Before becoming Chairman of the United States Bartenders Guild’s Nevada Chapter, and Director of the Academy Of Spirits And Fine Service, Francesco Lafranconi won more international cocktail competitions than you can shake a swizzle stick at. In fact, he’s only made one false move in his entire career — and that’s inviting the Bum to join him onstage at a cocktail seminar later this month.

We’re not worthy to fold Francesco’s bar towels, but we’re about to tell him that. Not when we get to help make (and hopefully help drink) six tropical cocktails at his “Tiki Beach” tasting seminar, which is set for 3:15 p.m. on May 17 at the Tampa Bay Wine & Food Festival in Tampa, Florida. Here’s Francesco’s drink menu for the seminar, which he’s holding on the beach in front of the Don CeSar Hotel (pictured above):

1944 MAI TAI (By Trader Vic Bergeron)
Refrain from any imitation and taste the Real Mc Coy! Myers’s Dark and Cruzan Single Barrel paired together with Orange Curacao, fresh lime juice and orgeat syrup. After the first sip your perception of Mai Tai will never be the same!

DOCTOR FUNK (By Don The Beachcomber, adapted)
In case you need a doctor to heal your burdens of life here’s the one and only: Dr. Funk! A combination of Flor de Caña Extra Dry Rum, Pernod, Amoretti pomegranate-grenadine and fresh citrus juices, topped with Perrier Lime-flavored sparkling water.

RESTLESS NATIVE (by Beachbum Berry)
Enjoy a tropical variation of a classic Daiquiri by combining together Cruzan Coconut-flavored Rum, Marie Brizard White Crème de Cacao and fresh lime juice, garnished with fresh coconut …tropical breezes and white sandy beaches here we come!

EASTER ISLAND’S SWIZZLE (by Francesco Lafranconi)
Martinis are OUT and Tiki is IN! Savor this tropical libation made with 10-Cane Rum, Grand Marnier, fresh lime juice, bitters and passion fruit-ginger beer….spicy, sweet and intense with fragrant aromas of mint.

HAI KARATE (by Beachbum Berry)
Cruzan 2-Year Dark Rum, unsweetened pineapple and fresh citrus juices, a rich touch of maple syrup and a hint of bitters…does life get any better?

THAITI HAMOA (by Francesco Lafranconi)
Tiki goes epicurean in this unique combination of banana flambé with Navan vanilla liqueur, Muscovado sugar and fresh citrus juices. Black tea and Pyrat XO rum with a hint of nutmeg will let the Polynesian spices tease you, while you’re seated by the sea, under the coconut trees…

Francesco’s oft-quoted motto is, “We’re not drinking… we’re learning!” If the Bum had a motto, it would be “We’re not learning … we’re drinking!” But he and Francesco are sure to find a happy medium (especially after that sixth drink sample).

TAMPA BAY FOOD & WINE FESTIVAL

Hallelujah, bothers and sisters: Our favorite drink ingredient, pimento liqueur, is now available domestically under the St. Elizabeth label.

Pimento liqueur is not made from that mysterious red substance stuffed into olives, but from the pimento berry, otherwise known as allspice — a case of mistaken identity that importer Haus Alpenz has solved by calling its pimento liqueur “St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram.”

The historical Saint Elizabeth was John The Baptist’s mom, and, according to Luke 1:6, “just before God, walking in all the commandments and justifications of the Lord without blame.” Her namesake liqueur is also without blame, much better than the Berry Hill brand that tropaholics have been ordering online from Jamaica at considerable expense, just so they could sample the recipes in the Bum books that call for pimento. St. Elizabeth’s is richer, spicier, and made with pot-stilled Jamaican rum instead of neutral spirits.

We’re still fond of the DYI pimento liqueur recipe on page 173 of Sippin’ Safari, but it does entail waiting months for the flavors to ripen. If you’re inclined to skip all that time and effort, instant allspice gratification is at hand now that St. Liz is in the Haus.

HAUS ALPENZ

Normally when we get a swelled head, it’s from too many Zombies. But some recent articles are having the same effect on our noggin.

