Beachbum Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean

The pre-tiki backstory.

Potions of the Caribbean is the most ambitious of Berry’s books—a 500-year history of Caribbean rum cocktails, organized chronologically and geographically, from the earliest plantation rum mixes through the pre-tiki Cuban and Caribbean cocktails that the modern genre grew out of.

What’s in it

The book covers what Berry calls proto-tiki: the Caribbean cocktail tradition that predates Donn Beach’s 1934 Hollywood invention of tiki bar culture. Recipes are organized by:

• Era. Colonial-era plantation drinks (16th–18th century). 19th-century hotel and saloon cocktails. Prohibition-era Cuban hotel bars. Pre-revolution Havana. Mid-century Caribbean resort circuits.
• Region. Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Martinique, Bermuda, the Bahamas, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico.

Headline recipes include the original Daiquiri (Jennings Cox, 1898), the Mary Pickford (Eddie Woelke, 1922), the Bacardi Cocktail (Cuba, 1920s), the Planter’s Punch (Jamaica, 1800s), and dozens of others Berry has recovered through archival research.

The production values are high: large-format, photographically rich, with the kind of design care that marks it as a book to be read end-to-end rather than just used as a recipe reference.

Why it matters

The modern revival’s recipe focus has tended to cluster on the 1934–1970 canonical period—Donn Beach forward. Potions of the Caribbean expands the lens back to the actual Caribbean traditions exotic cocktails grew out of, and demonstrates that the genre’s history is much longer and more international than the Donn-and-Vic Hollywood story suggests.

Forbidden Altar’s Proto-Tiki recipe category—the Daiquiri, Planter’s Punch, Bacardi Cocktail, Mary Pickford, Hemingway Daiquiri—is largely a Potions category. The book is the underpinning.

To go deeper

• Related People Jeff Berry.
• Related Proto-Tiki recipes Daiquiri, Planter’s Punch, Mary Pickford, Bacardi Cocktail, Hemingway Daiquiri.