I would make more tiki drinks at home than I do if they weren't so damn labor intensive. Not only do many of the cocktail have six or seven (or 12) ingredients; not only are many of the ingredients not the sort of thing you already have in your liquor cabinet, or which can be easily found in your local liquor store; but many of the ingredients are syrups that you have to assemble separately before you can even start to make the drink.
Among these are cinnamon syrup, passion fruit syrup, coffee syrup and a host of others, plus secret syrups created long ago by Donn Beach of Don the Beachcomber fame and mixologists of his ilk. We can thank author and tiki historian Jeff Berry for cracking the code on may of these potions. But we still have to make them if we want to sample, say, a Doniga Punch.
A Portland, OR, bartender and consultant named Blair Reynolds has now come to tiki-lovers' aid.
