This Rum Can Help You Make Trader Vic's-Style Mai Tais

Forbes

a day ago

There's more than one way to skin a cat, the saying goes, and there's also more than one way to make an authentic Trader Vic's Mai Tai. I won't get into the cat-skinning details, never having attempted to skin one myself, but I've made — and consumed — plenty of Mai Tais over the years, and have been an avid student of how to make a proper one.
For me, and many a rum enthusiast, a 'proper' Mai Tai is synonymous with that made by 'Trader Vic' Bergeron. The original, most famous, and perhaps most unknowable of all its iterations is the original, created on the fly by Vic for a couple of Tahitian friends in 1944. Nowadays, it's probably cheaper to create a time machine than it is to buy a bottle of the now-legendary J. Wray & Nephew 17 Year Old Jamaican rum used to make the original Mai Tai.
Appleton Estate, where Wray & Nephew 17 is said to have been produced, released a one-off recreation using the identical marques, or distillates, in 2023. It was, predictably, snapped up by rum nerds and cocktail geeks in a matter of nanoseconds, and a bottle on the secondary market will run you well north of $1,000 nowadays. Not, therefore, exactly a viable option for whipping up a Mai Tai.
My crushed ice game is not great but this Trader Vic's-style Mai Tai was delicious. Photo by Tony Sachs
Today's Mai Tais served at the remaining Trader Vic's locations are, while tasty, a far cry from the original, employing multiple 80-proof rums of unknown provenance — unknown to us, at least, if not to Trader Vic's insiders and higher-ups. So what's an aspiring Mai Tai-ologist to do? Believe it or not, Trader Vic himself encountered the same problem.
The original 1944 Mai Tai proved so popular that Wray & Nephew ran out of 17 year old rum to sell to Trader Vic's. Bergeron rejiggered the formula with W & N's 15 year old rum; once supplies of that started running low, he blended it with other Jamaican rums like Red Heart and Coruba. Eventually the 15 year old, like the 17 before it, became completely unavailable.
It was at that point, in the mid 1950s, that he reworked the recipe again. According to Kevin Crossman, who runs The Search For The Ultimate Mai Tai website, 'problems with consistent quality in the other Jamaican London Dock Rums caused Trader Vic to make private arrangements, in the interest of high quality, to blend and bottle a Jamaican rum under his own label and control. Consistent quality was maintained in both a 15- and 8-year aging.' Joy Spence, master blender at Appleton Estate, has said on the record that the blend was made by Wray & Nephew at Appleton Estate at least until 1981.
But wait, there's more! Vic Bergeron himself wrote a 1970 treatise, Let's Set the Record Straight on the Mai Tai . In it, he says, his blend, 'though excellent, didn't exactly match the end flavor of the original 17-year-old product. This desired nutty and snappy flavor was added by the use of a Martinique rum.'
Martinique rum (or rhum, as the French spell it) is equated nowadays with rhum agricole , which is distilled from cane juice rather than molasses and has its own, very distinctive flavor. Back in the '50s, though, rhum agricole was all but unknown in the States. The rum exported from Martinique was distilled from molasses. (Props must be given here to the great rum writer/historian Matt Pietrek, whose research on the topic can be found at his Rum Wonk blog and, frankly, throughout much of this very article).
I managed to find a vintage 1950s bottle of Rhum Negrita, a Martinique molasses rum mentioned by name in Trader Vic's books of the era (today it's a bottom-shelf Caribbean blend that's nothing like what it was back then). It's quite dark, doubtlessly through the addition of caramel coloring, and it has an intense, burnt-sugar flavor that's more reminiscent of a Guyana rum than a rhum agricole.
