Who Invented the Mai Tai: Trader Vic or Don the Beachcomber?

Trader Vic's story

Bergeron told his version in print in his 1972 Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide, Revised. In 1944, behind the service bar of his Oakland restaurant, he shook 17-year-old J. Wray and Nephew Jamaican rum with fresh lime, Dutch orange curaçao, a little rock candy syrup and French orgeat, then garnished it with a spent lime shell and mint.

He served the first two to Ham and Carrie Guild, friends visiting from Tahiti, and Carrie declared it out of this world. The name comes from maita'i, Tahitian for good, and the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails notes that Carrie Guild later confirmed the story in a signed affidavit. Our Trader Vic mai tai follows that 1944 formula, with no pineapple in sight.

Don the Beachcomber's claim

Ernest Gantt, who became Donn Beach, opened Don the Beachcomber in a former Hollywood tailor shop in the early 1930s and created the rum-heavy, faux-Polynesian bar that inspired Bergeron after a 1937 visit. Beach's side of the argument comes in two forms.

In her 2002 book, his widow Phoebe Beach wrote that he created a drink called the mai tai in 1933. The Oxford Companion sees no reason to doubt that, but says it had left his menu before Vic's visit and tasted almost nothing like Vic's: it was blended, with two rums, grapefruit and lime, Cointreau, falernum, Pernod and bitters.

Beach also told people that Vic had rebuilt his Q.B. Cooler. Historian Jeff Berry found the two drinks tasted remarkably alike, though they share only rum and lime, and he now calls the Q.B. a possible inspiration rather than a template, according to mai tai historian Kevin Crossman.

The settlement and the dirty stinkers

Bergeron was touchy on the subject. In the 1972 guide he wrote, "Anybody who says I didn't create this drink is a dirty stinker." According to Crossman, lawyers only got involved when a mix company, Sun-Vac, tried to claim the mai tai name for a bottled mix, and Vic won an out-of-court settlement in 1970. That settled the name, not the history, which drinks writers still argue about.

How Hawaii added the pineapple

In 1953 the Matson steamship line asked Bergeron to write the drink lists for its Waikiki hotels, the Royal Hawaiian and the Moana. The Oxford Companion says the mai tai sat near the bottom of the menu, but travel writers loved it, and by 1955 the name had spread across the islands, often on rival hotels' rum and pineapple or orange juice drinks.

Newspaper recipes collected by Crossman show the early Royal Hawaiian version stayed close to Vic's, and that pineapple juice and a dark rum float became standard in the 1960s. By then the postwar South Seas craze, fed by returning servicemen, Michener's Tales of the South Pacific and statehood in 1959, had made the mai tai the taste of a Hawaiian vacation, much like Puerto Rico's piña colada.

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