Tiki Talk with Ben Willis: Home Bars, House Cocktails and Essential Tracks

Ben Willis breaks down the ultimate setups for creating your own tropical backyard paradise. Plus, we spotlight a signature custom house cocktail to elevate your mixing game and spinning an essential track that sets the perfect island mood right in your living room.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

It's Friday afternoon. That means it's time once again to light the torches for Tiki Talk on Mega Rock. Ben Willis, I'm glad to be with you once again, because this week we're talking about what you can do to build your own tiki space at home. We're talking about home tiki bars. Yes, you can have the big, glorious, massive tiki palaces that they used to build in the past, purpose-built structures just absolutely packed to the brim with escapist, exotic, wonderful experiences. But there's nothing to say you can't find a space in your own home and build out your ideal escapist little hideaway. And that's what it's all about. And we're talking about the history, where'd this all come from? Once again, we're talking about post-World War II and the baby boom and the suburbia boom and the advent of the bonus room in a lot of architecture, where before that period, it you it was very rare to have a room that did not have a specific day-to-day purpose necessarily in your house. You had your bedroom, you had your kitchen, you had your dining room, and maybe you had a parlor to uh greet guests in and bring people into the house with. But you didn't necessarily have, unless you were rather well off and had a large house, you didn't necessarily have things like a private study or a library that you could retreat into away from, well, the world in general. But with the advent of suburbia in the post-World War II boom era, you had a little bit more floor space to play around with. And in some cases, that may have been a floor-level room, it may have been a sunroom off the back, but in a lot of cases, it happened to be a fleshed-out, worked-out basement. Oh, just to add to all the uh ambiance, you know, very low lighting. You can get things very dark even in the middle of the day if you wanted to add mood light into whatever you build out. But every person's home tiki bar are 100% expressions of their own personality and what they love. And this is very true about home tiki bars. You can see some pictures up on our Facebook page at Mega Rock PA up on Facebook. I've selected several examples of historic and modern home tiki bars, uh, which this has been an absolute boom thanks to the second and now third waves of tiki that have been going on. You can kind of point to the uh COVID era as the beginning of the third wave of the tiki bar boom, the home tiki bar boom. Because for a lot of people and a lot of tiki aficionados, they didn't have a whole lot to do if they had a shutdown period and they were stuck in their houses. What are you gonna do? You're gonna find a project to occupy your time, and for a lot of us that was building out and finally decorating properly your home tiki bar. What goes into it? Well, there is a well-renowned and regarded decorator in the tiki scene, goes by the name of Bamboo Ben. Uh, not to be confused with me, Ben Willis. Uh, this is a different Ben we're talking about here. Uh, his number one rule, if you are going to start decorating a space for that dark, exotic escapist tiki bar aesthetic, number one rule, no white walls. Now, understood, if you're renting your apartment or a house, maybe you can't choose your paint color, but there's ways around that. You can throw up matting or reed fencing along the walls in a non-destructive way to kind of darken things up, change the texture up, disguise the white walls if you have to. The other thing you want to look at, mood lighting. If you have a big central, bright light, get rid of it. Spread that light out into several smaller, more dim lamps, table lamps, wall sconces, and other things. We discussed previously the plethora of tiki-style lamps you can build on your own. It is a wonderful project that we might get to in the future as well. And then, of course, you want to think about things like foliage. Whether it's real, if you feel like you can keep plants alive indoors in your tiki space, go for it. But for a lot of people, it's so much easier just to find some big plastic ferns and a fake palm tree, as long as it doesn't look too fake, you know? Although there is something to be said about the plastic aesthetic. And then you gotta think about well, is this space for just me to sit and enjoy in? Maybe a couple people, or do you want to be able to entertain? All these things go into whatever the expression of your personal tiki space, it is going to be the perfect place for you to escape to. In your own home. And when you're in that escapist space, quite often in a home bar, if you're entertaining and you have guests over, quite often you'll have a home bar-featured cocktail. And uh, I am no different, even though I don't have a lot of people over to my space, it's not quite finished out yet. I do have what I consider a signature cocktail, one that I had worked on for a while, kind of a variant on a couple different base cocktails, but it is called the Home is Where the Rum is, and you'll see why I call it that in just a moment. We're gonna start off in a shaker with a good scoop of crushed ice. We're gonna start off with one ounce of freshly squeezed lime juice, three dashes of Angostura aromatic bitters, and then we're gonna add some very special syrups, but are very easy to make. We're going to start off with one quarter ounce of vanilla syrup, which is a simple syrup that is infused with vanilla beans, one quarter ounce of cinnamon syrup, which is again a simple syrup infused with cinnamon sticks. Very easy to make, there's recipes online. We're going to add another quarter ounce of spiced filernum liqueur. I've touched on this before, you can get it. Velvet filernum is a very common version, but there are many out there as well. So one quarter ounce of Falernum. On top of that, we're going to add our rums. One and one half ounce of gold Puerto Rican rum goes in. On top of that, one and one half ounce of dark, funky Jamaican rum. And just to give a little bit of that sulfur molasses flavor, we're going to drop in one teaspoon of dark black strap rum. And optionally, if you like your balance a little on the sweeter side, you can add one quarter ounce of nice Demerara syrup on top of that. Put that shaker together, shake it up with that ice. We're going to dump strain that into a tiki mug of your choice. Take a fresh sprig of mint, slap it a little bit, and then stick that in the top, put your straw in, put your swizzle stick in, and that is home is where the rum is. Sip it and enjoy in whatever space you build for yourself. So until we meet on another island out there somewhere, this is Ben Willis. Say Aloha, and here's John Hyatt from 2001, with a song that got so popular, Jimmy Buffett covered it. Reminding us, of course, if you own the tiki bar, the tiki bar is always open. Thank God the tiki bar is open on Tiki Talk on Mega Rock.