Day 49: Mahalo Victory

The Hula-Hula is indistinguishable
from the Walters as long as you
don't smell or taste it

You may not be aware of this, but The Bottle is a Wonderland is not the only site on the web that focuses on drinking.  There are sites about beer, wine, and cocktails. They probably number in the dozens on GeoCities alone.  We aren’t afraid to link to them because we don’t view them as competition; we mostly view them as inferior. Ha ha, we kid, we kid.  Many of them are almost as good as TBIAW and we frequently use them as references when researching our daily libation. 

Why bring this up?  I’m glad I asked.  It is because we often try to determine the origin of a drink in order to both inform ourselves and our 7 other daily readers.  Most of the time we either can’t find it or it turns out to be kind of boring so we don’t bother sharing it.  Sometimes it turns out to be boring and we share it anyway.  Boring or not, today is one of the days we learned something about our drink, the Hula-Hula Cocktail. According to the Mr. Boston guide, the Hula-Hula Cocktail is composed of gin, orange juice, and simple syrup.  According to almost every other site on the Internet, it is not.  All of those sites list the ingredients as gin, orange juice, and orange liqueur.  This is almost as controversial as the “Tastes Great / Less Filling” controversy of 1977 that almost tore our country apart.

  

The drink was invented by Ray Buhen some time in the 1930s.  Ray later started his own bar, the Tiki-Ti. The Tiki-Ti web site includes the following on its home page: “FOR BEST VIEWING PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR POP-UP BLOCKER”.  If that doesn’t entice you to visit, the site also requires QuickTime, Realplayer, and Flash.  This is why you rarely see both “mixologist” and “web designer” on the same resume. After closing down all the pop-ups and un-muting our computer, it was time to try the drink. We stuck with the good ol’ Mr. Boston recipe. This was wise, because the Hula-Hula Cocktail turned out to be pretty darn good. If you dislike gin you should probably stay away from this one, though, since that is the predominant flavor.  The orange juice and simple syrup add a touch of sweetness that is unusual for a gin drink but it was nice.  Mrs. Bottle actually liked it a little more than I did, which is also unusual for a gin drink. 

Stinking Badges

Back to these other web sites for a moment.  We are reluctant to criticize others since we know our web site won’t be winning any Webby awards for our light-on-dark design and standard blogger template.  As far as editorial content, we also know our limitations. We were recently rejected as contributors to a site where we would not have been paid. So we understand that the content value is worth something less than free.  Despite being around for over two months, we haven’t yet gone viral (and this has?).  We know our place.  Still, we find a lot of these other alcohol sites pretty dull.  They may have 20,000 recipes, but they are not reviewed with care, love, wit, and insight like ours are.  Would you rather know that the Hula-Hula Cocktail has a 9.2 rating from four anonymous drones, or a four-cocktail-glass rating accompanied by moderately amusing and superfluous commentary?

On second thought, keep that answer to yourself.

Overall Rating for the Hula Hula Cocktail

Taste: 4
Presentation: 3
Ease of Preparation: 4
Drinks Until Blackout: 5 – 24% Alcohol


Ingredients
1.5 oz Gin
.75 oz Orange Juice
.25 tsp Simple Syrup