Tropical Cocktails Letterpress Print

Sunshine in a Glass

As a visual person, perhaps no genre of cocktails entertains me more than that of "tiki" drinks.* With their vibrant colors, elaborate garnishes, lengthy list of rare ingredients, purpose-built containers, and dramatic presentations (fire?!), it's delicious eye candy that enchants as it intoxicates.

Delightfully Deluxe Tropical Cocktails is a 12 x 18 inch (31 x 46 cm) love letter to ten of my favorite vintage tropical cocktails, distilled into a vibrant, attractive print that's perfect for hanging in your hut, cabana, beachhouse, bar or bilge. 

It makes a perfect pairing with my cocktail-tasting and -creating notebook, 33 Cocktails.

A Feast for the Eyes, Fresh-Pressed in Portland

This open-edition print was printed by hand, with love, on  a gluten-powered 1909 Chandler & Price letterpress using authentic Day-Glo inks. Now discontinued, I was able to acquire a small cache of the iconic inks that defined a genre of black-light posters. They will light up your nights in three vibrant hues: Rocket Red, Saturn Yellow and Signal Green. Black light optional.

American-made French Paper

The poster is printed on 100% recycled (100% PCW), chlorine-free French brand paper, made in Niles, Michigan. If you're as big a paper nerd as you are a cocktail nerd, you'll want to know that it's 125# Muscletone in Starch White Cover. 

* "Tiki" as a concept is pretty loaded, and my choice to avoid the term except in passing is intentional. Early bars of the genre picked and plucked objects and ephemera from around the world, mixing cultures as far-flung as Japan and Java and including as decor relics and religious objects in an attempt to conjure a pacific paradise inspired by the Pacific. Like many, I look at it with a perspective 75 years removed, and think we can probably do better. Palm trees? Heck yes. Pagodas? Probably not. Sun and sand? Absolutely. Savage, servile, and scantily-clad wahines? No, thanks.