BEST Mai Tai I ever had! Secret Ingredient makes the whole drink

what's up guys welcome back to the educated bar flight today i have a special treat for you but before we get into that i would like to talk about trade coffee that did not go the way i wanted to go father's day is just around the corner and i bet right now that i just reminded you guys and now you're all thinking about what kind of gift you're gonna get and i'm gonna say it i'm just gonna come out and say it i am a dad and on father's day i usually get the greatest present it's kind of an afterthought of a present and uh you know kind of a hastily put together thing now here's the deal it's usually like a silly sweater or it's a coffee cup featuring a non-funny joke about being over the hill but what do you put inside that coffee cup i'm going to solve this problem for you guys not only are you going to have something to put inside that coffee cup but this is going to be a great gift that your dad is going to love if you are a dad you're gonna want this and you can just start subtly 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description below and don't forget that father's day is coming up a trade subscription is the best gift you can get the coffee lovers in your life now that i've had my coffee break let's uh get on with making the cocktails so a little while ago i made a video about tiki drinks from jeff berry's grog log these are recipes that he called off of the many years of investigating old tiki recipes and i did not like them at all and many of you guys asked me about reconstructing them and what that would take even longer ago i also did a like famous mai tais video where we did all the famous mai tais and the very last one was the 1971 mai tai from the royal hawaiian and it has kind of evolved over time to be called the hawaiian mai tai and this is a very problematic mai tai because it not only has a bunch of pineapple juice in it but has orange juice in it it's a little bit too sweet it's off balance so hopefully this video will not only show you what you can do to kind of reconstruct a drink but also give you guys a bunch of inspiration to reconstruct your own tiki drinks and it's my hope that you guys will do this and share those creations with us so the very first thing i think that we should do is actually make the old mai tai take a sip of it see what's wrong with it talk to the flavor profiles a little bit and then we will make the new one and i guess see why it's better i'm going to do quarter ounce of lemon juice quarter ounce simple syrup quarter ounce orega oh that was a fat quarter but that's okay one ounce of orange juice and one ounce of pineapple juice again we're elevating this with fresh pineapple juice not dull half an ounce of lime juice quarter of an ounce orange liqueur one ounce light rum one ounce dark jamaican rum one ounce of demerara rum scotia pebble give it a whip shake pour into the glass finish it off with your pebble give it the old slappy poo give it a crushy pants twist off the ends like so voila get one oh that's a nice cherry look at that boop right on top just like that i mean it doesn't taste bad it's just not balanced at all it tastes like fruit juice with booze in it there's no balance between the sweet and the tart it's all just kind of in there i think it was a weird choice of rums as well like the rums don't really play that well together i'm assuming that the light rum is just in there sort of give it more body it's a full three ounces of rum which is kind of a lot and then the demerara rum i mean you can kind of taste it but then you've got this like little kind of bittering after effect so you can taste the demerara in there and the dark rum but they just don't mesh well together it's not creating a hole so this seems like the sum of very disjointed parts but there it is the royal hawaiian mai tai now let's invite our guest on and see what we can do to take the idea of this drink and then really elevate it to something magnifique so today for you guys i have asked garrett richard chief cocktail officer at the sunken harbor club in brooklyn new york city to come here and help us garrett richard is a master not only at the tropical drinks category but also someone who has worked at bars such as existing conditions he had a pop-up at the rain city lawn room called exotica for a really long time and he is a master at reconstructing old recipes into fantastic works of art so garrett please join us on the set pop up it's garrett richard i have to tell everybody it is way roomier back here than what it looks like on camera oh really yeah there's a lot of shorts yeah thanks for having me you're so welcome yeah i really appreciate being here thanks for coming and saying yes to this i'm going to get you a straw yeah what do we have going here right now a bone straw um this so this is just the royal hawaiian mai tai from 1971 i used the jeff beech bum specs for it and it's just a whole bunch i mean do you want me to go through all no no i think we all know this is basically resort juice in a glass right right yeah i mean it's what you said earlier like a lot of juice a lot of alcohol right it's a hot it's a hot drink it is even though there's a lot of mixer and i think the thing is there are really good ideas in here i think pineapple or shot rum those things all go together so the question is is like how can we get to the heart of the matter any time i'm working with my bartenders at sunken harbor club i really try to tell them when they're r d a drink like get to the main idea there's a main idea in here and i think we can do that by embracing some new techniques one of which is acid adjusting so you've seen this term acid adjusting i'm sure in some fancy cocktail bar