Drink · 6 min · Amounts not specified
Mai Tai
Aged rum, orange liqueur, lime and orgeat. No pineapple juice, no grenadine — the original is a rum sour with almond in it.
The sheet · 1 rocks glass · 6 min
mediumWhy tonight. Aged rum, orange liqueur, lime and orgeat. No pineapple juice, no grenadine — the original is a rum sour with almond in it.
What it needs
Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.
- rum
- cointreau
- lime
- orgeat
Method
- 1 oz aged rum, 1 oz dark Jamaican rum, ¾ oz lime, ½ oz orange curaçao, ½ oz orgeat.
- Shake with crushed ice and pour it all into the glass, unstrained.
- Two rums, and no pineapple juice. There is no fruit juice in a Mai Tai except lime, whatever a resort has told you.
- Mint sprig and the spent lime shell on top, so it looks like an island. That part is allowed.
Technique coach
What the method is trying to make happen
Sequence, correction, heat and texture, equipment workarounds, scaling, and component reuse are available with this cook sheet.
An educational pour, not a reprint of a licensed spec. No allergen or alcohol-safety claim.
Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.
The technique underneath this
Going wrong while you cook it? Say what it is doing and the triage will tell you what is happening, the smallest move, and the instinct to resist.
Watch the technique behind this one
Third-party video. Opens in a new tab — nothing is embedded and nothing is fetched from a video platform until you click.
Reviewed video matched to this method, not to the cuisine. Opens in a new tab.
- Cocktail structureBasic Cocktails - How To Make A DaiquiriCocktail ChemistryThe plainest sour there is, which makes base-acid-sweet balance easy to taste rather than merely read.197K+ views at the September 2026 review. · Link checked 2026-09-08
- Syrups and citrusHow to Make Fresh Juice for CocktailsEpicuriousJuicing citrus fresh for drinks, and the plain reason bottled juice does not work.Link checked 2026-09-08
- Cocktail structureMartini vs. Martini with Educated Barfly | How to DrinkHow To DrinkTwo martinis side by side, so ratio and stirring time stop being abstractions.Link checked 2026-09-08
Why each of these is on the list
What the ingredients are actually doing
- rum
- The widest spirit on the shelf.
- cointreau
- Clean bitter orange with real sweetness behind it, so it does two jobs in a sour and lets you use less syrup.
- lime
- Sharper and more floral than lemon, and it fades faster — juice it the same hour you use it.
- orgeat
- Almond syrup with a floral edge, and it brings texture as much as sweetness — it is what gives a tiki drink its soft, thick mouthfeel.
Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.
Cooks from the same box
If you bought for this, you can already make these
Shares rum, lime
Cuba Libre
Rum and cola with a real squeeze of lime, which is the difference between a cocktail and a mixer poured over ice.
Shares rum, lime
Dark and Stormy
Dark rum floated over ginger beer and lime so it arrives in layers. Stir it yourself at the table; that is the point.
Shares rum, lime
Grog
Rum, lime, sugar and water — the original naval ration and the ancestor of every sour on this list.
Shares cointreau, lime
Cosmopolitan
Vodka, Cointreau, fresh lime and a splash of cranberry. Made with fresh lime it is a genuinely good sour; made with bottled it is why it fell out of fashion.
Next
Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.
The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.