TK-0006 - Beachbum Berry Remixed, Jeff Berry

The Beachcomber’s Gold is a shining example of how difficult it can be to arrive
at the definitive version of a Donn Beach recipe. For years we couldn’t find any of
his recipes at all, but now we have the opposite problem: different Beachcomber’s
recipes for the same drink, gathered from different sources, all of which are certifiably
authentic. Authentic, yes. But definitive? Turns out that when it comes to
Don The Beachcomber’s, there often is no definitive recipe: Donn kept changing
his recipes over the years, and the ones he didn’t change, subsequent owners of the
Beachcomber’s franchise changed for him. Case in point: the Beachcomber’s Gold,
a little cocktail that gives us a big headache.
The Beachcomber’s Gold recipe we printed in the original Grog Log was given
to us by rum collector Stephen Remsberg, who got it from a bartender at the Chicago
Don The Beachcomber’s back in the early 1970s. The Grog Log went to press
in 1998; three years later, Donn Beach’s widow, Phoebe
Beach, and her co-author Arnold Bitner published Hawaii
Tropical Drinks & Cuisine By Don The Beachcomber, which
had a Beachcomber’s Gold recipe markedly different from
ours. Complicating matters further, in 2005 we got our
hands on two Don The Beachcomber’s recipe notebooks
that belonged to guys who’d actually worked there:
Dick Santiago, whose notebook dated from 1937, and
Hank Riddle, whose notebook included drink prices
that placed his recipes in the late 1950s. Although
20 years apart, both notebooks listed the exact same
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