Slate Magazine69%
The Greatest American Cocktail Is a Brilliant Idea With a Messy History 37%
By Jordan Weissmann0%
7/3/2026, 9:40:02 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 40 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Hasty Generalization, and Anecdotal, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 21.7% saturation with 496 hits. Analysis detected 4,826 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,287 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.6% and a BS Rank of 37% (13,425 of 21,175 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 63.40% of the article peer group.
This is part of One Nation Under Booze, a celebration of 250 years of alcohol-soaked American history.
Read all of the series here.
What drink deserves to be considered the Great American Cocktail?
Ask most booze aficionados, and there is a strong chance you will receive one of just a few answers.
Maybe the old fashioned, our nation’s primordial cocktail, or the dry martini, the world-conquering symbol of tipsy sophistication.
There might be a stray vote for the mint julep, with its pedigree stretching from Colonial Virginia to Churchill Downs, or even the margarita, which can thank postwar Hollywood tipplers for its popularity (though its exact national origins are shrouded in mystery along the southern border).
Yet over my years of barhopping and mixing drinks at home, I have quietly developed a conviction that there is another drink that best captures our national, um, spirit—a kitschy and delicious concoction that somehow encapsulates better than any other the good, the problematic, and the absurd in this mad capitalist country of ours.
I am speaking about the mai tai.
Yes, the drink that you and your mother-in-law both sucked down last year while sweating by a hotel pool—the potion that is regularly described by its most ardent fans as the most bastardized cocktail in existence.
I promise to explain.
The modern cocktail, as Peter Suderman recently pointed out in Slate, is a quintessentially American invention, as much our contribution to the world as rock ’n’ roll music, pro wrestling, or the internet.
Of that class of potions, the Great American Cocktail(™) could be a few things: the drink that is most authentically ours; the most successful; the one whose story most captures our essence as a country; or some combination of all three.
But in any case, it’s as logical a lens as any through which to consider our history.
When I approached various drinks experts about this matter, the expected front-runners quickly emerged.
“I would choose the old fashioned, if you put the gun to my head,” the popular drinks writer Robert Simonson told me.
Philip J.
Greene, an author of books on the Manhattan and many other drinks, concurred.
“That’s the original American cocktail.”
Before it became a blanket term for all mixed drinks, the word cocktail itself referred to what we now think of as the old fashioned—its simple, endlessly adaptable template of spirit, bitters, and sugar with some water was first codified in 1806.
By 1873, a bartender speaking to the New York Sun declared it “the Great American drink” in an article experts consider to be the first piece of cocktail writing by the mainstream press.
It helps its case that the old fashioned is made by default today with rye whiskey or bourbon, the first true American spirits.
So does the fact that it’s simple to make: Virtually anyone can stir an old fashioned up at home.
It’s a fundamentally democratic drink.
To me, though, the old fashioned is an uneasy choice.
Yes, it is a seminal drink.
But is it truly the greatest?
To say so would downplay more than 200 years of American mixological innovations.
What’s more, it is an inherently conservative choice.
The name old fashioned is believed to have evolved because 19th-century Americans, tired of the fancy innovations being churned out at American bars, began ordering their cocktails “the old-fashioned way.”
Besides, it not even entirely American.
As the cocktail historian David Wondrich has argued convincingly, the idea to mix bitters, spirits, and water actually dates back to 17th-century London.
Americans adopted the template, then ran with it.
So what is his pick?
He told me he’d choose the dry martini for its “sheer muscle,” and the fact that it is truly a Yankee original.
The martini and its slightly older cousin the Manhattan emerged in the mid-to-late 19th century, when Americans began putting imported vermouth into their various cocktails.
“Ever since the dry martini snapped into focus at around 1895, it has been the drink,” Wondrich told me.
“It has been the go-to, the No. 1, the last recourse of desperate people who need a drink.
And there’s that shining martini glass.
It’s the one with a neon icon, you know?”
The drink also has its own elaborate American mythos working in its favor—a reputation as the drink of urban America’s great soused artists and intellectuals.
