Summer 2016 | Sea Island Life Magazine Spring/Summer 2016 | Page 50

Tiki culture in the U.S. can be traced back to Don the Beachcomber, which initially opened in 1934.

at-home cocktail hours, tropical interior decor
and apparel, and even a new genre of orchestral music, exotica, to get their tiki fix. Perhaps
not surprisingly, the era also coincided with
the granting of statehood to the Hawaiian
Islands in 1959.
Still, even tiki couldn’t survive the changing
tides of the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, tiki
culture had fallen almost completely out of
favor with younger generations—especially the
more traveled and politically conscious baby
boomers—and the majority of the country’s tiki
bars closed their doors. Tiki ephemera, meanwhile, was relegated to garage sales and pawnshops, only to be rediscovered decades later.

The Great Tiki Revival
It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that tiki “artifacts”—think mugs, menus and matchbooks—
began to resurface in secondhand stores,
particularly in areas that had been home to
larger concentrations of tiki-themed bars and
restaurants. In cities like Los Angeles, Kirsten
and one of his neighbors, Jeff “Beachbum”
Berry, began snatching up as much tiki memorabilia as they could find. Berry took things
in an entirely new direction by collecting the
vintage drink recipes that elevated tiki into a
cocktail movement.
“I found that the recipes didn’t exist anywhere in print,” Berry says of his early

Latitude 29 is owned by tiki expert Jeff “Beachbum” Berry.

50 SEA ISL AND LIFE | SPRING/SUMMER 2016

endeavors. “I’d talk to the bartenders around
town who still made these drinks and get
nowhere. Very often, they would’ve built
40-year careers by keeping the tiki recipes
they knew secret. They literally had little
black books in their shirt pockets with all the
recipes, and sometimes the recipes were even
in code. These were their passports to job
security; they knew how to make the drinks
and the early restaurant owners didn’t, so if a
bartender wasn’t getting enough money or got
a better job offer from someone else, he’d just
threaten to take his recipes with him.”
Over time, Berry began to unearth vintage
tiki recipes in the Los Angeles area, but the
growth of the Internet took his treasure hunt
across the country. “People who were the
wives, children and grandchildren of some of
these bartenders had their old recipe books,
and they’d find me or I’d find them,” he
says. “A lot of the old books were just in shoe
boxes or file cabinets.” Before long, Berry
had compiled his findings into his first book,
“Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log” (1998), which
further galvanized the tiki revival.
“Jeff Berry’s books did a lot to bring tiki back
into the mainstream again,” Kirsten remarks.
“And then craft cocktailing gave the whole
tiki movement a major push.” A 180-degree
departure from the drink-making styles of
the 1980s that prioritized cheap spirits and
canned juices above all else, the craft-cocktail
movement that originated in the early 2000s
and continues today is all about freshness—
a concept that dovetails beautifully with the
format of the traditional tiki drink.

BOTTOM LEFT PHOTO BY JOCHEN HIRSCHFELD

Don the Beachcomber’s Zombie