Don the Beachcomber was a huge hit. The tiny space was usually filled with a who’s who of Hollywood: Howard Hughes, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable. It wasn’t just the decor, which capitalized on a 1930s fascination with the South Pacific—it was also Donn’s inventive new drinks. The drinks were based on rum, says Shannon Mustipher, the author of Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails. Cuba was nearby and willing to sell to the U.S., she says, “so rum was the only spirit that had been readily available in the U.S. while distillers were not in operation.” Plus, she points out, rum was cheap at the time—a major selling point for a bar that opened during the Great Depression.

Donn’s cocktails blended multiple versions of rum, as well as multiple citrus juices, sweeteners, and spices, in complicated recipes that took their inspiration from traditional Caribbean punch recipes but added layers of flavor and nuance, according to Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the owner of the tiki bar Latitude 29, in New Orleans. This was truly the second wave of American craft cocktails, Berry told Gastropod. “Nobody ever had drinks like this before,” he said. “Nobody ever made drinks like this before.”

Read: A new golden age for the tiki bar

Berry tasted his first classic tiki cocktail in the 1980s, when tiki bars had nearly disappeared and cocktails were limited to three-ingredient Harvey Wallbangers. Its balance and complexity stood out like a beacon of hope amid the sea of cheap spirits and sickly sweet mixers that were popular in that decade. But as he set out to drink more of these delicious tropical cocktails, Berry realized he had a problem: Most bartenders had no idea how to make Don the Beachcomber’s original drinks correctly, and to make matters worse, Beach had written his original recipes in code.

In this episode, Berry tells Gastropod the story of how he decoded Beach’s legendary concoctions and fueled today’s tiki renaissance. And we do some detective work of our own to investigate tiki’s rise, fall, and revival. Why did tiki bars peak in the 1950s and ’60s, before nearly disappearing in the ensuing decades, and what brought about the revival today? Sarah Miller-Davenport, the author of Gateway State: Hawaii and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire, describes how Polynesian-style bars and restaurants allowed mid-century, middle-class white Americans to feel cosmopolitan and adventurous, in part by playing on racist stereotypes of Polynesian sexuality. These stereotypes are part of the reason Kalewa Correa, the Hawaii and Pacific America curator at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, says tiki bars make him, a native Hawaiian, uncomfortable—that and the ubiquitous tikis, Polynesian-style carvings that invoke images of Polynesian gods. Listen in for the story of American tiki bars—and for the debate over whether they’re just another form of cultural appropriation.

This post appears courtesy of Gastropod.

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Nicola Twilley is a co-host of the podcast Gastropod and a contributor to The New Yorker. She is at work on two books: one about refrigeration and the other about quarantine.

, and Cynthia Graber is a writer and audio journalist based in Somerville, Massachusettsand a co-host of the podcast Gastropod. H er work has appeared in Scientific American and The New Yorker . Scientific AmericanThe New Yorker