This is the BEST Mai Tai I have ever had

Today, it's the greatest Mai Tai of all time. You might even call it the ultimate Mai Tai. Am I not allowed to say that? Okay. All right. How about the definitive Mai Tai? It's kind of lame. Still working on it. And I say that, seriously, this is the best Mai Tai. And you may disagree, but when it comes to the best thing that I have ever had, there is only one opinion that matters, and it's not strangers on the internet. It's actually mine. What I like the most matters to me saying what I like the most and it's best. Now, two years ago, I shared a Mai Tai spec that was very basic. Appleton 12 and Hamilton 86. Mai Tais need Jamaican rum. They demand it. And for my money, it's hard to beat Appleton 12. I also like throwing in a little Demerara rum, which some might argue is not authentic. But to that, I say that I do not care. I've never had that original 17-year-old rum. So I don't even know what that tastes like. Plus the man himself ended up using rums in his blend that tasted like Demerara or likely even were a Demerara from the third adjusted formula, which no one talks about because everyone's obsessed with the second formula, which was actually the third one. I know. And why people care so much about the second one no idea. Actually, I do. Actually, I do know. I know why I know, but I'm not going to tell you. They also can't tell you the rums yet. We'll build up some suspense. We obviously need lime juice. And let's take a moment to talk about how to get that juice. I've been using this juicer for years now, and it is hands down the best juicer that there is. And we know it's the best because it's hideous. It's ugly. It's an eyesore. It rattles around. And I'm a little obsessed with how things look on camera. And this is good really mainly for three reasons. First of all, it's like a nice little container. Instead of taking an elbow juicer and trying to juice it into a jigger that's about to fall over like a maniac, you can just juice into here and your juice just stays in there. You can juice more than you need and you're not wasting it. You can come back to this later when you want to make a second cocktail. The next reason this is great is it just gets more juice than anything else. You get more leverage on this handle. And if you do what I do, which is oftentimes cut the tops and bottoms off of limes, you can actually get them to flatten out better, which means you get even more juice. I've even tested this. I've taken limes, juice them as much as I could. Then I went and cut the tops and bottoms off after juicing them. And I got quite a bit more out of each line. So it does the best at extracting the most juice possible. The next reason it's great is it just juices everything. You can put pomegranates or pomegranate seeds in here. You can put grapefruit, oranges. If you're in a pinch, you can even do pineapple. Pretty much anything you can think to fit in here that you can put leverage on, you can. So you don't need one for limes and ones for lemons and a big one for grapefruit. You just need one thing. Yeah, it's ugly. It's clanky. You got to wash it by hand. Don't put this in the dishwasher, but it's great. Now, if you're looking online, I've done a lot of testing on these, and it's the ones that are cast aluminum that you want. You do not want stainless. Stainless bends, and the whole purpose of this is having this cast arm that you can really crank on. I put a lot of weight on this, and I've not broken it. Those stainless ones will bend on you the first time you use them. Now to the orgeat. This is not my 60-second orgeat, but my 60-second plus 12-hour orgeat. I figured out a way to clarify this orgeat efficiently and predictably with a very good yield each time, which has been a problem if you've ever tried to take the 60-second version and then try to clarify. This is the best orgeat I've ever had, and while Trader Vic was using an orgeat that he said was from France, which was probably from New Jersey, not sure about that, keeping it more local to where the Mai Tai was created, and I'm using an orgeat created in the East Bay where the Mai Tai was created. Many of you will go to a French orange curacao, maybe something with a sugarcane juice backbone, but I am nothing if I am not authentic, and unlike Trader Vic who used an orange curacao from New Jersey, I'll be using an orange curacao from Holland. Winner of my blind orange curacao taste test, and just $13.99 for a whole liter. Harder to find now because I just placed an order out of a place that only had a couple bottles and there's really not much left of California. It's good. It's bowls. It's delicious, and if you're one of those complainers that's upset because I don't use rock candy syrup, I actually do use rock candy syrup. The rock candy syrup's already been formulated into my orgeat, so it's a orgeat rock candy syrup, okay? And finally, the rums. I didn't set out to make this similar to the last two-bottle blend, and in this case, I didn't care about price or accessibility, but it's basically the same in spirit, just not price. So I'm going with one part Appleton 12 again, and one part of the Eldorado LBI DHE, the first of the Eldorado High Esta releases, and maybe my favorite rum. Actually, I think it is. There was a lot of pushback from the rum snob community on this one, but I care what things taste like, not the way a name or how the labeling makes me feel on the inside, and this tastes delicious. And I went through basically an entire bottle of this blending with different Jamaican rums, and the results were very clear for me. Appleton 12 worked best with this Eldorado. So if you were to come and belly up to the make and drink bar and ask me for a Mai Tai, well, you're not getting this one. It's just too damn expensive. Okay, maybe if it's a celebratory thing, we would, but we'll see. But if you slip me a 20, maybe two 20s, I would make you the definitive Mai Tai reserve, where we'd sub out the Appleton 12 or the Appleton 21. Also exceptional. It's just not necessary. And in fact, I think it's more worth your money to have an Appleton 21 Mai Tai on its own. So let's make this. I'm going to start with one ounce of fresh lime juice, half an ounce of my 60 second plus 12 hour rich rock candy or jat, half