Jeff Berry

Saloonkeeper

One of Imbibe magazine’s “25 Most Influential Cocktail Personalities of the Past Century,” Jeff “Beachbum” Berry is the author of seven books on vintage tropical drinks, which published for the first time anywhere the lost recipes of Tiki’s golden age — from the original Zombie to the Jet Pilot, Pearl Diver, Navy Grog, Saturn, Three Dots & A Dash, and many others. Esquire calls Jeff “one of the instigators of the cocktail revolution” and Food & Wine “one of the world’s leading rum experts,” while The New York Times cites him as “the Indiana Jones of Tiki drinks” and The Los Angeles Times as “A hybrid of street-smart gumshoe, anthropologist and mixologist.”

Jeff’s been featured on the Travel Channel’s “Food Paradise” TV series, The Discovery Channel, PBS Television and National Public Radio; he’s also been profiled in The Washington Post, USA Today, The New York Times and Wine Enthusiast magazine.

Jeff’s original cocktail recipes have been printed in publications around the world, from Bon Appetit and The Huffington Post to over 20 international recipe books, including the venerable Mr. Boston Official Bartenders Guide.

And now Jeff’s drinks are being served at his restaurant in New Orleans, Beachbum Berry’s Latitude 29, which has won critical acclaim in Esquire, Playboy, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle, GQ, Travel + Leisure, Town & Country, Southern Living, New Orleans magazine, and the Food Network.

With Martin Doudoroff, Jeff co-created Total Tiki for iPad and iPhone, a drink recipe app which Macworld magazine calls “beautifully rendered and, thanks to Berry’s tireless reporting, impeccably sourced.”

Jeff’s also co-created a line of Tiki barware with Cocktail Kingdom, which Imbibe hails as “especially notable because it revives old styles of essential glassware that were previously almost impossible to find.”

While this is all way too much work for a bum, Jeff is also currently writing 29 entries for The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails and lecturing about tropical drinks across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.