An Island Gourmand

A great series on home brewing sake...

Serious Eats talks about a drink...

The Miami Rum Renaissance Festival begins with the Zombie Jamboree...

It's National Margarita Day...

Got your Triple Sec?

Serious eats has a most excellent discussion on white rum and comes to an interesting conclusion... Which we heartily endorse.

By the way for those interested, down here in the Caribbean Bacardi Silver costs $7.99 (though it might have been on sale yesterday) and Castillo Silver goes for $2.99

Ed Hamilton over at the Ministry of Rum sums up the year and looks forward...

Solar Burrito shows us the path...

Ed Hamilton is the The Man from the Ministry of Rum and what better place to start than Rum 101!

Today's installment... Can spiced rum be serious?

It's pretty amazing when you think about it, but I don't think you can get a decent Mai Tai anywhere in the Caribbean...

Beachbum Berry (my main resource when it comes to Tiki culture and libations) has been on  something of a quest for Mai Tai's in Europe and having a lot better luck than he'd find here in the Caribbean. You should also note a previous post of his on the correct recipe for a Mai Tai... You might be surprised!

Being marooned in St Croix sans mast, one of the first things you notice is that the cost of beer is much higher than say, St Martin... Well, at least it is one of the first things I noticed!

Fact is, I'm not much of a beer drinker or to be more accurate I'm not big on the same old semi-generic lagers that pass for beer these days. Now if we were talking Moose Drool, it would be a whole different story...

Which has had me thinking along the lines of brewing my own beer... Sort of a nano-brewery I suppose.

The upside is that instead of paying $4 for a pint of decent beer (or $3 for Bud/Heinenken/Caribe) at the local micro brewery, I'd be paying less than 50¢, which makes Mr Cheapseats all warm and fuzzy, and the ability to have (at least if I get it right) beer that tastes like the sort of beer I actually like!

The downside is that finding room for said nano-brewery on "So It Goes" is going to entail building a "cool space" to house it (which is doable) and, well, just doing it... So these days, I'm spending some time reading various tomes on brewing and brewing equipment. While looking at various home brew kits like this one which seems to be the defacto standard or the smaller sort of the Mr Beer variety which would be a lot easier in the "I-live-on-a-very-small-boat" vein.

One of the real problems with the whole Tiki food and drink thing is that the basics are not really there. Where to find the needful stuff for a real Mai Tai or a Zombie is often a whole lot  problematic!

I long ago gave up drinking Tiki drinks in bars as they were never ever right and sadly most people think that what passes for tropical drink is just bad rum, fruit punch and too much sugar... Face it, it's a lot more than a cute mug and a swizzle stick!

Enter Trader Tiki who is doing stuff right with an interesting product line of ingredients for folks who feel that a Mai Tai should actually taste like a Mai Tai.

 Check out the reviews of the new hip rum Kraken over at Bitter End...

We're interested in this rum as they certainly have a pretty awesome advertising program and a sense of fun but we will reserve our opinion until we have a bottle in hand!

I really like  Lobstersquad, a great blog, always entertaining and the artwork always brings a smile...

Check out the current post for a world class mojito recipe!

Why did no one tell me about this? A little lead time and I would have been all over this, I could have been a contender...

More info over at Beach Bum Berry's... Sounds like a LOT of FUN!

The 4th of July for me has always meant beach, surfboards and Tiki drinks...

When I was a kid, the whole Tiki bar thing was quite the rage and seriously hip. In these modern times the whole Tiki fad is looked down on by many as a pinnacle of kitsch but it was a LOT of fun, and I'll go on record as saying we could always use a whole lot more FUN!

Plus let's get real... What better place to have your very own movable Tiki Bar than an ocean-going sail boat?

Of course to do it right you need LOTS of RUM! Lucky for us that down here in the Caribbean you can buy a good rum for less than $4 a liter (and you'd be dumb-as-nails to use anything better for Tiki drinks) various fruit juices and some serious Tiki mugs...

I mean you really do need the Tiki mugs as they strike just the right note and the whole point of the excercise is striking the right note! Of course you can always use coconuts and hollowed out pineapples but for me Tiki mugs are the serious stuff (and who wants to waste good drinking time hollowing out a pineapple?).

Of course you need the recipes because, while most things on boats are not rocket science, mixology of the Tiki variety IS and before you are ready to come up with your own special signature Tiki/Boat drink it is best to spend a bit of time learning from the masters and working on the classics!

"Sipping Safari" is a great place to start but any of the Beachbum Berry books will do...

I would be remiss in not mentioning that for a proper on-board Tiki party that the old T-shirt is something of a faux pas and that at the least a real Aloha shirt is the minmum for Tiki chic (leis however are considered to be something of an over kill)!

Have a happy 4th...