Tiki meets aperitivo in the Jungle Bird, a tropical drink with an edge

In wilderness settings (read: bar patios), I’m a subpar birdwatcher. Put me in a tiki bar, though, and I become an ornithologist, parsing the menu for a specific feathered friend. The Jungle Bird used to be an endangered species, but thanks to bartenders’ reintroduction work, its flock has grown.

Created by Jeffrey Ong for the opening of the Kuala Lumpur Hilton’s Aviary Bar in the 1970s, the Jungle Bird was reportedly served in a bird-shaped vessel. With dark rum, Campari, pineapple juice and lime, it sounds like a kindergartner’s painting, a mass of chaotic colors. But it coheres: the lush tropical fruit wrapped around the herbal bitter citrus, the rum’s richness pulling the whole thing together. It’s a tropical drink with an angry little edge.

Now more than 50 years old, the Jungle Bird has become a centerpiece of a newer cocktail subgenre often referred to as aperitiki — a portmanteau of aperitivo and tiki — in which drink makers mash together classic tiki ingredients such as tropical fruit, rum and lime with the bittersweet and herbal notes of European aperitivos and amari.

Good tiki drinks have always been complex, but their complexity derived largely from the interplay of rums with fruit and the spice syrups that early tiki legends mixed up. The grandfathers of tiki — Ernest Gantt (later Donn Beach, playing off the name of his bar, Don the Beachcomber) and Victor Bergeron, creator of Trader Vic’s — borrowed extensively, inventively and often problematically from island cultures in their creation of the tiki cocktail genre. Among the many flavors in those mid-20th century concoctions, bitterness was not a major player, says Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, whose research was foundational to reviving and preserving tiki drink recipes.

Gantt and Bergeron “were more concerned with doing riffs on the Caribbean punch template,” Berry says — rich, spiced concoctions that tasted like what people imagined drinking in island paradises. They used elements such as Angostura bitters and absinthe in their recipes, but in dashes to accent drinks — condiments, not primary flavors. In the old poem (“one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak”) that serves as a mnemonic for the prescribed ratios for punch, bitter didn’t figure at all — although, Berry notes, “there’s an extra line about ‘a touch of spice to make it nice,’ and that would have been Angostura bitters.”

Fast forward to the modern era, when “the first wave of craft cocktail bartenders just thought tiki was part of the problem,” says Berry. “The younger bartenders had only known the syrupy cruise ship versions of these drinks. They had no idea — because all the places that originally served them were out of business — that these were actually craft cocktails, 70 years before that term even existed.”

Berry’s resurfacing of the Jungle Bird did a lot to start healing the rift between tiki and the modern craft cocktail world. Berry came across the recipe in a lesser-known cocktail book, and published it in his cocktail book “Intoxica!” in 2003, where it quickly started gaining more attention. The recipe’s inclusion of Campari “made it an outlier, and made it the thin edge of the wedge as far as tropical drinks entering the realm of the craft cocktail, because Campari is catnip to that crowd,” says Berry.

Shannon Mustipher, author of the cocktail book “Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails,” talks about the gap between East and West Coast bar cultures. “On the West Coast, tiki never really went away,” she says, and there were always fresh tropical ingredients available there. But in New York, when Mustipher came up, tiki really had been lost. Yet New York was the epicenter of the cocktail renaissance, which leaned spirit-forward and bitter, embracing Fernet and Campari and other amari. In the early days of the cocktail revival, New York was also notoriously serious about drinks, and Mustipher speculates that the second wave of bartenders coming out of that scene wanted to have more fun.

Partly on the wings of the Jungle Bird, the flavors of the tiki bar and of the craft cocktail renaissance began to mix. Berry says you’d be hard-pressed now to find a neo-tiki bar that hasn’t gone down the bitter hole.

“We've riffed on the Jungle Bird in every possible way,” confirms Kevin Beary, beverage director at Three Dots and a Dash speakeasy in Chicago, where the bar has been tinkering with classic tiki recipes since its inception, reconsidering them from the ground up and exploring how drinkers’ perceptions of bitterness affect how they consume a cocktail.

