Jeff Berry

Jeff "Beachbum" Berry (born

Berry fell in love with tiki culture as a child in 1968, when his parents took him to a Chinese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley in the Los Angeles area. He loved its faux-Polynesian decor and was fascinated by the elaborate cocktails that were served. He later explained, "It was this weird, mysterious adult thing that was a part of the whole exotic fantasy world.... drinks would come with all kinds of elaborate garnishes. It had a huge impression on me, and that became my favorite place to go."

By the 1970s the tiki craze, which had been launched by Donn Beach and Victor Bergeron in the 1930s, was fading; formerly popular with celebrities and trend-setters, tiki-themed restaurants forty years later were regarded as "tacky". Berry began to compile the recipes he found through his research into scrapbooks for friends. The Tonga Hut, Los Angeles's oldest tiki bar, offered customers a Grog Log Challenge: to drink, within a year, all 78 cocktails whose recipes are printed in the Grog Log.

Two years later Berry wrote the chapter on tropical drinks, called "Mixologists and Concoctions", in Sven Kirsten's influential The Book of Tiki. Tiki-themed bars and restaurants began to come back into style. Soon researching, writing, and giving talks about tropical drinks was his main activity. In 2015 he commented, "All these neo-tiki bars were opening up all over the world... and between 75 and 90 percent of their menus were all recipes I had found." His fourth book, Beachbum Berry's Sippin' Safari (2007), includes what he believes to be Beach's original recipe for the Zombie, which had never been written down except in code. Some of his rediscovered classic drink mixes are marketed by Trader Tiki.

Impact M. Carrie Allan of The Washington Post described Berry's work in researching and reconstructing lost recipes as that of a "cocktail archeologist." Wayne Curtis, historian and author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, dubbed him "the Indiana Jones of tiki drinks."

Publications

Drink creations Although Berry's books have primarily chronicled the sometimes "lost" recipes from historical bartenders of the past such as Beach, Bergeron, Tony Ramos, and Harry Yee, Berry has also invented and published some of his own cocktail recipes. Examples that have appeared in other bartender guides, drink apps, or tiki websites include the Ancient Mariner, Bum’s Rush, Castaway, Hai Karate, Restless Native, Sea of Cortez, Hula-Hula, and Von Tiki.