Piña Colada

Puerto Rico’s national drink has the paperwork to prove it. The island made it official in 1978, though getting there took some arguing. Ramón “Monchito” Marrero said he invented the Piña Colada at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan in 1954, after roughly three months of trial and error behind the bar. Ricardo García, a bartender at the same hotel, claimed it as his own. Barrachina, a restaurant in Old San Juan, has a plaque on the wall crediting Ramón Portas Mingot in 1963. The Caribe Hilton has the better paper trail, but the argument has never fully died down.

The name translates roughly to strained pineapple, which describes the method better than it describes the result. The proportions themselves are not in dispute: rum, pineapple, coconut, and enough ice to pull the three together. This version is the older style, blended briefly and strained into a Collins glass rather than poured out as a thick frozen slush. What you get has body without turning into dessert, and it is probably closer to what came across the bar in San Juan in the fifties than the machine-poured version most places serve now. Light rum is the standard call here because it stays out of the way. An aged or dark rum will fight the coconut for attention rather than sitting underneath it.

Glass: Collins glass | Strength: Medium | Serves: 1 | Prep Time: 3 minutes

Bartender’s tip: Cream of coconut and coconut milk are not the same thing, and swapping one for the other is the most common way this drink goes wrong. Cream of coconut, sold as Coco López or Real, is thick and heavily sweetened. Coconut milk is thin and unsweetened, and using it without adding sugar leaves you with something watery and faintly savory. Shake the can hard before you measure either way, because cream of coconut separates on the shelf and the good part sinks to the bottom. Crushed fresh pineapple gives you texture that juice cannot, which is what keeps this from tasting like a soft drink. Run the blender only long enough to break up the ice. Over-blending melts it, and you lose the drink to dilution before it ever reaches the glass.