maybe in an article and i think it can kind of scare people off the bat like what is are we adding acid to our cocktail like what is what does that even mean really what we're trying to do with acid adjusting is make a juice into something that we already know and love and for all the cocktails you've made on your channel we know that lemon and lime work really well in drinks right right the question is why is that and you know you can say off the bat well lemon's really tart lime is really tart but if you look at the structure of lemon and lime juice they're both six percent acidic they're just broken down in different ways so lemon juice is just six percent citric acid citric acid you know you put that on your tongue it's a very clean acidity kind of hits your tongue and then it leaves really quickly lime juice is a mixture of both citric acid and malic acid malic comes from granny smith apples if like when that's your first experience with it as a kid it's like you buy the granny smith apple oh really tart hits your tongue for a very long time it lingers that's why when you have a daiquiri that acidity is so so like crushingly refreshing right is that malic acid so if we know that those two juices are six percent what we can do is take another juice and just bring it up to that six percent and then it'll act like a lemon or a lime with the pineapple juice we're gonna make this like lime juice so all we need to know is how acidic the pineapple is which pineapple generally these are we're speaking in generalized terms because of agribusiness and you know the type of produce that we get here in the united states but generally speaking this is about 0.8 acidic and it's mostly citric acid so what we're going to do is simple math we're going to do 6 minus 0.8 and in this case we're going to adjust it to lime which has that fun ratio of citric and malic acid in this case we're going to break down the pineapple juice so that it becomes lime juice by adding 3.2 grams of citric acid and 2 grams of malic acid per 100 ml so let me ask you a question this is going to get really nerdy but yeah i have to know so in in your ratio 0.8 so 0.8 you're taking the 0.8 out of the lime juice is that because pineapples have more citric acid because i realized that when you do acid adjustment and you want to create that six percent it's usually four percent citric acid two percent malic acid right and that's how you get your six percent so what you're doing is you're taking the you're taking that 0.8 out of the citric acid and leaving the malic acid intact it's simple subtraction that's it i wasn't really good at math but i can do that i mean i'm terrible terrible terrible in that yeah yeah don't don't let the don't let the subtraction scare you but yeah if we just measure out a hundred mils of pineapple and then weigh our acids out we're gonna have a pineapple that's super tart and then we can build a mai tai on that pineapple juice cool in order to acid adjust at this small of a level you kind of need a drug scale so it's going to be 3.2 grams of citric that's hard to do on a normal scale it's actually easier if you have a liter of pineapple juice because it's just 32 grams right so if you're doing a party you want to make a lot of these or if you just want to make these throughout the week make more of a suggested pineapple and you'll actually have an easier time but since we're doing a little amount we're going to use this really small fancy drug scale the other thing is with these juices you can start plugging them into drinks that you already know so think about pisco sour with acid adjusted pineapple that's tart like a lime or if you want to make a ricky with that be incredible so let's start with our little drug scale and then we're going to do the same of the very very tart malic acid oh my god almost oh it's so close like on the dots it's 2.1 3.1 you're gonna take three grains off of that it's gonna be two in 20 years i'll be able to do it like right so we're gonna put 100 ml of our juice and uh fun fact both pineapple and orange juice have the same acidity so if you wanted to do this with orange juice you could also use this same ratio pineapple just has a lot more sweetness than orange juice if you measure it out right so that's two ounces and then right there yeah so you want to be able to dissolve your citric acid like pretty thoroughly so if you want to take like a bar spoon and just what we're gonna do is basically build a mai tai the way we would at sunken harbor club but instead of using lime juice we're going to use our acid-adjusted pineapple juice right and i chose the rums very specifically to go with the more pineappley fruitier flavor the chairman's reserve has a lot of beautiful like barrel tannins but it equally has a lot of nice like ripe orange notes that i think really play well with the pineapple so a lot of my recipes start with salt i'm sure people are asking okay why do you salt everything well a lot of it comes from my background in training with dave arnold at existing conditions and the central idea is you saw your food why don't you salt your cocktails and i think salt really interacts in cocktails in different ways so you have a cucumber drink it's going to pop the cucumber in the case of this reconstructed hawaiian mai tai it's going to pop the almond i mean nuts like salt right so we're going to start with five drops of saline so this saline is 20 saline just so you know and if you don't know how to make it you can google it yeah the idea with the percentage is that this is enough concentration that's not going to throw off the balance of water and sugar and acid in the cocktail right i like to do three for like smaller drinks like martinis things like that bigger tropical style