Cocktail origin myths are often blurred and imprecise, but The Zombie is different.
It was actually invented by someone, at a place and time that’s indisputable. It didn’t emerge out of meetings of cultures, the intermixing of age old drinking traditions. It was designed, by a bloke who owned a bar, who wanted to attract customers and understood a lot about the way people drink, spend money and enjoy themselves. For me, it feels like one of the first cocktails that’s a pure product of marketing imagination, and it became a viral phenomenon.
It was created by Donn Beach, who opened the Don’s Beachcomber Bar in Hollywood in 1933 and probably the originator of the Tiki trend in cocktails. He’d travelled extensively around the pacific and his highly ‘themed’ establishment served rinks that used fruit and fruit juices more heavily than hitherto, often rum based and plastered with visual cues of ‘tropical’ exoticism.
The American Bartenders Association record the original recipe as ...
5 ml (1.5 oz) Jamaican dark rum
45 ml (1.5 oz) Puerto Rican gold rum
30 ml (1 oz) Demerara overproof rum
20 ml (0.75 oz) Fresh lime juice
15 ml (0.5 oz) Falernum
15 ml (0.5 oz) Donn’s Mix (2 parts fresh yellow grapefruit juice, 1 part cinnamon syrup)
1 tsp Grenadine
1 dash Angostura
6 drops absinthe
It’s a clever recipe. Extremely easy to drink. It’s not hugely strong but the key thing is that it’s designed to feel like it is. There are the 3 rums (though they add up to a normal double). There’s a homeopathic quantity of absinthe. This put the fear of God into Americans who’d returned from France after WW1 believing that could drive you mad/ blind. Only tiny quantities were needed to give the characteristic smell of danger.
You couldn’t build a drink to better express the idea of fucking you up... well... unless, as Beach did, you restricted it to 2 glasses per customer, served it in a skull and called it a ‘Zombie’
Beach varied his recipe over the years and barmen all over the world took the idea and added their own refinements - all on the theme of danger and oblivion.
This ceramic Zombie mug was imported from Japan by the Otagiri Company founded in in 1954 in San Francisco. They were supplied to Trader Vic’s restaurants, a chain that took the Tiki Tradition and turned it into an international phenomenon. It was originally designed so you could serve it with a small candle fitted inside the ‘face’ for added spookiness. Making the drink into a slushy with crushed ice added impact and further quietly insured you wouldn’t actually get blind drunk until you’d drunk eight. They wanted to buy a lot of drinks, to be drunk/sober enough to tip generously when you paid the bill and they didn’t want you vomiting on the table.
History doesn’t record who first extracted the overproof rum and served it on top in an inverted lime shell where it could be lit. It’s a terrific piece of theatre and a nice re-use of a waste product. And we don’t know what genius worked out you could flick ground cinnamon into the flames for a sparkly flare. But I’ve got to imagine they made great tips.
You might not want to drink one, but you have to admire the Zombie.
Where the Martini is the purest expression of Modernism in a glass - beauty through austerity and form rigorously following function - the Zombie is the purest expression of post-war American consumerism. A cocktail with chrome and fins.
There's something great to be written about the cocktail/holiday connection. They mean so many things to so many people but I love that there's a whole menu of them that are just fun and different. The things you really need on holiday. It's a lovely story that you went somewhere 'designed' to de-stress you and you drank drinks that were all about relaxation and self-indulgence. (I also strongly approve of slow, all-afternoon drinking).
In the early 90’s my wife and I had a week in Barbados at an “all inclusive” resort. We went because both of us had had a really tough time job wise during the first gulf war. We wanted just to de-stress and do nothing for 10 days. We got into the habit of going to the rum bar at around four in the afternoon with an American couple on their honeymoon and playing a Caribbean game involving moving beans around a board and drinking Zombies until it was time for dinner. It was a good job that they were designed not to be too alcoholic!