In an interview at Saveur.com, we’re referred to as “Professor Tiki” and allowed to pontificate at length (perhaps because we were lucky enough to have Justine Sterling as our interviewer: “As my father says,” Justine told us, “I have Mai Tais in my blood.”) Paul Clarke has also seen fit to quote us in his San Francisco Chronicle survey of premium rums. And then there’s our profile in the New Orleans Times Picayune, in which the James Beard Award-winning food writer Brett Anderson gives serious consideration to our quest for “any decent cocktail garnished unironically with a tiny parasol.”

As if that weren’t enough, Robert Simonson reports in his Off The Presses drink blog that a Manhattan Bar called PDT has named a drink after us, which they call the Beachbum (rum, apricot brandy, orgeat, lime and pineapple juices — garnished unironically with a tiny parasol).

Are we blushing, or is that just the gin blossoms flaring up again?

SAVEUR.COM BUM INTERVIEW

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE RUM ARTICLE

NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE BUM PROFILE

SIMONSON SIPS A BEACHBUM

Our quest to create the most decadent drink in the world, one using all four horsemen of the health apocalypse — alcohol, cholesterol, sugar, and salt — took a great leap forward recently, when Randy Wong of the band Waitiki hipped us to Liko Lehua Fruit Flavored Butters.

Unlike other so-called fruit butters, the six flavors in the Lehua line (lilikoi, mango, guava, lime, pineapple, and coconut) actually have butter in them. Randy sent us the guava butter, with a note that the stuff might be worth trying in cocktails. We immediately thought of Don The Beachcomber’s Mystery Gardenia, an iced drink blended with a mixture of honey and butter. Why not sub the guava butter for the honey butter and see what happened?

What happened was a rich, tart, bracing cocktail that was worth every inch it added to our waistline. It tasted even better with the lilikoi (a.k.a. passion fruit) butter. We then tried plugging the lime, pineapple, mango, and coconut butters into the same formula, but none of them hit the high notes of the lilikoi and guava.

However, the coconut butter was such a luscious experience on its own that we felt obligated to find it a home in another drink. Again, we didn’t have to look far: subbing the coconut butter for coconut cream in a Pina Colada did the trick. We don’t even like Pina Coladas, but we couldn’t stop drinking this one until we actually felt our arteries jamming.

The recipes (see below to order the fruit butters):

LIKO NO KA OI

Into your blender place 3/4 ounce Liko Lehua lilikoi or guava butter (whichever flavor you’re partial to), 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice, 1 1/2 ounces white Puerto Rican rum, a dash of Angostura bitters, and 4 ounces (1/2 cup) crushed ice. Blend at high speed for at least 30 seconds. Strain through a fine-mesh wire sieve into a cocktail glass (pictured above).

LEHUA COLADA

In your blender place 4 ounces unsweetened pineapple juice, 2 ounces white Puerto Rican rum, 1 ounce Liko Lehua coconut butter, and 8 ounces (1 cup) crushed ice. Blend at high speed for 10 seconds. Pour unstrained into a tall glass.

LIKO LEHUA FRUIT FLAVORED BUTTER

The Bum has been 86’d from many a bar, but all that’s about to change. Because before you can get tossed out of a bar, you have to get into the bar. And now, thanks to tavern owners like Rufus Terrill, proprietor of O’Terrill’s Irish Pub in Atlanta, riff-raff like us can get the bum’s rush from all the way out on the street … via a security robot called the BumBot. Fashioned from an old barbecue smoker and mounted on a three-wheeled scooter, the BumBot disperses vagrants with a blast from its turret-mounted water cannon.

This causes us no immediate alarm, as O’Terrill’s doesn’t exactly serve the kind of drinks we like to cadge. But should this device ever fall into the hands of Tiki bar owners, we’ll be getting both a lot wetter and a lot drier.

BUMBOT

Pictured above: photographer Sven Kirsten and diorama artist Bosko Hrnjak shooting the cover of Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log, way back in April of 1998.

We’d like to thank our liver for holding out long enough to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our first book. It’s hard to believe the Grog Log was published a decade ago, and even harder to believe it’s still in print.

