What’s shakin’ cocktail fans?
Welcome to Episode 196 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast!
Thanks for joining me for this interview episode, where we track down the best and brightest minds in the spirits and cocktail world so that we can share their secrets with you. This time around, I hang out with Jayme Blaschke, creator of The Lagoon of Mystery and host of A Moment of Tiki. He’s a home Tiki bar architect and a renaissance man when it comes to tropical botany, exotica, calypso, and bossa nova music, current tiki trends, and more.
In this tropical deep dive, some of the topics we discuss with Jayme include:
How a brush with homelessness and an off-hand comment made while floating in a pool spawned a passion for tiki and led Jayme to build and cultivate his beautiful home tiki bar, The Lagoon of Mystery.
A virtual walk-through of some of the building materials, design choices, and escapist landscaping that morphed Jayme’s Texas poolside patio into a transportive oasis that plays “Dive In” movies during the summer.
Some thoughts on how to relate to Tiki culture as a white guy – which Jayme and I both are. We offer perspectives and concrete resources that will help you learn about colonialism, appropriation, and how to celebrate Tiki tastefully in the 21st century.
A fun romp through the many genres of island-appropriate music that you can use to flesh-out your Tiki playlist – including exotica, calypso, bossa nova, and modern indigenous compositions that will whisk you away to a tropical landscape.
Along the way, we discuss what kind of Tiki bar could boast a mechanical bull, how to avoid weevils in your bamboo, why NOT to drink green beer with J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, and much much more.
Jayme leads by example. In every aspect of his passion for Tiki, he does the work. He knows the plants in his garden. He can rattle off musicians and albums from many decades of exotic music. He knows what Donn Beach was doing in 1937 (as opposed to 1936 or 1938). And while “Tiki” to some might represent a “getaway” or a “reprieve” from the modern world, you get the definite sense that, for Jayme, the escapism of Tiki is an escape “TO” a place like The Lagoon of Mystery, rather than an escape “FROM” real life.
This episode’s featured cocktail is the Chief Lapu Lapu. To make it, you’ll need:
.75 oz. Dark Jamaican rum
.75 oz. Light rum
1 oz. Passion fruit syrup
1 oz. Lemon/lime juice
1.5 oz. Orange juice
Combine these ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Give em a good, healthy shake for about 15 seconds, and then strain into a glass filled with crushed ice, garnish with an orange wedge and a few pineapple fronds, and enjoy.
There’s not a whole lot of drinkware consensus out there for this cocktail. I’ve seen it served in a low-ball bucket glass, a hurricane glass, and even in a hollowed out pineapple, so my recommendation would be to use any vessel that can accommodate the liquid and the garnish, which means that the Chief Lapu Lapu cocktail is probably a great excuse to break out your favorite tiki mug if you’ve got one.
This drink has a great story behind it – as Jayme and I will discuss later in the episode. It’s a wonderful example of a slightly off-the-beaten path cocktail that holds its own next to the giants of the tiki world (like the Mai Tai and the Zombie) but that also encourages us to explore the history and geography responsible for Tiki and tropical drinks. That’s a fancy way of saying that the real life Chief Lapu Lapu is credited with defeating in battle a very prominent European explorer, so be sure to join us in the lightning round if you’d like to find out exactly what happened.
Okay. We need to divide this section up into a number of different categories. Jayme offers many, MANY different resources for those of you who may be interested in learning more about Tiki or creating your own home Tiki bar.
JLB Gibberish – Jayme’s Home Tiki Bar Build Blog
A Moment of Tiki – Jayme’s YouTube Series
Tiki Central – A currently-under-maintenance Tiki site.
All Tiki Bar Builds – Private Facebook Group
Home Tiki Builds, Drinks and Resources – Public Facebook Group
Wood Talk – Woodworking Podcast
Stumpy Nubs – Woodworking YouTube Channel
Bamboo Ben – Home Tiki Bar Architect
Palms Won’t Grow Here – David A. Franco (growing tropical plants in temperate climates)
This episode was made possible with editing and sound design by Samantha Reed, Tiki bar building insights, botanical resources, and playlist recommendations courtesy of Jayme Blaschke, and a little bit of interview magic by yours truly. This has been a Modern Bar Cart production, copyright 2021.
This episode is also brought to you by Near Country Provisions. If you live in the Mid-Atlantic and want to enjoy ethically raised (and delicious) meat from local farmers delivered to your door every month, then you need Near Country in your life.
Head over to NearCountry.com and enter the code BARCART when you sign up for your subscription to receive 2 free pounds of bacon or ground beef in your first delivery.
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