cocktails and needs like a big early so do you put saline in everything almost everything old-fashioned don't really need them that much that's the kind of it's sunken we don't really use it in the old fashion but you know there could be an old fashion that it works for right so yeah we start with our salt let's do one ounce of our acid adjusted pineapple so this is adjusted to this acidity of lime juice which you should taste a little bit of it of it on its own don't mind if i do and i'm gonna do what everyone doesn't like that i do and drink out of a oh yeah isn't that weird yeah i mean what's great about it though what i really like about it is that you know a lot of times recipes are off because uh they're they're they're not tart enough and they just don't have that back palette pop that you get in really well balanced cocktails and this is really nice because it tastes exactly like pineapple juice but then that back palette pop it it kind of happens a little late like it's not right on the front of it every time right it opens up on your palette and then it hits you really hard on the back your palate so i i can already tell that this is going to work really really well in a cocktail that's nice we're concentrating the pineapple flavor down all right so we have our we have our juice let's do our sweeteners so original going to start with orchestra we're going to do 5 8 of an ounce so just basically a scant three quarters of an ounce um again if your ore shot is less sweet and less concentrated you probably can knock that up to three quarters so then we're gonna do we do one teaspoon of both clemont crayol shrub and grand marnier so behind the bar at sunken harbor our sort of house curacao is a 50 50 blend of those two orange liqueurs the idea is that you're getting high tones from the clemont you're getting the sort of very bright rum agricult notes and then you're getting sort of the base from the grand marnier so we're trying to hit like all the all the notes of orange so into the cocktail you go we do one teaspoon of grand marnier if you happen to have both of these batched like we do behind the bar at sunken harbor it's 3 8 of an ounce of our curacao mix but that that ends up being a teaspoon of each and then our rum so uh i love using karuba and mai tais basically i think karuba is like the best supporting actor in a lot of really good tiki drink specs or tropical drink specs so we're gonna use three quarters of an ounce of karuba the thing is that rums sort of over the late half of the 20th century they became a lot more rectified they became lighter you had the you know craze of bacardi and the vodka renaissance that happened and a lot of rums just became light rums or lighter than they used to be and what's really nice about kuruba is you can kind of bring some of the body back to those rums that maybe don't have them anymore or just the cocktails don't have them anymore right and then we're going to do an ounce and a half of the chairman's reserve and we're using chairman's reserve i think it goes really well with the pineapple the chairman's reserve distillery is kind of very similar to the way the japanese whiskey distillers were they when they opened it they looked at a lot of different caribbean islands and they wanted to see what worked and what didn't and they took kind of the greatest hits of all of those and i think for this cocktail it's great because it kind of blends a lot of those styles that were in that royal hawaiian like you get a little bit of that demerara burn you get a little bit of that funky jamaican and i think in one bottle it does a lot of work right now let's get to the thing that i did wrong the last time i made a garrett richard cocktail which was the shaking with uh cold draft cubes and pebble ice take us through the the thought process behind this yeah so i know i know when you made my cocktail on the channel before you did a whip shake i do a whip yeah whip shake it's it's a it's very common in cocktail bars and it works for a lot of specs but at sunken harbor we call this a hybrid shake really what it is is it's just half of cubed ice and half of crushed ice and the idea is that the cubed ice you shake with it gives you really nice aeration really nice texture and it kind of whips the pineapple and then you dirty dump that into the glass and the cube stays at the bottom and kind of gives you less dilution up front right the idea is that less dilution up front actually pops the acid if we did a lot of dilution up front it would be a very kind of flat acid thing so the idea is to sort of give you that margarita like tartness in the mai tai oh i love it yeah i never really thought about it that way because honestly you know normally when i do a whip shake i just do a scotia pebble and that's like just adding a little bit of upfront dilution and then adding enough chill to like chill it enough that when it sits on the crushed ice it's not going to immediately dilute it's not going to be over diluted and it's going to be able to sit for 15 minutes you know while you drink your cocktail this i have never tried but it's so sensible i don't know why this isn't the technique i ever learned yeah it's like those big cubes at the bottom are kind of holding a lot of the chill and you're getting a little bit more chill up front in the glass and this allows the crushed ice to sort of have a slow burn effect which this shake works really well with trader vic cocktails we do it with the kuiperina so it's definitely something to play around with great okay so what we're gonna do how many cold draft cubes uh let's do four okay four cold graph cubes if your cubes are smaller definitely maybe throw one more in but these are a nice nice size actual yeah actually i'm