Hannah Chamberlain, the writer and influencer behind Spirited LA, summed it up thusly in an email:
Hemingway said, “They made me feel civilized.”
Robert Simonson calls them “a totem of American culture, alongside apple pie, hot dogs, blue jeans, baseball, and a two-car garage.”
They were mixed up regularly by FDR, and celebrated by great American writers like Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, Anne Sexton, Ogden Nash, E.B.
White, Billy Wilder, and Robert Benchley.
The Great American Cocktail can only be the martini.
My objection to the martini is twofold.
The first is that the drink has become so successful worldwide that it has lost some of its fundamental Americanness, even if it is a reminder of our global hegemony; its most famous drinker is arguably a British spy, James Bond.
Just as critically: Nobody in their right mind would drink a martini at a Fourth of July barbecue (flavor aside, its essential chill is not meant for the summer sun), a flaw that seems utterly disqualifying for anything vying to be the great American cocktail.
Which brings me back to my nominee, which suffers no such limitations.
The mai tai is, first and foremost, the most famous drink to evolve from America’s midcentury Tiki craze, the roughly 40-year period during which the country was absolutely awash in Polynesian-themed bars slinging rummy tropical beverages, and everything from bowling alleys to apartment buildings adopted their island fantasy aesthetic.
Unlike some other cocktail creations of that era, it is not an especially complicated drink: The original recipe, created at Trader Vic’s in 1944, consists of dark rum, lime juice, dry curaçao, some sugar syrup, and the almond syrup orgeat.
It is garnished with a sprig of fresh mint and half a spent lime, mostly for the aromatics, but also so that it looks as if a little island is floating in your glass.
Prepared properly, however, the cocktail is a marvel of balance and depth, one that highlights the absolute best of its base spirit with nutty, citrus, and herbal notes.
It pairs well with anything from Chinese food (a version of which defined Tiki bar menus) to pulled pork or a hot dog.
In his award-winning book Smuggler’s Cove, the Tiki bartender Martin Cate described it as “what is, perhaps, second only to the daiquiri, the perfect rum delivery system.”
It is also dangerously crushable.
I once attended a baby shower where someone brought a large batch of well-made mai tais.
By the middle of the evening, one guest who’d been indulging was so trashed that she attempted to smoke a cigarette backward.
But what’s in the glass is not necessarily what makes the mai tai so potently American (after all, it’s made of imported rum, not bourbon).
Rather, it’s the drink’s place in the full arc of Tiki history, a quirky cultural detour only imaginable on our shores.
The story of Tiki begins with one man: Ernest Raymond Gantt, who after bumming his way around the Pacific and Caribbean in his early 20s landed in Great Depression Los Angeles.
There, he made a living by doing a bit of bootlegging, lending his collection of tropical souvenirs out to film crews, and other odd jobs.
Gantt was also rumored to have run a speakeasy, and in 1933, shortly after the end of Prohibition, he founded his own (legal) bar in Hollywood—Don’s Beachcomber.
Gantt turned his small space into an escapist hideaway, decorating it in his South Seas bric-a-brac and creating a menu full of faux “Polynesian” drinks—wildly creative spins on classic Caribbean cocktails like the daiquiri and planter’s punch he’d encountered in his travels.
A natural marketer, he gave his “rum rhapsodies” over-the-top names like the Missionary’s Downfall and the Vicious Virgin.
The star of the menu was the Zombie, a drink supposedly so deadly that the bar limited customers to two (which of course built up its allure).
So was born the world’s first Tiki bar.
It quickly turned into a hit, attracting press and celebrities like Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hughes.
Gantt eventually moved the bar to a bigger space, renamed it “Don the Beachcomber” and changed his own name to Don Beach.
Soon, imitators spread across the country—though they often had to guess at drink recipes that Gantt carefully kept secret.
One of those followers was Victor Bergeron, a small-time restaurant owner from Oakland who, after visiting the Beachcomber in 1937, decided to try to cash in on the new Polynesian fad himself.
He rechristened his old joint Hinky Dink’s into “Trader Vic’s” and gave it a Tiki makeover.
