The Doctor is Funk

We're going into the realm of Beachbum Berry, and his excellent book Beachbum Berry Remixed. The book abounds with stories and recipes from the original king of tiki, Donn Beach. One of the most important things to remember when reading page after page of his creations is that, by and large, Donn was making this stuff up from whole cloth - certainly he knew the ingredients and flavor set of the Polynesian paradise his establishments evoked, but this was far more about his vision and his bartending skills than any wholesale lifting of native drinks.

One notable exception that proves the point, perhaps, is the Doctor Funk. This was a very real drink from Samoa, from a very real person named Dr. Bernhard Funk. A native of Germany, born in 1844, he migrated to Samoa around 1881 as reputedly the first medical practitioner in Apia (the capital city of Samoa). He was friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, and was his bedside doctor when the author died in 1894 in Samoa.

There are several references to his medical skills in works (including Fanny Stevenson's collection of letters from his husband), but he seems to also have had some impressive cocktail skills. The Doctor Funk was a notorious drink spreading out across the region, and his signature recipe had people waxing prosaic about the drink. My favorite was the quote attributed to Paul Gauguin by a skipper: "'E said Dr. Funk was a bloomin' ass for inventin' a drink that spoiled good Pernod with water." Other contemporaries were far more complimentary of the concoction.

Dr. Funk had a rich life, and even went native enough to marry the daughter of a Samoan chief. He was interested in meteorology, wrote a Samoan-English-German dictionary and medical handbooks, and constructed a recreation center at Lake Lanoto'o. Unfortunately, his deteriorating health drove him back to Germany, where he died in 1911. Friends carried out his last wish: he had a granite stone transported back to Samoa and placed on the shore of Lake Lanoto'o with a memorial service on his behalf. I recommend this thread at Tiki Central for much more (and there is much more) about the good Doctor.

All of this brings us back to the drink that is credited to him (and Donn Beach, in its modern version). The recipes can vary greatly (absinthe vs. pernod, different rums, and so on), but we'll take the advice and recipe as set out by the good Beachbum in the aforementioned book. It's a drink that comes to a remarkably happy balance based on the ingredients; the Pernod offers a distraction from the lime, the pomegranate syrup adds just enough sweet to balance the forward flavors, and the rum...well, you'd never know it was in there. A delightful riff on the usual lime-and-rum tiki flavor set that is a worthy tribute to a very interesting man.

Doctor Funk (from Beachbum Berry Remixed, 2010)

.75 oz. fresh lime juice
.5 oz. pomegranate syrup
1 tsp. Pernod
1.5 oz. light Puerto Rican rum (I use Bacardi white)
1 oz. club soda

Add the first four ingredients to a shaker with plenty of ice. Shake vigorously (a bit of water does this drink no harm). Add the club soda directly to the shaker and then pour the shaker unstrained into a glass.

Mixology, Bartending and Me

What triggers a passion?

Well, I certainly drank my share in college and beyond. I have specific drinks tied to specific locations and events: beer by the pitcher at Rick’s in Ann Arbor (leading to my only public singing experience in New York City), crap-but-cheap Long Island iced teas at Uptown in Bowling Green OH on Tuesday nights, fuzzy navels by the lake at Rose Hulman on a warm spring day, my first sip of julieska at the Arosa Keller in Essen Germany. For the most part, though, a drink was something that was combined with another activity or experience.

With games, my epiphany was at the hands of James Ernest, showman, poker player, game designer and CEO of Cheapass Games. James was the first person to challenge me to separate the game experience–the social involvement, metagame aspects and material components involved with playing a game–and think about the mechanics and rules that make up a game as a device for social experiences. It let me experience (and, nowadays, evaluate) games not only for their emotional and social pleasures, but to appreciate WHY a game does or does not work on a purely mechanical level, and then see how the game experience either magnifies or obscures a design’s mechanics.

For alcohol, it was a 2007 NPR interview with Jeff Berry, upon the publication of Beachbum Berry’s Sippin' Safari. The book is a celebration of the tiki craze in the US, and the interview focused on the Zombie–a drink normally presented as five random rums, pineapple juice, and whatever else fruit juice was on clearance at the dollar store last week. This is a drink that was shrouded in mystery and history, and Jeff told a story of corporate espionage, detective work, and sheer joy for the topic that absolutely hooked me (well, at least made me go out, buy the book, and act as the starting point for another story that I’ll tell later this year).

All of a sudden, alcohol became a medium of creation isolated from the usual social trappings. With a palette of ingredients millennia in the creation, I now had a sense of how to play with a well-stocked bar to make drinks and appreciate how the component parts combine to create something better.

This also brought me into the mixologist craze, and what an interesting experience that has been. I’ve discovered some great bars, tried some fairly exotic mixers, liquors and drinks, and certainly broadened my appreciation for what can be done with alcohol. Things like shrub and falernum are now recipes I can rattle off from memory, and the complexity and subtleties of a contemporary cocktail can be a marvelous opportunity to simultaneously drink and dissect.

That said, a 2011 issue of Imbibe featured an interview with Ray Foley, a voice for working bartenders and bar service for decades and who has both a passion for bartending and scorn for those who would push the occupation of bartender into a niche, boutique corner of the industry. This is the man who invented the fuzzy navel, and say what you want about the joys of homemade cardamom-infused limoncello, Ray Foley has been responsible for serving more drinks than you or I ever will. A good drink should be shared, and the easier and more accessible a drink is, the more people that will have the opportunity to enjoy it.

I am not an expert, or even trying to achieve that status (I have friends who are far more gifted in that regard), but on this blog I’ll try to walk the line between highbrow and lowbrow, a hand extended into each world, trying to snag things that everyone will find, if not necessarily practical or to their tastes, at least interesting to hear about.

Tomorrow: a reason to talk to me!