Shark's Tooth is a genuine Don the Beachcomber original, decoded from Donn Beach's deliberately encrypted recipe system by tiki historian Jeff "Beachbum" Berry, who first published it in his 1998 book Grog Log and republished it in Beachbum Berry Remixed (2010). It's built as a fruit-punch sour — rum, lime, pineapple, and a double dose of cherry liqueur — but its real signature is the presentation: the drink is blended and served on its own, with a second, more expensive aged rum poured tableside in a separate shot glass for the drinker to stir in just before the first sip. Difford's Guide lists it under the parenthetical "by Don Beach," the same shorthand tiki menus have used for decades to flag his originals.
A fruit punch sour of sorts with a base of rum, the essential tiki juices — lime and pineapple — and a dose of two cherry liqueurs to tie it all together.
PunchA Decoded Beachcomber Original
Donn Beach ran his original Hollywood restaurant on secrecy: ingredients were pre-batched into unlabeled or code-numbered bottles specifically so his own bartenders couldn't walk out with the formulas. When Beach's tiki empire collapsed and its recipes scattered, drinks like the Shark's Tooth survived only as fragments in old notebooks and the memories of retired bartenders. Berry spent years cross-referencing those fragments before publishing his reconstruction — the version served at tiki bars today traces directly back to that research, not to a surviving Beachcomber menu card.
The two-glass presentation is the drink's most distinctive feature and appears consistently across every source that documents it: the shaken portion is poured unstrained into a small glass, and a full ounce of aged, darker rum rides alongside in its own shot glass, meant to be stirred in tableside rather than mixed behind the bar. It turns a simple sour into a small piece of theater, in keeping with Beach's showman instincts.
The Spec
A gold Barbados-style rum is blended with lime, pineapple, sugar syrup, and maraschino cherry syrup over crushed ice, then poured unstrained; a second, aged Jamaican rum is served alongside to be stirred in at the table.
Why two rums, served two ways
The gold Barbados rum gets blended with the citrus and crushed ice, so it dilutes and integrates; the aged Jamaican rum is kept whole and poured in at the table, staying sharp and distinct against the softer, colder base. Combine both up front and you lose the point of the drink — the Jamaican rum is meant to arrive as a jolt, not a blended note.
Two cherry liqueurs, small pours
The original calls for both maraschino cherry syrup and a splash of Cherry Heering in some published versions; this build keeps it to the cherry syrup alone for a cleaner, less fussy home spec, while still carrying the drink's signature cherry-forward top note.
Bottom Line
Shark's Tooth is one of the more legitimately documented Don the Beachcomber originals still in circulation — a real recipe, real decoding work behind it, and a tableside ritual that's more fun to serve than almost anything else in the tiki canon.