"The gift of memory is an awful curse."

My good friend Conor has spent his adult drinking life trying to recapture his first experience in Hawaii, sipping on a mai tai. There is no doubt that some island magic captured his imagination: the location, the drink, the moment. Who wouldn't want to recreate that? He'd go to a cocktail bar, order a mai tai, and assess it against the first and all subsequent renditions of the drink.

With the assistance of rum expert Matt Robold, I was able to concoct a version of the drink that Conor deemed the best so far. Trader Vic's original recipe called for a Jamaican rum that is no longer in production, and so Robold suggested a combination of Jamaican and Martinique rums to approximate the original. Here's the cost breakdown:

Appleton Estate 12yr ($34 for 750ml) -- $1.34 for 1oz
Clement VSOP ($40 for 750ml) -- $1.57 for 1oz
Clement creole shrubb ($33 for 750ml) -- $0.65 for 0.5oz
Trader Vic's orgeat ($8 for 1L) -- $0.12 for 0.5oz

To make the math round nicely, I'll assume that the cost of lime and mint (which unlike the cost of simple syrup, really cannot be considered negligible) comes out to $0.32 per drink.

This means that, for you to make this mai tai at home, it'll set you back four dollars. Not too shabby considering it's a really delicious drink. However, once applied to a bar setting, then the economics of pour costs come into play. That drink now not only has the function of refreshing the customer, but as bartender Andrew Bohrer says, it also has the job of paying for labor and keeping the lights on. Let's assume that a bar runs at a 20% pour cost.

I have just put a $20 mai tai on your menu.¹

No matter what kind of volume discount a bar might enjoy from their distributor, there's no way they'd be able to sell that drink in the vicinity of that price. Here, then, is the conundrum: if Conor's ideal mai tai clocks in at $20, then what exactly is getting served at bars when they're charging half or even less?

Let's try and cheapen things up a bit.

Bacardi ($11 for 750ml) -- $0.87 for 2oz
Bols curacao ($11 for 1L) -- $0.17 for 0.5oz
Torani almond syrup ($6 for 750ml) -- $0.12 for 0.5oz

I'll again use the cost of lime and mint to make the math come out to a round number, assuming $0.34 which brings us to a mai tai that has a pour cost of $1.50. This then shows up on a menu as $7.50, which is much more in line with the cost of the expected cost of the drink. But in doing so, we've sacrificed all the pertinent ingredients. The almond syrup might not be used at all, dropping the cost further. There might even be a bottle of Mai Tai Mix lying around (just add Rose's Lime Juice!)

This is the fundamental reason why it's been so difficult for Conor to find a decent mai tai after so many years of searching: pour costs hinder bars from presenting cocktails at premium prices (especially one that lacks upmarket cachet), thus requiring corners to be cut in terms of ingredients. Gone are the interesting spice notes of the rhum agricole, replaced instead with the flavor of vanilla extract.

In all likelihood, young Conor had one of these inexpensive renditions. Recreating that exact drink, that exact combination of flavors, can probably be done quite cheaply. However, Conor has his own cost structure in mind, and again this mai tai has added responsibilities. Not only does the drink have the function of refreshing him, it must also transport him to a time and place far away and long gone. The full influence of premium ingredients must be summoned in order for such a drink to be up to that task.

$20 is mighty cheap compared to the cost of a time machine.

Addendum

Since writing this piece, I've had the chance to talk to bartenders from great bars up and down the West Coast, and it should be noted that many of them, in fact, *do* use a recipe very similar to this while keeping their pour cost low (bars don't pay retail, after all). And so it is possible to get a perfect Mai Tai at places like 320 Main, Caña Rum Bar and Smuggler's Cove and a handful of other fine establishments, and at a reasonable price as well. The point of the article remains, which is to look at the ingredients of a drink's platonic ideal in identifying the true cost of making it. Cheers, everyone!