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When Justin Park agreed to compete one last time in the World’s Best Mai Tai contest during the 10th-annual Don the Beachcomber Mai Tai Festival earlier this month, he thought he was signing himself up for another fun weekend in Kona.
Park had no problems in 2012 or 2015 when he flew from Honolulu with his bar tools, supplies and accessories. But his luck ran out this year, when none of his checked bags arrived with him, and he was forced to spend hours searching for them.
Instead of enjoying a welcome drink during an 11 a.m. contestant orientation, Park was rushing between the airport and Costco in a mad dash to locate his bags and replace anything lost in transit.
“I didn’t get to the hotel until 2:45 p.m.,” Park recalled last week from his normal spot in the well at Bar Leather Apron. The contest started less than two hours later. “And there were still certain things I needed to do.
“In my head, I was playing out different scenarios. I had the goal of what I wanted to present, but then I started thinking, ‘If I don’t get this bag, what am I going to do? How will I change my drink?’”
Despite the lost luggage, Park persevered and his drink, Ka Mai Tai o Keawe (“The Big Island’s Mai Tai”), won him the title of World’s Best Mai Tai for the third time, along with another check for $10,000.
WHILE PARK ran through the different scenarios up in his room, other bartenders took advantage of a ballroom at the hotel designated as the official prep space for the competition. When I was at the festival in 2010, the majority of bartenders signed up to participate were from area hotels and more focused on their attire than the drinks they were making.
That wasn’t the case in 2018. Last year’s winner, Kevin Beary from famed Chicago tiki bar Three Dots and a Dash, was back in an attempt to repeat his victory, with others flying to Kona from around the country as well as Canada. This year’s contest also included a unique twist, in that five of the 20 finalists were previous winners.
John Wilhelm, a bartender at Toro Latin Restaurant and Rum Bar in Scottsdale, Ariz., learned of the Don the Beachcomber contest a couple of years ago. Along with competing, he wanted to see how his skills compared to others from the tiki scene.
“We do a lot of mai tais and respect the culture,” he said. “Last year I just decided I was going to go for it.”
Christopher Nevins, who works at the Four Seasons in Wailea, is a five-time veteran of the mai tai competition and said the opportunity to return has improved his bartending abilities at his day job at the hotel’s lobby bar, which is expected to flip to a tiki theme this month.
“This really gets me back into tiki culture and makes me do my homework more,” Nevins said of the Kona festival. “And you can’t be too prepared for these things. In a live setting, something always happens.”
Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, a widely recognized expert on tiki culture and tiki drink recipes, said this year’s bartenders were among the most talented ever to take part in the competition. And the Hawaii-based bartenders weren’t just there to fill out the lineup, either.
“Hawaiian mixology has not only caught up with the capitals of Europe and the mainland, in many ways it’s surpassed them,” Berry said.
“Nowhere in the world have I ever seen garnishes as brilliant and fabulous as the ones at this year’s fest. It was so amazing to see the craft, creativity and talent on display this year.”
BACK UPSTAIRS in his room, Park’s luggage fiasco hadn’t deterred him from his underlying plan of action, which was to introduce a twist on the classic mai tai recipe that would catch the attention of the judges while not straying too far from the traditional tiki cocktail flavor profile.
“What I did was put a twist on my secondary rum,” Park explained. “I like to use two rums that have very different flavor profiles, but at the same time complement each other in a contrasting way.
Park said that along with perfect balance, an important key is texture.
“Macadamia nut meat, coconut, vanilla and honey, those were my main flavors this year,” Park said.
“For the foam, I used a mixture of water, coconut water and ohia-lehua honey, and then sea salt that’s been smoked with kiawe wood. And then I added the gelatin and charged it (with nitrogen gas) and that’s what gave it the texture.”
As one of the final three competitors, Park also realized he was up against a unique challenge when it came to the temperature in Kona. Not only was it a typically hot summer weekend, but humidity levels were soaring due to thunderstorms moving in from Hilo, where flash-flood warnings had been posted earlier in the day.
“Dilution is always a huge part of that competition,” he said. “A lot of the competitors will shake their cocktail, and then pour it into a glass with ice that’s provided, but then it’s already half-melted. …
“I’ve never done this before, and I don’t know why I’ve never thought of it, but I used whiskey rocks.”
The “rocks,” usually ceramic or metal, are designed to mimic the chilling effect of ice cubes. “I froze them,” Park said, “so when I shook, tasted and then poured over those rocks, there wasn’t any additional dilution of my drink.”
But using the rocks meant Park needed to think differently when building his finished cocktail. Instead of serving the base drink with a head of foam on top, he first added the foam to his glass before pouring the mixed drink over it.
“If I did it the other way around, it would have been too hard to get both flavors when taking a sip of the drink,” said Park.
WINNING THE World’s Best Mai Tai title for a third time is enough for Park, who confirmed it was his final time taking part in the competition. He said the challenges he overcame this year made the win — and the $10,000 check — an even sweeter victory, but the experience was muted by what he faced upon his return to Oahu the next day.
Park’s 11-year-old Boston Terrier, Simi, had been rushed to the veterinarian earlier in the week, and the prognosis wasn’t good when he left Oahu, he said.
“I don’t even remember making the drink itself,” Park said of his turn in front of the judges. “I was in a really emotionally charged place. She was more than a dog to me. She was everything.
“When I finished making the drink, there was no smile on my face. No emotion. But when I lifted it up to present to the judges, I could see a ray of sun break through the clouds over the ocean.”
Park said he took that as a sign that Simi was still with him as he took first place. The next morning, he flew back to Oahu and went straight to the veterinarian, where his dog was being kept comfortable until Park could say his final goodbye.
“You talk about the swing of emotions, the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. When it comes to experience, that’s where the experience came in,” he said. “If I hadn’t done the contest all those years and knew what to expect, I would have cracked. Maybe I would have made a drink, but it wouldn’t have been something that I would have delivered in a fashion where it was impactful to the judges.”
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