product that was The Zombie in the 30s.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: But so many of the early tiki drinks, especially, go back to that basic format of sour, sweet, strong, weak.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And one of my favorite ingredients that features heavily, especially in Don Beach's drinks, has to be filernum, which comes from Barbados and is a wonderful blend of rum, spices, and sugar, and lime and ginger, clove, almond, sometimes vanilla, allspice.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Just a small amount of that in your drink can make a world of difference.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it features strongly in one of my favorite, simple, classic Caribbean, and by extension and adoption, tiki cocktails, the corn in oil, a classic, basic Caribbean cocktail straight from Barbados, using everything you would expect to find in the Caribbean.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to start by taking our Rock's glass, we're going to build this in the glass, put some fresh ice in our rock's glass, add to that 12 ounce of fresh lime juice, one half ounce of our delicious velvet phalernum, three strong dashes of also flavorful and wonderful and straight from Trinidad Angostura aromatic bitters, and two ounces of a good-aged Barbados rum, a very common one you'll find is Mount Gay.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Stir in the glass with the ice until it's well chilled, take your little lie wedge, perch it on top, and if you really want to punch this up, you can take some dark, black strap rum and float just a quarter ounce of it on top of everything.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And there you go, the corn and oil.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sure to take the edge off and make you feel like you're floating down in the blue of the Caribbean.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, until we meet on another island out there, somewhere, this is Ben Willis saying Aloha on Tiki Talk.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna leave you with a classic from Sir Elton John from 1975, off of his Rock of the Westies album, Number One on the Hot 100 for three weeks.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's Island Girl on Tiki Talk on Mega Rock.
• 3:58
  unknown: I see your feet flash.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Jamaican heart is so sweet.