We never thought the book would hang around long enough to become dated, but at this point many of the ingredients it recommends are no longer available. New ingredients have come on the market as well. Over the years we’ve also found much better versions of some of the Log’s vintage recipes (such as the Zombie), and we’ve found ourselves more than a little embarrassed by the early original efforts we included (back then, before you could Google every classic cocktail recipe ever published, we were so proud of ourselves for “creating” drinks like the Red Tide — never realizing we were re-inventing the wheel with what was basically a Bacardi Cocktail).

In short, a revised edition is long overdue. Stay tuned … the Bum may be a bum, but if anything can get him to work, it would be setting tropaholic wrongs to right.

THE GROG LOG

Hard work and dedication will get you far, but no work and dissipation will get you farther. All the way to the Virgin Islands, in fact. That’s the life lesson we learned last month, when a phone call woke us from a sound sleep at the crack of noon. It was Absolut Spirits rep Chris Patino, asking if we were interested in a junket to St. Croix as the guest of Cruzan Rum, one of the brands in Absolut’s portfolio.

The next thing we knew we were on a Caribbean beach drinking with the other attendees of the Cruzan Legacy Tour, hosted by Absolut’s resident cocktail guru Simon Ford. The group ranged from celebrity mixologists (Francesco Lafranconi, Allen Katz, David Nepove, Michael Trujillo, Jason Girard, Armando Rosario and Arturo Sighinolfi, all associated with Southern Wine & Spirits) to big-time nightclub and bar consultants (Tobin Ellis and John Hogan of BarMagic). Bringing up the rear: two freeloading slackers (yours truly and Wayne Curtis, author of And A Bottle Of Rum: A History Of The New World In Ten Cocktails).

What’s the chief topic of conversation when you throw twelve guys together without any women around? You guessed it — cocktails. For the next three days, drinks were not only drunk, but discussed with a passion that males normally reserve for females, cars, or sporting events. When the talk finally did drift toward football, David Nepove, who stands over six feet tall and looks like a linebacker, cast a baleful look at the Bum and confided, “Man, I don’t care about sports. All I want to talk about is cocktails.” Our kind of people.

So is the Nelthropp family, which has been living on St. Croix for eight generations and running the Cruzan distillery for three. Paterfamilias Hardy Nelthropp regaled us with tales from the 1930s, when Cruzan began absorbing the many other rum distilleries then operating on the island. (In those days rum was the life-blood of St. Croix: visitors reported back that the entire island smelled like molasses, the sugar by-product from which rum is distilled; molasses is literally the mortar that holds many of the island’s old brick buildings together.)

Mr. Nelthropp’s son Donny led the distillery tour, guiding us through warehouses full of barrels stacked two stories high, then through a Powerpoint presentation detailing how the rum in those barrels is aged to smooth out the harshness that other, larger rum companies don’t take the time to neutralize. (These companies shall remain nameless, on the off chance that they invite the Bum to their tropical island headquarters).

Donny’s sister Karen then conducted a taste comparison of Cruzan vs. those other rum companies. She remained serenely confident at the sight of so many connoisseurs swirling, sniffing, and judging her rum against its rivals. We soon learned the reason why: Competition is in Karen’s DNA. Throughout our stay, she gleefully led us on a series of challenges: a pop quiz on St. Croix history, a swizzle stick hunt, a test to see which of us so-called experts could identify six different kinds of spirits by scent alone (the Bum scored a dismal two, correctly guessing only gin and vodka).

But it was her cocktail competition that emerged as the highlight of the trip. We were divided into teams, then given 30 minutes to create a drink using only Cruzan rums and ingredients native to the Virgin Islands.

The results opened the Bum’s bloodshot eyes to some new ideas. It had never occurred to him to layer a tropical drink as you would a pousse-cafe (which the team of John Hogan and David Nepove did) or to make an instant infusion of cloves in rum (which Tobin Ellis and Wayne Curtis did). But the real eye-opener was what everyone except the Bum seemed to be doing: muddling. These guys were mashing bananas, watermelons, cucumbers, mangos — just about everything in the room that could be squashed and juiced. The results were stellar: vibrant, nuanced, and truly creative.

