The Crystal Ship takes its name from a Doors song, not a South Seas legend. Jeff "Beachbum" Berry — tiki's most rigorous historian, the man who spent years decoding Don the Beachcomber's secret recipes — put it on the opening menu of his own bar, Beachbum Berry's Latitude 29, when it opened in New Orleans's French Quarter in November 2014. Where much of Berry's other work is archival reconstruction, this one is simply his: a mezcal-and-rhum-agricole rework of the standard tiki build, designed to prove that smoke and grass could sit under orgeat and pineapple just as comfortably as rum always has.
A marriage of smoky mezcal and grassy rhum agricole, blessed by lime, pineapple, orgeat and blue curaçao.
Latitude 29 menuA Modern Bar's Own Signature, Not a Revival
Berry built his career resurrecting lost formulas from Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic's era, published in books like Sippin' Safari and the Grog Log. The Crystal Ship isn't one of those excavations — it's an original house drink for his own French Quarter bar, built once craft tiki had already established its own vocabulary of smoky agave spirits and unaged cane rhums standing in for the classic dark-rum backbone.
The name is a small signal of that modern-tiki attitude: rather than reaching for a faux-Polynesian phrase the way Don the Beachcomber or Trader Vic era drinks did, Latitude 29 named it for a 1967 rock ballad, treating tiki naming as a wink rather than a costume.
The Spec
Equal parts mezcal and unaged rhum agricole form the base, with pineapple and lime doing the classic tiki citrus-and-fruit work, orgeat for body, and a modifying pour of blue curaçao for both color and a clean orange top note.
Why mezcal instead of rum
Classic tiki drinks lean on funky dark Jamaican rum for backbone and char. Mezcal does the same structural job here with smoke instead of pot-still funk — a young, unaged Espadín (Del Maguey Vida is the commonly cited pour) keeps it bright rather than heavy-handed.
Rhum agricole's grassy note
Unaged agricole is distilled from fresh sugarcane juice rather than molasses, which keeps this half of the base vegetal and slightly funky instead of sweet — the counterweight that keeps the mezcal's smoke from reading as one-note.
Bottom Line
The Crystal Ship is a legitimate modern-tiki original from one of the style's most credentialed bars — proof that the tiki formula still has room for new base spirits, as long as someone with Berry's ear for balance is doing the swapping.