going to grab this and then we're going to do all right we're going to do a little dirty dump first oh we're going to shake it and then dirty dump it i'm going to stop you before we start shaking so here's another thing i noticed in the previous video is i don't put a lime wedge on the top of my mai tais right we put a lime wedge on the bottom bottom and what that does is it actually coats the entire glass with lime oils so by the time we top with the crushed ice everything has been coated in lime oil and it just doubles down on the lime flavor so we need to cut a lime wedge i think you topped because the old trader vic style is you put a lime wedge on the top it looks like an island it's a very nice presentation and what we do is we call a spent wedge so i'm going to take the wedge and then just squeeze out all the juice so now you just have basically the oils and that's going to go at the bottom of the glass i don't want to shake it with it yeah and then and then we do a little like like we're at a fancy party drinking wine and just swirl it right you can you can smell see oh yeah it's like glasses yeah i'm all about getting those oils inside that that's why i actually like that that the squeezer that we use because it's so that changes incredible yeah it's a chamber right so it traps all those oils and it puts it inside the juice and then you pour it and then you have this nice vibrant lime juice okay cool so we're gonna do this and we're gonna do our awkward angry man shake bartender hates me and then we're just gonna ungated porridge pour it all up in there like that okay and then we're gonna top with crushed ice so it's gonna be about a cup to a cup and a half if you have a glass that's about 16 ounces like a double old fashioned glass you don't even need to measure it because it's gonna be so let me let me ask you a question all right i'm going to put this to bed for everyone once and for all i and i i think you probably know what camp i'm in but are you in the snow cone on top or non-snow cone oh yeah that's a great question to ask when it comes to no snow cone all right so you're in the snow cone camping the first week that i trained uh the bar team at sunken harbor club i made a snow cone and i went and then just put it and just knocked it off and i said we are not doing any of that here because of the added dilution yeah um i think tiki tropical drinks should have like a measured amount of crushed ice right because then you know what you're getting across the board and for for this recipe it's about a cup to a cup and a half depending on your thing but this is perfect to me all right yeah i hate to say it guys you may have been right i don't know i don't know i don't know how i fall on it because i i love me a snow cone and i know that it adds extra dilution because you got you know the top you know the top of the cocktail is uh you know all ice and it's rapidly diluting i just think that a lot of drinks need that extra dilution um and then also of course you know any ice that's below here is uh keeping the uh consistency of the cocktail and and actually helping it to not over dilute over uh you know a measured amount of time or whatever yeah i think it depends on the drink because uh a mint julep you definitely want a lot of that ice i would say maybe even a zombie like something that has a lot of alcohol right but like this is fairly delicate it is yeah i would agree with that all right so we got our mint sprig what else are we doing give it the old wacky and i think we need to let people know because like this looks like a normal mai tai we should probably let people know that there's something going on here okay educated by flyer no i'm not really that happy with the pineapple wedges that i cut i'm never happy with the way they look in my drinks i want to see a guy that does this day to day i do do it daily um i tend to just cut from the top and then just do some like thick wheels and then cut the wheels from there this is a really good knife so i think we'll get we'll get a nice and cut that wheel in half and then you know we're being fancy if i was at the bar maybe i'd make it a little bit smaller but you know do something like that right there you go oh yeah i actually like where you notched it yeah let's taste this it's just so freaking nuanced in flavor and i gotta say that that's spent i'm never gonna do a mai tai without a spent lime wedge in the in the game it helps in so many drinks so but what i love about it is that even well-constructed drinks and even well-constructed mai tai specifically but this is kind of true for a lot of different tropical drinks have you know this ratio between tart and sweet where the tart can dominate you know oh yeah and then obviously seasonally that changes right uh and and that's not to say that that those drinks don't have their own balance but this particularly has tart and sweet there's like nuances in the tart and there's nuances in the sweet and you taste a lot of different levels of sweet and what's that what that's doing against the acid-adjusted pineapple um that i've just don't experience in very many cocktails that really is quite possibly the best i've ever had well i mean making that simple change of like changing the category of what the pineapple is doing like in this in the original drink that we made the pineapple is more like flavored dilution right and now it is the acid that everything is being built upon so it really can speak for itself it can carry the entire cocktail and the idea is that sometimes in looking at these older drinks not saying like okay this is bad it's saying well okay what what is not work like what's not playing its role and in that original mai tai like everyone loves pineapple juice like the