Today, the tables have turned, and in recent years it's been all but impossible to find a rum from Martinique that isn't a rhum agricole. But Holmes Cay, a New York-based independent bottler that's been hunting down and releasing great rums from around the world since 2019, has given us the next best thing. Its recently released Réunion Island Rum Traditionnel comes from the French island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, whose molasses rum is a close cousin to that which comes from Martinique. Holmes Cay has released two other rums from Réunion, but this is the first aged expression.
Holmes Cay's Réunion Island Rum Traditionnel is an essential piece in the Trader Vic's Mai Tai puzzle. Photo by Tony Sachs
Tropically aged for three years in ex-cognac casks, it's bottled at 46% ABV, a touch above the 44% of vintage Negrita. It's lighter in both color and flavor than the Negrita, but it's got the same basic vanilla-cinnamon-burnt sugar notes to it. To give it a little extra 'oomph' in my Mai Tai, I added a touch of Guyana rum — coincidentally or not, also bottled by Holmes Cay. Guyana 2018 Versailles was distilled on the legendary Versailles wooden still — it intensifies the flavor of the Réunion rum without altering it, and it's well worth drinking in its own right.
Thanks to Holmes Cay, we've ticked the box of the most difficult ingredient to find for our genuine 1950s-style Trader Vic's Mai Tai. So what else do we use for our liquid time machine? According to The Search For The Ultimate Mai Tai, the recipe calls for:
1 ounce Martinique rum. For our purposes, let's make that Réunion Island Rum Traditionnel. I also added a splash, no more than 1/4 ounce, of Guyana rum.
1 ounce Trader Vic's Jamaican rum. We know that it was made at Appleton Estate and was a blend of 15 and 8-year-old rums. So it makes sense to go with Appleton for this component. Joy Spence says the 8-year-old is her go-to in Mai Tais; you can combine their 8 Year and 15 Year expressions to make your own Trader Vic's blend (personally, I like to use their richer, more complex 21 Year Old bottling). Will it taste exactly like what Trader Vic used? Probably not, but it will certainly have the same basic DNA. I would avoid the funky pot still rums from Jamaica, such as Smith & Cross, Doctor Bird, or certain rums from Hampden Estate. They're beloved by many a rum enthusiast, myself included, but their earthy, vegetal flavor profiles aren't appropriate for this endeavor.
1 ounce pre-mixed Curaçao, orgeat & rock candy syrup. What the heck do we do here? First of all, figure out proportions: based on common sense but no hard evidence in particular, I went with a half-ounce of curaçao and a quarter ounce each of orgeat and rock candy syrup. The modern-day Trader Vic's Mai Tai uses Leroux curaçao; I opted for Pierre Ferrand. Pretty much anything goes here, but bottom-shelf brands aren't recommended.
As for the orgeat, I went with Latitude 29's, made by Orgeat Works. The famed New Orleans bar is run by Jeff 'Beachbum' Berry, a dedicated scholar of historic tiki cocktails. If it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me. I used Trader Vic's own rock candy syrup, but have since been alerted by drinks writer and fellow Mai Tai obsessive Dylan Ettinger that Vic's is a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water, where the proper old-school ratio is 2:1. This is also known as rich simple syrup, and it's probably easiest just to make your own.
The juice of one fresh lime. Most Mai Tai recipes call for one ounce of fresh-squeezed lime juice. Based on personal experience, sometimes I get a full ounce from a single lime. Quite often, I don't. So is it an ounce or not? How about this: squeeze a lime. If it's somewhere in the neighborhood of an ounce, you're good to go. If it's considerably more or less, adjust according to your desired taste. But don't worry about precision here.
Pour all the ingredients into a shaker with plenty of ice, shake it until it's pretty damn cold, and then pour it out into the glass of your choice (I prefer Trader Vic's own double rocks glass myself) filled with plenty of shaved ice. Garnish with half of the spent lime shell and a sprig of fresh mint, and you've got yourself a Trader Vic's Mai Tai. Is it an exact replica of the 1944 original? No. Is it totally legit, created and approved by Vic himself? Absolutely. Is it delicious? Oh heck yes.