For almost all of tiki’s practically centurylong existence, the exact make-up of Don’s Combine—a central ingredient in Don the Beachcomber’s Donga Punch, and, crucially, his Zombie, essentially the most storied drink within the historical past of the style—remained a thriller. Through the years, the recipes for this and different carefully guarded commerce secrets and techniques had been decoded by means of a collection of hard-won breakthroughs by tiki scholar and bar proprietor Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. Now, bartender Garret Richard has made one other breakthrough.
“I all the time felt like there was just a few info lacking,” stated Richard, who has spent a lot of his bartending profession immersed equally within the worlds of technique-driven drink-making (Booker and Dax, Current Circumstances) and tiki classics (he’s the creator of Tropical Normal and the founding father of the previous tiki popup Exotica). “I believed it was form of a flawed ingredient,” he says of Don’s Combine, which has historically been made by combining two components grapefruit juice with one half cinnamon syrup. “These two issues go dangerous sooner collectively,” he explains.
Richard, now the chief cocktail officer at Brooklyn’s Sunken Harbor Membership, believes he’s came upon not solely a greater Don’s Combine, however maybe a extra period-correct model, too. Impressed by the strategies outlined by Darcy O’Neil, a chemist and drink-maker and the creator of Repair the Pumps, a historical past of America’s soda fountains, Richard applies the identical flavoring strategies used at soda fountains to create what he’s calling Antica Don’s Combine. “Don had referenced soda fountain stuff rather a lot. It was clear that he was working with folks that had been making syrups,” says Richard. “My thought was: What if he simply approached this ingredient the identical approach a soda fountain [drink-]maker would make a syrup?”
This meant flavoring easy syrups with essences (important oils reduce with alcohol), extracts (spices rested in high-proof spirits after which strained off) and acid powders. In his recipe, Richard combines grapefruit essence and cinnamon extract—in the identical 2:1 ratio decoded by Berry—in easy syrup together with a contact of citric acid. The result’s a flavor-packed product, with all of the brightness of its contemporary juice counterpart in a extra shelf-stable package deal. “The superb factor about it’s how centered the flavors are, how juicy it’s, despite the fact that there’s no contemporary juice in it,” says Richard, who notes that the stability of cinnamon and grapefruit is distinct, and the syrup nonetheless possesses the requisite pink coloration. “I made it most likely two months in the past and it’s nonetheless tremendous, tremendous crisp.”
It’s not the primary time Richard has got down to enhance upon the Don’s Combine system. In his guide, Richard features a recipe for Don’s Remix, a contemporary method to the syrup utilizing a cordial method discovered from Current Circumstances co-owners Don Lee and Dave Arnold. It requires clarifying grapefruit juice to make it extra shelf-stable and utilizing that clarified juice because the water part in a cinnamon syrup. The ensuing product introduced Don’s Combine nearer to the environment friendly, shelf-stable ingredient he believes Donn Seashore would’ve used. However, utilizing a Spinzall was definitely not in Seashore’s repertoire. For Richard, the strategies he’s discovered from O’Neil are the lacking hyperlink. “At first, I did a high-tech model of it,” he explains, “however the older know-how may be even higher.”
