08/29/2026
Jeff "Beachbum" Berry’s research and preservation of tiki cocktail history is worthy of high praise.
Jeff “Beachbum” Berry
Professional Bum, Cocktail Historian, Author
Polynesiacs Artist Interviews No. 117
New Orleans, Louisiana
“My motive was completely selfish. All I wanted to do was to make these drinks at home.”
“I started approaching it the way a journalist would. Why? Because I was curious. I was intrigued, and I went down the rabbit hole. I had to learn how to make these drinks. The first thing I did was I hit the library. The libraries still had index cards back then. A lot of the kids today aren't gonna even know what that is, you know, there were no computers or anything to do the work. I spent a lot of time looking up old magazine articles, bound periodical volumes, and tried to find any old recipes that might have been printed from these restaurants.”
“I did the same thing with old recipe books, out-of-print books. There were a lot of used bookstores back then. There were no new content books, but there were plenty of vintage ones, for sale, really cheap. Now they're all online for a hundred bucks, but back then, you could get anything you wanted for, like, five bucks.”
“I found a couple of things, you know, close, but no cigar kind of things, until I found the exception, Trader Vic’s book. In 1972, he published his Revised Bartender's Guide. It was the one that he updated from the 1946 or '47 one. And he had all his greatest hits in there.
“So all of a sudden, this book was like the Rosetta Stone, because I could take it with me to Trader Vic's. He had the recipe of the fog cutter, and I could order a fog cutter, and then start teaching myself the DNA of tropical drinks, because the drink would come, and I'd sip it, and I'd look at what was in the recipe, and started to train my palate at that point, to recognize it.”
“That worked up to a point. There were still a lot of flavors I couldn't distinguish. I still was terrible at guessing. But Annene, who would eventually become Mrs. Beachbum, when I met her, she had been a bartender in New York, and she was much better at parsing flavors than me. She helped guide me through how to recognize flavors.”
“After the Rosetta Stone, the next momentous find was the Holy Grail, the little black recipe book from an old shoe box that decoded all the original recipes of Don the Beachcomber. If Otto hadn’t published Tiki News at the time, I’m not sure it would have happened.”
“The work took more than a decade. The finds, plus my numerous and generous conversations with every original-era bar staff I could meet, helped me piece the puzzle together.”
“Did I think I would write books about cocktails? No, I had no intention in the beginning. I wanted to make these drinks at home because if I couldn’t, I wouldn’t get them anywhere else. If I could have, I wouldn't have bothered.”
One of Imbibe magazine’s “25 Most Influential Cocktail Personalities of the Past Century” and one of Drinks International’s “100 Most Influential Figures,” Jeff “Beachbum” Berry is the author of seven books on vintage tropical drinks, which published for the first time anywhere the lost recipes of Tiki’s mid-century golden age. Esquire calls Jeff “one of the instigators of the cocktail revolution” and Food & W**e “one of the world’s leading rum experts,” while The New York Times cites him as “the Indiana Jones of Tiki drinks” and The Los Angeles Times as “A hybrid of street-smart gumshoe, anthropologist and mixologist.”
Jeff’s been featured on the Travel Channel’s “Food Paradise” TV series, The Discovery Channel, PBS Television and National Public Radio; he’s also been profiled in The Washington Post , USA Today, The New York Times and W**e Enthusiast magazine.
Jeff’s original cocktail recipes have been printed in publications around the world, from Bon Appetit and The Huffington Post to over 20 international recipe books, including the venerable Mr. Boston Official Bartenders Guide.
And now Jeff’s drinks are being served at his restaurant in New Orleans, Beachbum Berry’s Latitude 29, which has won critical acclaim in Esquire , Pl***oy, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle, GQ, Travel + Leisure, Town & Country, Southern Living, New Orleans magazine, and the Food Network.
With Martin Doudoroff, Jeff co-created Total Tiki for iPad and iPhone, a drink recipe app which Macworld magazine calls “beautifully rendered and, thanks to Berry’s tireless reporting, impeccably sourced.”
Jeff’s also co-created a line of Tiki barware with Cocktail Kingdom, which Imbibe hails as “especially notable because it revives old styles of essential glassware that were previously almost impossible to find.”
While this is all way too much work for a bum, Jeff is also developing cocktail-focused rum blends for the Hamilton label and tropical bar syrups with Orgeat Works. He’s also been known to leave his hut to lecture across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.
Find him at beachbumberry.com, (IG), or Jeff “Beachbum” Berry (FB).
