The Tradewinds is a tiki sour with aged rum, apricot liqueur, lime, and small accents — a drink that appears in mid-twentieth-century tiki bar menus with multiple attributions and no clear original creator. The most common spec has appeared variously under Donn Beach, Trader Vic, and several mid-period tiki bar names. Calling this an "X created it" cocktail overreaches; the cleaner framing is that the Tradewinds was a working tiki bar recipe whose authorship became diffuse through the genre's chain-restaurant phase.
Some tiki drinks have a clean paper trail. The Tradewinds has multiple, contradictory ones.
A Cocktail Without a Single Creator
By the late 1950s, the American tiki bar scene had expanded enough that recipes circulated freely between bars. Bartenders moved between Don the Beachcomber, Trader Vic's, the Luau, the Sportsman's Edge, and dozens of regional chains; menus borrowed and renamed liberally. The Tradewinds is one of several drinks from this period — alongside lesser-known cocktails like the Aku Aku and the Outrigger — whose origin is contested across multiple bars and bartender claims. The cocktail has been reconstructed by Beachbum Berry and others, with the general shape consistent across reconstructions but the specific creator left open.
Treating this as a tiki community recipe — like the Industry Sour in modern bartending — is the most defensible position. The drink works as a published reference even without a confident attribution; the recipe is the artifact, not the author.
The Spec
One and a half ounces of aged rum (Jamaican or demerara), three-quarter ounce of dark rum, half ounce of apricot liqueur, three-quarter ounce of lime juice, half ounce of orgeat, two dashes of Angostura. Shaken with ice, strained over crushed ice into a chilled coupe or saucer.
Apricot Liqueur, Not Brandy
Apricot liqueur (Rothman & Winter Orchard Apricot, Giffard Abricot du Roussillon) is sweeter and fruitier than apricot brandy — it's what the recipe calls for. Apricot brandy (Marie Brizard, some Bols variants) is drier and pulls the cocktail in a different direction. The liqueur is what carries the cocktail's stone-fruit character.
Why Two Rums
The aged rum (Appleton Estate Reserve, El Dorado 12) provides body and the cocktail's structural backbone. The dark rum (Cruzan Black Strap or Myers's) adds molasses depth and the dark color the cocktail is named for — the trade winds carrying the dark of the open ocean. A single rum at two and a quarter ounces will work but reads as flatter.
Garnish
A lime wheel and a sprig of mint is the most common modern garnish. Some bars add an apricot half, which is decorative but doesn't change the cocktail. The Tradewinds doesn't have a heavily theatricalized garnish in the way the Zombie or Mai Tai does.
Bottom Line
The Tradewinds is a quiet entry in the tiki canon — not as flashy as the Zombie or as iconic as the Mai Tai, but a balanced and drinkable mid-century tiki sour. If you have apricot liqueur on hand (it gets used in a Pendennis Club and several other classics), the cocktail is worth keeping in the home repertoire. Hedge any "originally created by" claims about it; the honest history is messier.