N°11 · The Tiki Crown Jewel
Mai Tai
/ my-tie /
Aged rum, lime, curaçao and orgeat over crushed ice. The best drink in the world, according to the first person who tasted it.
- Spirit
- Aged rum
- Glass
- Double rocks · tiki mug
- Method
- Shaken · crushed ice
- Est.
- 1944 · Oakland, California
Where it comes from — as far as anyone can prove
Oakland, 1944. Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron — restaurateur, showman, owner of a wooden leg he encouraged guests to stab ice picks into — pulled down a bottle of 17-year-old J. Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum for two friends visiting from Tahiti. He built it with lime, orange curaçao, orgeat and rock candy syrup over crushed ice. Carrie Guild took one sip and said “Maita’i roa a’e!” — Tahitian for, roughly, “out of this world, the best.” Vic had his name before the glass was empty.
Then came the feud. Donn Beach — Don the Beachcomber, tiki’s founding father — maintained he’d created a Mai Tai in 1933. Vic’s rebuttal, published in his own book, remains the finest sentence in cocktail litigation: anyone who said he didn’t create the drink was “a dirty stinker.” History, and a settled lawsuit over a competing mix, have sided broadly with Vic.
“Anybody who says I didn’t create this drink is a dirty stinker.”
— Trader Vic, settling the matter, 1972
The drink conquered the Pacific in 1953, when Vic put it on the menus of the Matson Line’s Royal Hawaiian hotel, and then the mainland, with an assist from Elvis and Blue Hawaii. Demand grew so ferocious that it is routinely credited with draining the world’s stocks of aged Jamaican rum — the original 17-year Wray & Nephew became extinct partly because the Mai Tai drank it all. Surviving bottles are now among the most valuable rums on earth.
Things worth knowing by the second round
- 01
The name is the review: maita’i is Tahitian for “good” — the superlative form supplied by the first taster.
- 02
The original’s rum — 17-year Wray & Nephew — is now so scarce that when a London bar obtained a bottle, Mai Tais from it sold for four figures.
- 03
The modern split of Jamaican rum and rhum agricole is a reconstruction of that lost bottle’s flavor, agreed upon by tiki scholars.
- 04
A proper Mai Tai contains no pineapple juice and nothing blue — the beach-resort version is a different drink wearing its name.
- 05
Trader Vic’s wooden leg was real, and stabbing an ice pick into it was part of the floor show.
Famous company
Blue Hawaii (1961)
Elvis, Waikiki and a tray of Mai Tais — the drink’s Hollywood coronation.
The Royal Hawaiian, Waikiki
Where Vic installed it in 1953 and where the Mai Tai Bar still faces the surf.
Trader Vic’s, worldwide
The original’s home — the 1944 spec is still served as “the original formula.”
The tiki revival
Bars like Smuggler’s Cove rebuilt the real recipe after decades of paper-umbrella impostors.