For the life of us we couldn’t choose a clear winner, but the Nelthropps had no such problem. You’ll find their pick below. First, the recipes (drink photos courtesy of Tobin Ellis):

CRUZAN MELLOW YELLOW (by Francesco Lafranconi)

In your shaker, muddle 1/2 cup fresh mango chunks in 1 ounce fresh lime juice and 1/2 ounce orgeat syrup. Add 2 ounces Cruzan 2-year Dark rum, half an egg white, and 3 dashes Angostura bitters. Shake with ice, then strain into a rocks glass filled with fresh ice. Top with a dash of Cruzan Mango rum and grated cinnamon. Garnish with a mango slice and hibiscus flower.

THE NORIEGA (By Tobin Ellis and Wayne Curtis)

Core 1 whole pineapple, reserving the cored shell. Muddle 1/2 cup of the pineapple meat in your shaker with the juice of half a lime, 1/2 ounce simple syrup, 1/2 ounce Cruzan pineapple rum, 2 to 3 dashes Angostura bitters, and 2 ounces of clove-infused Cruzan 2-year Dark rum (made by steeping cloves in the rum for 10 minutes and then straining). Shake with ice and strain into the pineapple shell filled with crushed ice (pictured below).

PAPARAZZI’S DEMISE (By Allen Katz)

Dissolve 1/2 ounce clover honey in 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice and 1/4 ounce fresh lemon juice. Pour the mixture into your shaker, adding 2 ounces Cruzan Light rum, 1/2 ounce Cruzan Black Strap rum, and 1 egg white. Shake this all up with ice, then strain into a rocks glass filled with fresh crushed ice. Top with 1/2 ounce club soda. Garnish with 3 dashes of Angostura bitters in the egg white foam. Swirl with a straw and serve.

CITRUS RUSH (by Armando Rosario and Jason Girard)

In your shaker, muddle 2 to 3 orange quarters in 1 ounce fresh lime juice. Add 1 ounce simple syrup and 2 ounces Cruzan Light rum. Shake with ice and strain into a rocks glass filled with fresh ice. Float 1/2 ounce Cruzan Black Strap rum. Garnish with 2 orange wheels inside glass and a lime wheel on top (pictured below).

BAD AZTEC PUNCH (by Jeff Berry and Simon Ford)

Into your shaker pour 1 ounce fresh lime juice, 1 ounce fresh orange juice, 1 ounce Cruzan 2-year Dark rum, 1 1/2 ounces Cruzan Coconut rum, and 1 1/2 ounces Simon’s pineapple & aniseed simple syrup (made by muddling 4 chunks of pineapple per 1 ounce simple syrup and 2.5 ml essence of anise, a.k.a. aniseed). Shake well with ice, then strain into a rocks glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish with a pineapple leaf and an edible flower.

NICE PEAR OF CRUZANS (by Michael Trujillo and Arturo Sighinolfi)

Cut half a lime into quarters and place in your shaker with 3 lychees and 1/4 ounce pear essence. Muddle. Add 3/4 ounce each Cruzan 151 rum, Cruzan Black Cherry rum, and simple syrup. Shake with ice, then strain into a double rocks glass filled with fresh ice.

INDEPENDENCE DAY PUNCH (by John Hogan and David Nepove)

This is a layered cocktail. Step one: In a tall glass, pour in 1/4 oz grenadine and fill with crushed ice. Step two: In your shaker, muddle a third of a banana in 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice, 1/2 ounce simple syrup, and 1 ounce Cruzan Light rum. Shake this with ice and strain over the grenadine (being careful to layer). Step three: Carefully float 1/2 ounce Cruzan Black Strap rum mixed with 2 dashes Angostura bitters over the banana cocktail layer. Step four: In your shaker, muddle 4 one-inch watermelon cubes and 2 barspoons chopped cucumber in 1/2 ounce simple syrup, 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice, and 1 ounce Cruzan 2-year Dark rum. Shake, then carefully strain over the Black Strap layer. Step five: Whisk an egg white with 1/2 ounce simple syrup, then float the foamed egg white on top of your drink. Garnish with a tropical flower. (Pictured below, undergoing scrutiny by judges Donny Nelthropp and Karen Nelthropp Low.)

