IBA Tiki

The IBA's official tiki cocktail: a two-rum base lifted with amaretto and Frangelico, passion fruit purée, pineapple, lime, and muddled ginger, shaken and served over pebbled ice.

The IBA Tiki was created by the Cuban bartender Diosmel Mendoza Medrano for the International Bartenders Association's 69th World Cocktail Championship, held in Cuba in November 2022 — the first edition after a hiatus forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The competition's organizers commissioned the recipe in honor of the IBA's board, and the association added it to its official list in 2024 as the 101st entry in its 101 IBA Cocktails book. Medrano built the drink at El Polinesio, a tiki restaurant inside Havana's Hotel Habana Libre. That room has an unusually direct line to tiki's founding generation. When the hotel opened as a Hilton in 1958 the space housed a Trader Vic's — one of the outposts of the chain built by Victor Jules Bergeron Jr., Trader Vic himself, the man credited with the Mai Tai. The hotel was requisitioned and nationalized after the 1959 revolution and the bar was lost, but the Polinesio that occupies the space today still carries its exotic styling. Tiki as a movement began with two Californian bar entrepreneurs. Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, better known as Donn Beach, opened Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood in 1933. Bergeron established Hinky Dink's in Oakland in 1934. Both built elaborate Polynesian-themed rooms and developed layered multi-rum drinks from Caribbean spirits, tropical juices, house-made syrups and imported ingredients — orgeat and falernum among them. The IBA's formula reaches a similar destination by a different route. In place of orgeat and falernum it pairs two Havana Club rums, the rounded Profundo and the smoky expression, with amaretto and Frangelico, whose almond and hazelnut character supplies the nutty depth that orgeat lends the older canon. Five drops of Luxardo maraschino, passion fruit purée, fresh pineapple and lime juice, and a muddled slice of ginger complete the build. The specification names Havana Club and Luxardo by brand, both of which sponsored the championship the drink was made for. It is shaken, strained over pebbled ice into a chilled tiki glass, and garnished with citrus and a dehydrated pineapple slice.