pineapple should be the start it was like being dominated by all these other things and like you taste this it's like it's like biting into the best pineapple you ever have it is i mean it's like it's like i'm back i'm back at the uh you know disney resort having like dole whips and my ties in one glass but there's this kind of effect that this does which i think some of the best cocktails do where you can taste all of the separate ingredients by themselves and then also together at the same time which is a weird trick that happens to your brain like none of the rum is dominant all of them play their part you can taste all the different things that they're doing kind of separately and together as well as all the other ingredients you know we what's nice about this also is that even though we acid adjusted pineapple and we didn't have any lime in it we still utilized lime by adding introducing the oils with that spent wedge which that came i mean lima wells are so important to so many cocktails right like i just can't overstate how incredible i like just incredibly crafted this drink is and it really shows you like what drinks can be you know they don't have to be just this they can be up here you know yeah i think for everyone out there it's like please try acid pineapple and you know lots of different drinks i think that there's potential for this in a whiskey sour you know maybe you adjust it to lemon and you have a nice like bourbon-y lemon pineapple thing you know there's there's a lot of avenues to go on and i think tropical drinks going forward i think you're going to start seeing a lot more of these techniques being used i mean i'm going to start playing with this technique for sure and not only that but i just want to say to you guys i know that there's going to be a portion of you that really you don't want to do this like you don't want to put forth the effort to do this but i got to say it's just a matter of adding citric acid acid and malic acid to to pineapple you can get those things on amazon you can get them a special if you guys had did the the super juice episode that we did then you guys have it lying around your house anyway just juice a pineapple and there you go um i gotta say even though i do love the trader joe's hack i'm not really sure that that pineapple juice would really do this kind of justice yeah we can we can test it yeah we can absolutely test it and yeah i mean to build on what you're saying i've done this technique outside on a park bench before so as long as you have a scale it helps if you have the drug scale but you know if you have a regular just kitchen scale at home this is very accessible right but i also want to clarify something because when we talk about these drinks as being sort of problematic it's not to say that these drinks are bad and the you know the proof of that that they're not bad and that but that they might be problematic is that these drinks are still around right so the flavor profiles that these drinks present are are are actually very good it's just a matter of taking those flavor profiles and dialing them into something that makes sense because i will say now that i've tasted this and this side-by-side you know you have this which is very vibrant very nuanced it's it does what i like to say kind of pretentiously about cocktails where like the best cocktails sort of reveal themselves like an onion like layer upon layer as they dilute they evolved right they evolve as you drink and you're you know we kind of get that effect here and then next to this this guy tastes a bit flat yeah i need to i need to go back to this one just to see it it tastes a little bit flat even with the added dilution but i will say that the nuances of this cocktail come out when it starts to dilute and you start yeah which that might start to deconcentrate all of those uh juice flavors it might have been designed for resorts i mean you're walking around you're going to the pool right right that's some time you're outside in the sun that's some time you know but you know when you're inside a cocktail bar you know you may want something a little bit more concentrated so there you got it i don't want to tire you guys you guys have a lot to think about right now so i think you should just uh you know do what garrett says go out acid to just some pineapple juice throw him in some cocktails hit us up on instagram hit us up in the comments tell us what you think and i want to thank you so much garrett for coming i hope this is the start of a very fruitful relationship i'm here like i said i'm a very big fan of what you do i will be i'm surprised to be here on your channel this was such a treat and um i hope that when you're in brooklyn new york you can come to sunken harbor club it would be great to host you there i mean it's on the list now probably because i got a guaranteed stop 100 so yeah thank you so much yeah cool i don't know you can can i can i plug my plug everything please um so you can find me behind the bar at sunken harbor club in brooklyn new york and you can see some of my creations on garrett j richard at instagram.com

Channel: The Educated Barfly

Views: 204,441

Keywords: easy drinks, drink recipe, easy cocktails, easy cocktail recipes, best cocktail recipes, simple cocktails, cocktails at home, homemade, how to drink, drinks, easy, quick, tasty, nice, binging with babish, cocktail chemistry, easy recipe, top 5, steve the bartender, masterclass, master class, cocktail, cocktails, educated barfly, cocktail recipes, anders erickson, anders bartender, tiki, mai tai, hawiian mai tai, tiki drink, best tiki drink, fixing tiki, tropical drink, pineapple

Id: JZUjOS4BaUs

Length: 27min 26sec (1646 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022