He also started going by Trader Vic himself, telling customers that a shark had eaten the leg he’d actually lost to childhood tuberculosis.
What distinguished Bergeron from other copycats, ultimately, was his extraordinary palate; he developed a menu of his own classic cocktails that rivaled the Beachcomber’s and built Trader Vic’s into the most successful Tiki chain of all, with more than 25 locations.
Jackie Onassis and Andy Warhol visited his outpost at the Capitol Hilton.
Richard Nixon would sneak into the Capitol Hilton branch for a Navy Grog.
And the flagship drink of this little empire was the mai tai.
Its supposed origins were unassuming: Bergeron claimed that he and a bartender simply decided one night to try to make “the finest drink we could.”
Two friends declared the final product “Maitaʻi,” meaning “the best” in Tahitian.
That was it.
Initially, the drink wasn’t much of a hit, according to Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the author and bartender widely considered America’s foremost scholar of all things Tiki.
But fate struck in 1953, when the Matson Steamship company hired Bergeron to create drink menus for their new cruise lines and hotels in Hawaii, most famously the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki.
Tourism to the island was beginning to explode, with interest surging after it became a state in 1959.
“In Hawaiʻi, it seems to have gone viral,” Berry told me.
“Other hotels started serving it at their luaus.
And of course every tourist who went to Hawaiʻi went to a luau.
Over time, it sort of became the unofficial drink of Hawaiian tourism.”
This development laid both the seeds of the mai tai’s triumph and its (temporary) downfall.
Tourism made the drink a sensation back on the mainland, too: Soon, Trader Vic’s was promoting itself as the home of the mai tai, and the chain eventually began selling pre-bottled versions.
So did rival brands, which in 1970 led Bergeron to bring a lawsuit against a company that had claimed the drink had been created at Don the Beachcomber, winning an out-of-court settlement.
This was, in short, a cocktail famous enough to litigate over, which is why it hopped from Tiki bars to mainstream watering holes, allowing it to survive when the tropical wave finally began to recede in the 1970s.
But Hawaiʻi was also where the bastardization process kicked into high gear.
As they tried to imitate the mai tai without the benefit of a recipe, hotels began diluting it with pineapple and orange juice, among other adulterants.
Even the Royal Hawaiian adapted, presumably to meet the expectations of guests who’d tried it elsewhere.
Much the same happened back in the lower 48, and while you could still get the real deal at a Trader Vic’s, the typical version of the mai tai for decades devolved into a vaguely tropical selection of juices, bottom-shelf rums, and sugar.
Cocktail-heads know that this story, thankfully, has a happy ending.
Like most fallen classics, the quality of mai tais was revived during the craft cocktail boom of the ’90s and early aughts.
Berry’s own work unearthing lost recipes helped kickstart a Tiki bar revival that’s still humming to this day, both at home and internationally.
The most perfect mai tai I have personally tried was mixed before me at a quiet spot in Tokyo called simply Rum Bar.
Tiki can be a little divisive.
Where some see a delightful cultural mashup, others see awkward appropriation.
Where some see silly fun, others see tackiness (personally, I am fond of a good aloha shirt).
But most drinkers have learned to cut loose and go with the schtick.
That is partly because, when made well, the drink is just damn good.
Moreover, the fad’s emergence marked the first moment when U.S. bartenders reembraced real culinary craft in their cocktail-making after the dark age of Prohibition—which made it a spiritual precursor to the 21st-century cocktail renaissance.
But what makes the story of the mai tai so fundamentally American is how it shakes together so many ingredients from our national character.
Hollywood escapism (what is a Tiki bar if not a kind of fantastical stage set?).
Gleeful cultural theft.
The desire to make a buck.
Enshittification and determined revival.
Somewhere in the process, a faux Polynesian cocktail invented in California somehow became the trademark drink of vacationers in Hawaiʻi, and then a national craze.
In some ways, the mai tai is the anti–old fashioned—a stack of one obviously inauthentic remix upon another that somehow created a delicious and original drink we can call truly our own.
As Berry put it to me: “What could be more American than that?”
Read all of One Nation Under Booze here.
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