And the winner was: the most labor-intensive drink, John and Dave’s Independence Day Punch. Okay, so sometimes hard work really does pay off … but if anyone asks, you didn’t hear that from us.

CRUZAN RUM

Barcelona has three Tiki bars. To those of us here in the New World — where we’re lucky if a major metropolitan area has even one — this fact will induce fits of envy. It shouldn’t, say Barcelona residents Mr. Ivan and Lady Eve. They insist that Spain still has a long way to go in the Tikification process — a process they’ve been helping along with their blog about all things exotic, Bastardo Saffrin.

Mr. Ivan (that’s him above) recently conducted an e-interview with your humble Bum. He asked some very interesting (i.e., very alcoholic) questions that wouldn’t have occurred to the non-Polynesiac press. The interview was first posted in Spanish, but Mr. Ivan has re-posted it in the original English for those of us who didn’t pay attention in high school language class:

BASTARDO BUM INTERVIEW (ENGLISH)

BASTARDO INTERVIEW (SPANISH)

BARCELONA’S TIKI BARS

The Walt Disney Company has atoned for its recent slate of movies by hiring Kevin Kidney and Jody Daily to design a drink bowl commemorating the 45th anniversary of Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room. Now that we’ve seen it, we can’t imagine serving a Scorpion Bowl in any other vessel.

You may recall that Kevin also designed the cover and maps for our most recent book, Sippin’ Safari. Clearly Disney didn’t know about his association with old soaks like us, or they’d never have hired him.

To see the other items Kevin and Jody have designed for Disney, including a beautiful bar-top fountain:

KEVIN & JODY’S DISNEY DESIGNS

KEVIN’S OTHER WORK

If the Bum hadn’t just pawned his hat, he’d tip it to New Orleans mixologist Chris Hannah, whose Tiki-inspired drinks and exotic syrups are turning Arnaud’s restaurant bar, the French 75, into the French Polynesian 75.

That’s Chris above. The drink on the right is an original tropical concoction of his called the Ohanna (a play on ohana, the Hawaiian word for “family”). To make one, shake 1 1/2 ounces El Dorado 12-year Demerara rum, 1 1/4 ounces each falernum and orange juice, and 1/2 ounce coffee syrup with plenty of ice. Pour unstrained into a tall glass. Garnish with an orange slice.

What makes the Ohanna an experience best had at the French 75 is the unique nature of the syrups Chris makes at home, then brings to the bar to put in his drinks. His falernum, which he based on Paul Clarke’s recipe, is the best we’ve ever tasted, and his coffee syrup is delicate enough to sip straight, as you would a liqueur.

Without the Bum even having to beg (which he has been known to do, especially in bars), Chris has graciously consented to share these two recipes.

Here’s Chris on how to make his falernum: “In 6 ounces of rum (I use Old New Orleans 3-year), I steep the zest of 6 limes, 20 cloves, 10 cracked coffee beans, 10 whole dried allspice berries (I crack them too), 3 broken cinnamon sticks, and 1 cup of toasted pecan pieces. I sit this in a container for 2 days and then strain it. Then I mix it with the juice of three whole limes, 1 1/2 cups of simple syrup, and 1 teaspoon of almond extract (if I could find pecan extract I’d use that).”

Chris’s coffee syrup: “Take 1 cup of medium-roast coffee beans, crack all the beans, then add 2 cups of brandy. The brandy sits with the coffee beans for three to four days in a jar. Then I strain the brandy.” Chris then makes a brown sugar syrup with 1 1/2 cups each water and brown sugar, and combines the syrup with the coffee-infused brandy.

If all that sounds like just too much work, hop a freight down to Chris’s place of employ and join his ohana of fans:

FRENCH 75 BAR