Beach, Donn | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

, né Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt (1907–1989), was a mixologist and restaurateur who almost single-handedly created the post-Prohibition “tiki drink” category, launching a faux-Polynesian cocktail craze that influenced American culinary culture for over four decades. See tiki.

The son of a New Orleans hotelier turned Texas oilman, Donn was born in Mexia, Texas, on February 22, 1907. At age eighteen he squandered his college fund on a trip around the world. His travels ended in Los Angeles, where in 1934 he opened Don the Beachcomber’s, a South Seas–themed bar whose “Rhum Rhapsodies”—wildly original exotic cocktails with Polynesian names but Caribbean roots—enchanted the Hollywood movie colony. By 1937 the Beachcomber’s was nationally famous and nationally imitated.

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While Donn actually had combed beaches in Polynesia, it was in Jamaica that he found his “tiki” drink template: the Planter’s Punch. Donn built on this simple mix of lime juice, sugar, and rum by blending multiple juices, multiple sweeteners, and multiple rums in the same glass. He created over thirty complex, layered Planter’s variations, most famously the Zombie; other popular inventions included the Navy Grog, Rum Barrel, Pearl Diver, and Missionary’s Downfall. These were appropriated by hundreds of copycat tiki bars and restaurants that sprang up across America from the late 1930s well into the 1970s.By 1980 a chain of Don the Beachcomber’s restaurants stretched from Chicago to Waikiki, but Donn was living in the shadow of his most successful imitator, Trader Vic, whose Mai Tai had replaced the Zombie as the most famous tiki drink. On June 7, 1989, Donn succumbed to liver cancer in Honolulu. See Mai Tai, Bergeron, Victor “Trader Vic”.