an ounce of a orange curacao from Holland, one ounce of Appleton 12, and one ounce of the Eldorado LBI DHE. I'll take that spent lime shell and I'll drop it into the glass on the inside of the glass. Garnish with some mint and of course, as always, a long straw. So there you go. The make and drink Mai Tai updated for the year 2025. All right. Cheers. It is a rummy, delicious masterpiece. And that has nothing to do with me. Those two rums working together beautifully. And as I mentioned earlier, I think I did that. I blended that Eldorado with a bunch of different rums. I tried almost every Jamaican rum I had, and there is a delicateness to it that gets overpowered by something that's incredibly funky and Appleton 12 is not. So you still taste Appleton 12. You get some tropical fruit, the age, you get a little bit of that orange note also coming from the bowls. And then you get the intensity, the chocolatey, orangey, deliciousness that is the Eldorado High Ester. If you want rum fire Mai Tais, this ain't it. If you want that incredibly funky banana overripe pineapple, you know, the super high Ester Jamaican rum, then this is not it. This will not get you there. But if you like richness and depth and you like age rums and Mai Tai, which I love, then this accomplishes that. But the age doesn't overtake the flavor of the rums. And it's because of that Eldorado rum. It is hands down my personal favorite Mai Tai I've ever had, without a doubt. And it seems very expensive because to have this Mai Tai, you have to, you have to put up an initial investment. You have to get some expensive rums. I just calculated the cost for this. The poor cost for this Mai Tai, the rum is $6.80, which sounds like a lot when you're making drinks at home. The bowls orange Curacao comes out to 20 cents. So you've got $7 for your lime and your Orgeat. So let's just round it up to eight bucks. So this Mai Tai will cost you $8 to make at home. Now let's go the other direction. Let's pull down the cheapest bottle. I should say the cheapest bottle, but like a cheap, affordable Mai Tai bottle, which would be Appleton Signature. That would cost you about two to $3 per Mai Tai to make this. Is this one, you know, two, three, four times better. I think it's 10 times better. So to me, it's worth it. And back to the $8 thing that sounds so expensive at home. And while I encourage everyone to go out, support your local Tiki bar, go to your favorite places, you know, you're going to spend $16 for a Mai Tai with like decent rums. So this one out in the world, probably set you back, I don't know, $40, $50, maybe. It's not an everyday Mai Tai. It's not like an every weekend Mai Tai. It's a special occasion. It's like, I want to drink something really good right now. This is the Mai Tai that I go for. So it's not for everyone, but if you like those aged Jamaican rums, if you like those aged Appletons, if you like that note of orange peel in the background, if you like the chocolatey butterscotch intensity of this specific El Dorado rum, you get to taste everything without stepping on anything. And it's all there in a cocktail. And it's just delicious. That's all I have to say about it. It's delicious. And before we move on, August 30th is of course, Mai Tai Day. That's just Mai Tai Day. It is not National Mai Tai Day. Okay. There's no nation behind it. National holidays are either determined by the federal government of wherever you live or the government or the king or queen of wherever you live, or they're determined by a random online calendar company whose goal is to fill every day with the most unusual and obscure nonsense to get you to celebrate something. So maybe you go buy a product from a brand, maybe the brand themselves created those holidays. For instance, I bet you had no idea that Mai Tai Day celebrates with another holiday, which is National Toasted Marshmallow Day, because that's a real thing. Because Big Marshmallow wants you to go buy more marshmallows before the end of the summer. But Mai Tai Day does not have national in front of it. It's not because it's somehow not deserving of being thought of as a holiday. It's because it's a real holiday through the city of Oakland. City of Oakland determined that August 30th is Mai Tai Day, and Mai Tai, a Mai Tai, is the official cocktail of Oakland. But that didn't come out of nowhere. That came out of people pushing this forward and doing work to try to make it a holiday. Specifically, Michael Thanos from Forbidden Island, his brother Mano Thanos, and then Will Viaro. These are people that tried to make this a holiday, and it took them time and energy and effort to do that, and they were able to do that. So calling it national whatever because a calendar company decided to like, well, we're going to take this now too, is belittles the fact that people actually tried to make this a real holiday. Whether you care about the Mai Tai or not, it's kind of beyond that. But people actually cared enough to try to make this a real holiday where they lived in the place it was created, and they did so. So that calendar company, guess what? They used to have a national Mai Tai Day, some other day, just a made-up day that someone was like, hey, let's make June 12th National Mai Tai Day, because we got to put it before National Rum Day and way before National Vodka Day. Because what nation is celebrating this? It makes no sense that I'm celebrating national something and in another country, they're celebrating the same national holiday. It makes no sense. But to those of you out there, you don't need to go out in the world on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube and correct anyone that says National Mai Tai Day. We just know, and we kind of know like, oh, if you're saying National Mai Tai Day, you probably don't know what you're talking about. It's just like a little thing between us, just for us to recognize and just clock that right here moving forward. So that is it for this one, celebrating the Mai Tai, the day before Mai Tai Day, no National Mai Tai Day. Mai Tai Day, say it with me, Mai Tai Day. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like below. Consider subscribing to the channel. If you want to support this channel more, check out my Patreon page, and otherwise, see you on the next one.