When you think of Mai Tai cocktails, it’s easy to get swept away with retro visions of Hawaiian shirts and wooden mugs from the questionable tiki bars of the 1950s and ’60s. In fact, the Mai Tai was so popular during this time that it apparently led to a worldwide rum shortage.
As the story goes, the Mai Tai cocktail was created in 1944 by Victor Bergeron at his restaurant Trader Vic’s in California, who simply wanted to create a delicious drink using his 17-year-old Jamaican rum. He got to work and ‘added a squeeze of lime, a dash of rock candy syrup, a splash of orange curacao, some French orgeat’ and poured his tropical creation over ice. He then handed this drink to a friend visiting from Tahiti, who enthusiastically exclaimed it was “Mai tai roa ae,” which translates to “out of this world – the best”. The iconic Mai Tai cocktail was born.
Since then, the Mai Tai has gone through many iterations from its original recipe, rising and falling in popularity throughout history. It holds a reputation as a sickly sweet cocktail due to the historical overuse of packaged juices, fruits and syrups, which replaced fresh ingredients when it became more mainstream. This ignored the fact that the Vic Trader’s recipe only required lime juice. But with a Mai Tai revival well and truly here, Victor can rest easy. A new wave of hardcore fans – and this balanced recipe – are ensuring that his tropical concoction will once again be mai tai roa ae.
