Test Pilot

A potent tiki classic blending dark and light rums with falernum, citrus, and a hint of anise from the iconic Don the Beachcomber era.

The Test Pilot was created by Donn Beach — born Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt in 1907, later legally renamed — during the early years of World War II, around 1941, at his Don the Beachcomber restaurants in Hollywood and Chicago. Beach had opened the first Don the Beachcomber in 1934 on McCadden Place in Hollywood, launching the tiki movement that would shape American drinking culture for the following three decades. The Test Pilot's name reflects the era's genuine fascination with aviation: the late 1930s and early 1940s were the years when military pilots were the culture's most glamorized figures, testing experimental aircraft in California's desert air corridors. The drink is constructed from a blend of Jamaican rum, a lighter Cuban-style rum, and a splash of Demerara rum, combined with falernum, lime and grapefruit juice, and a float of Pernod or Herbsaint to introduce an absinthe-anise accent. The use of multiple rums — each contributing different weight, ester character, and sweetness — was a signature Beach innovation: what one rum could do, three could do more completely. Beach kept all his recipes encoded with numbered ingredients to prevent employees from reproducing or selling them. Jeff Berry, the cocktail historian who spent years decoding Beach's formulas through interviews and archival research, recovered the authentic Test Pilot recipe in his book Sippin' Safari (2007), documenting it alongside a family of aviation-named descendants — the Jet Pilot, Space Pilot, and Ace Pilot — that other bartenders created by riffing on the original.