The Gun Club Punch No. 1 is real Trader Vic's history, not a modern reconstruction wearing a vintage name. Victor "Trader Vic" Bergeron served two distinct Gun Club Punches at his bars, each poured into its own colored ceramic mug — green for No. 1, red for No. 2 — a distinction tiki collectors and historians still track today. Both recipes are documented in Trader Vic's own Rum Cookery and Drinkery and carried into the 1972 revised Bartender's Guide, and No. 1's build — light and dark rum, pineapple, lime, orange curaçao, grenadine — is the pineapple-forward half of the pair.
Two punches, two mugs, and no gun club on record that either one was actually named for.
A Real Split, Not a Modern Guess
Unlike a lot of tiki-directory entries that trace back only as far as a single guide's own kitchen, the Gun Club Punch pair shows up independently: bartender and blogger Frederic Yarm cites Trader Vic's Rum Cookery and Drinkery for No. 1's build, and longtime tiki-forum members corroborate the green-mug/red-mug split from firsthand bar experience, separate from any single guide's write-up. No. 2, served in the red mug, swaps in grapefruit juice, high-proof Demerara rum, and triple sec for a drier, sharper profile — confirming "No. 1" isn't a made-up distinction, it's the pineapple-and-curaçao half of a real two-drink system.
What isn't documented anywhere is an actual gun club. Bergeron built plenty of drink names around evocative theming rather than real venues — this is almost certainly one of those, and no source claims otherwise. Treat the name as tiki-bar flavor text, not a historical lead worth chasing.
The Spec
Two rums doing separate jobs, orange curaçao and grenadine for color and body, and enough pineapple and lime to keep the whole thing drinkable over a full glass of crushed ice.
Two rums, not one
The light rum keeps the punch from turning muddy and gives the citrus somewhere clean to land; the dark Jamaican rum is there for the funky, molasses-heavy backbone that separates this from a generic fruit punch. Neither one is optional — cut either and you're back to something a lot more ordinary.
Why the curaçao matters more than it looks
A half ounce is a small pour next to five ounces of juice and rum, but orange curaçao is what pulls this toward Trader Vic's register instead of a plain rum punch — it's doing the same job triple sec does in a Mai Tai, adding bittersweet orange depth rather than sweetness.
Bottom Line
A genuine piece of Trader Vic's own two-mug system, verifiable outside a single tiki directory — pour it in something that isn't the green mug and it still holds up as a well-built, pineapple-forward rum punch.