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A Look at One of the World's Favorite Families of Cocktails Heading out for some drinks with friends is often a recipe for good times, and the right cocktails can make fun even more likely. Where some well-known cocktails suit themselves nicely to business meetings and the like, others are of decidedly less-formal sorts. For many who enjoy social drinking, tiki cocktails are some of the most enjoyable and fun of all. A Long History of Enabling Good Times and Memorable Evenings While they might seem like the kitschy sort of thing that would most likely have arisen in the 1950s or 1960s, tiki cocktails have a longer history than that. In https://digitalsocial.eu/project/1366/tiki-cocktails , they were probably born sometime during the Great Depression, with their whimsical, tropical character providing a much-needed lift during those dark times. The most likely inventor of the tiki-themed beverage was a Hollywood impresario and restaurateur who went by the nickname Don the Beachcomber. A fan of warm climates, palm trees, and lazy afternoons spent sipping on delicious drinks, he brought a bit of the flavor of the South Pacific first to California and then to a steadily expanding empire around the world. Fruity, Fun, and Refreshing While there are dozens of tiki recipes in wide circulation today, a focus on the essentials is all that it takes to turn out a suitably tropical cocktail of this kind. For one thing, the vast majority of recognizably tiki-influenced cocktails are built around rum, a sugarcane-based form of liquor that is popular throughout the world's tropics. Any form of rum is acceptable. Light varieties of rum will contribute a bit of the liquor's distinctively sugary flair but without the deeper, heavier notes that characterize kinds that are aged for longer or produced from less-processed forms of the main ingredient. Heavier, darker rums will hold up better and maintain a presence even when several different kinds of fresh fruit juices combine to create an especially potent mix of flavors. In any case, just as much effort and deliberation will often be put into the way a cocktail from the tiki family is served and presented. Fun embellishments of various kinds, from paper umbrellas to glasses shaped like hula dancers, can contribute plenty of impact of their own.