A current example on the menu is the delightfully named Sippopotamus, a large-format mix of tequila, Select Aperitivo and multiple tropical fruits. But beyond the Jungle Bird, Beary says, “there are other examples of bitter drinks in the tropical style that have definitely gone wide as well. The Trinidad Sour, the bitter Mai Tai, and then, within nerdy tiki circles, the bitter piña colada is also fairly popular.”

About that Trinidad Sour: Its creator, Giuseppe González, also had a big role in growing the Jungle Bird’s following. The recipe in John J. Poister’s “New American Bartender’s Guide” said dark rum, Berry named “dark Jamaican rum” in “Intoxica!,” and González gave the drink another face-lift in 2010.

“When a spec says ‘dark rum,’ that’s actually an enormous category with tremendous variation across it,” says González, now at Tamba in Las Vegas. “What happens with rum in St. Croix is not what happens in Jamaica is not what happens in Haiti is not what happens in the Dominican Republic is not what happens in Puerto Rico is not what happens in Venezuela,” so the dark rums you get from one place to the next vary dramatically.

At his very first bar gig at Painkiller (better known as PKNY), González landed on Cruzan Black Strap Rum from St. Croix, which has coffee and maple notes he hasn’t found elsewhere, and reduced the amount of pineapple juice, significantly changing the drink.

González’s approach to the Jungle Bird has since become the standard, but the bar world is also constantly contributing new species to this delicious aviary. At Washington, D.C.’s, Lost Island Vibes, Owen Thomson — of the much-missed Archipelago — does the Spicy Jungle Fowl with strawberry gomme syrup in addition to the pineapple, Chacho Aguardiente (a jalapeño-infused sugar cane spirit) and Capitoline Tiber Aperitivo. Mustipher had the bird in mind when she composed her Kingston Soundsystem, which uses unaged rum, soursop juice and the bright yellow gentian liqueur Suze to change its feathers.

At Berry’s own Latitude 29 in New Orleans, the name is arboreal rather than avian: The Paul of the Jungle is named as a tribute to Paul Gustings, a beloved New Orleans bartender known for aggressively dousing his Sazeracs with Peychaud’s — so, like the original Jungle Bird, a Gustings Sazerac glows red.

This is a charming bird, one that can convert those who think tiki is too sweet or that Campari is too bitter, and may open them up to the whole aperitiki category. As a Negroni person, I like my tropical paradise better when it’s a little bitter.

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Jungle Bird Cocktail

Bridging Tiki and Italian aperitivo cultures, the Jungle Bird is a classic tropical cocktail made with rum, pineapple juice, Campari and lime.

For the simple syrup

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup water

For the drink

Ice cubes or 1 large ice cube

1½ ounces dark rum, preferably Cruzan Black Strap

1½ ounces pineapple juice, preferably fresh

¾ ounce Campari

½ ounce fresh lime juice (from 1 lime)

½ ounce simple syrup

Pineapple wedge or leaves, for garnish (optional)

Make the simple syrup: In a small (1- to 2-quart) pot over medium-high heat, combine the sugar and water, stirring to dissolve the sugar, and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat, let cool until warm, then transfer to a lidded jar or bottle and refrigerate until completely chilled, about 1 hour. You should have about 1½ cups.

Make the drink: Fill a rocks glass with ice cubes (or one large cube) and set aside. Fill a cocktail shaker with ice, and add the rum, pineapple juice, Campari, lime juice and simple syrup. Seal the shaker and shake vigorously to chill and dilute, about 15 seconds. Strain into the prepared glass, garnish with the pineapple wedge or leaves and serve.

Servings: 1

Make ahead: The simple syrup needs to be prepared and chilled at least 1 hour before making the cocktail.

Storage: Leftover simple syrup can be refrigerated in a lidded container for up to 2 months.

Where to buy: Fresh pineapple juice can be found at well-stocked supermarkets and natural food stores.

Substitutions: For a different edge, try other rums, swap out Campari for another red bitter such as Cappelletti, or bump up the pineapple flavor by using pineapple gomme syrup (sometimes written as “gum syrup”) instead of simple syrup.

Nutritional Facts per drink | Calories: 248, Fat: 0 g, Saturated Fat: 0 g, Carbohydrates: 22 g, Sodium: 4 mg, Cholesterol: 0 mg, Protein: 0 g, Fiber: 0 g, Sugar: 21 g

— Adapted from the Kuala Lumpur Hilton’s recipe and Giuseppe Gonzáles.