Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, probably the world’s leading expert on tiki drinks, first encountered tropical cocktails when he was 10 years old. He watched his dad sip a navy grog at a local Chinese restaurant. “It just seemed like the most exotic, glamorous thing in the world at the time,” he says. “When I got old enough to drink, I went in search of those places and those drinks and they all sort of disappeared.”

The tiki craze began in the 1930s. Prohibition ended, and Don the Beachcomber, who was born Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt to a New Orleans hotelier, created a fantasy version of the South Pacific along with a long list of complicated rum drinks. Amazingly, tiki never fell out of favor for nearly 40 years. “What killed it was Vietnam,” Berry says. “It wasn’t very fashionable, after a Vietnam protest rally, to sip a coolie cup in the Saigon room of a Polynesian restaurant.” The lounge scene in the mid-1990s revived all things tiki. While lounge music only lasted a few years, the interest in tropical drinks continues to grow. But don’t expect tiki drinks to ever be as common as a rum and coke. “A lot of these drinks you’re never going to see on a regular restaurant menu,” Berry says, “because they’re just too hard to do.”

Berry just published Sippin’ Safari, his fourth book on tiki culture. The book started as a search for the elusive recipes of Don the Beachcomber. Unlike his main rival Trader Vic, who published recipe books, Don the Beachcomber carefully guarded his recipes. As Berry began tracking down the old bartenders and their families, most of whom were Filipino, he started collecting not just drink recipes but also amazing stories. Don the Beachcomber, for example, used code in his recipes so that no one, not even his bartenders, could steal them. The biggest stars of Hollywood frequented tiki bars, and some of the waiters and bartenders moonlighted as actors. And until Don the Beachcomber arrived in Hawaii in 1948, it was almost impossible to find evidence there of Polynesian culture.

On Saturday, July 21, Berry will reveal some of Don the Beachcomber’s secrets at Tales of the Cocktail. Along with Wayne Curtis, author of And a Bottle of Rum, and rum collector Stephen Remsberg, Berry leads a discussion on “Tiki Drinks: From A to Zombie.” For more information, see www.talesofthecocktail.com. Tales of the Cocktail, which runs July 18-22, is a festival of cocktail mixing and lore that draws experts from around the world.