Let's get tropical: A guide to alcoholic island-hopping

Rum-based cocktails can be just the thing to make the summer shimmer. Drawn from Hawaiian, Polynesian, and Caribbean cultures, tropical drinks are sugary fruit-infused drinks meant to be enjoyed slowly over a lazy afternoon. The A.V. Club hunted down some summer standbys that will feel terrifically liberating during what promises to be an oddly humid and sweltering Denver August, whether you’re at home or perusing the drink menus at local cocktail-lounge favorites like The Cruise Room and Seven Eurobar in Boulder.

Caipirinha
A well-mixed caipirinha tastes like a very sweet limeade and goes down easy, but the high sugar content will chemically destroy your brain, creating an epic hangover that can only be cured by another caipirinha. This is the cycle of success for the national cocktail of the ultimate party nation, Brazil. Once impossible to obtain outside Brazil, the key ingredient of cachaça (a popular distilled booze down there) can be found in the Mile High at Café Brazil.
Ingredients: cachaça, sugar, and lime.

Wiki waki woo
Another obnoxiously fun-to-order drink ("One wiki-waki-woooo!"), this one tastes just like fruit punch, which is odd, as it's lethally loaded with alcohol. The cranberry hits you up front and slowly gives way to the flavors of pineapple, with subtle underpinnings of almonds and cherry emerging in the finish.
Ingredients: Vodka, white rum, tequila, Triple Sec, orange juice, pineapple juice, cranberry juice, Amaretto, pineapples, and cherries.

Bahama mama
The Bahama mama can be prepared with orange, pineapple, and mango juices or syrups, but at the core, it’s just a lot of rum. Notes of fruit and citrus will temper that powerful rum taste when mixed properly, but if you can’t taste the alcohol, your mama was too watered-down—this is a traditionally a very potent brew.
Ingredients: Light rum, gold rum, dark rum, Malibu rum, and fruit juices or syrups.

Mai tai
This sinister-sounding concoction was either dreamed up by outrageous culture-sacker Don The Beachcomber after accurately sussing the Hawaiian zeitgeist in 1933, or invented by sleazy Horatio Alger type “Trader” Vic J. Bergeron in 1944. (It’s kind of awesome that this is disputed, incidentally—the world was smaller then.) When this drink is correctly prepared, the rum content will be balanced by the sourness of the limes and the sweetness of the syrups. The mint garnish provides a critical olfactory element that gives the drink freshness and zing.
Ingredients: Rum, lime juice, curaçao, rock candy syrup, Garnier Orgeat syrup, and fresh mint.  

Hot chicana
In these culturally sensitive times, this one takes nerves of steel to order, and a gut of iron to consume. The reward is blissful annihilation of your sobriety and all sense of taste. Imagine a sort of spicy-liquid red-hot-tamale-candy base infused with Bacardi in a shot glass, and you've got the idea—powering down a few hot chicanas is more a statement about your ability to do insane things than an enjoyable taste experience. It's the kind of adventure you can tell tales about later, like skeeching or cliff diving.
Ingredients: Rum, cinnamon Schnapps, and Tabasco.