Navy Grog

Light, gold, and dark rum with grapefruit and honey — Donn Beach's tribute to Vernon's 1740 naval grog, the Royal Navy abolishing it on Black Tot Day, 1970.

The Navy Grog is Don the Beachcomber's formal tribute to the centuries-old rum tradition of the British Royal Navy. Donn Beach — born Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt in 1907, later legally renaming himself Donn Beach — opened his first Don the Beachcomber restaurant and bar in Hollywood in 1934, launching the tiki cocktail movement that transformed American bar culture. Beach was notorious for keeping his recipes secret, coding his house-made ingredient lists with numbers and letters rather than ingredient names to prevent employees from reproducing them elsewhere. The naval rum tradition he honored dated to 1740, when Vice Admiral Edward Vernon — nicknamed Old Grog for the grogram cloak he wore — ordered that the daily rum ration issued to British sailors be diluted with water. The resulting mixture was called grog in his honor. Rum remained a formal component of the Royal Navy's daily issue until August 1, 1970, when the Admiralty abolished the tradition — a date still commemorated annually as Black Tot Day by rum enthusiasts worldwide. Beach's Navy Grog combined three different rums — light, gold, and dark — with grapefruit juice, lime, and honey, the blend of rums producing a complexity no single rum could achieve alone. Jeff Berry, the cocktail historian known as Beachbum Berry, spent years researching original tiki bar recipes and eventually decoded Beach's coded formula, documenting the authentic Navy Grog recipe in his authoritative tiki cocktail reference works.