With its distinctive transportive taste, coconut is a flexible constructing block in lots of cocktails. It’s a basic ingredient within the tropical drink canon, the place coconut cream supplies wealthy texture to classics such because the Piña Colada and the Painkiller. However in different varieties, too, the salty-sweet taste of coconut has grow to be a strong software within the bartender’s arsenal, nicely past the tropical classics.
Coconut water, for instance, works nicely as a stand-in for soda water in highballs, as within the beloved Caribbean drink Scotch and Coconut, or its agave-forward riff, the Snake Eyes. It even works in a spritz, alongside a mineral-forward rosé in Chantal Tseng’s The Americanah. “Coconut water is a good way to make the dilution in a cocktail extra fascinating with out altering the feel of the drink,” says former bartender on the now-shuttered Misplaced Lake Vince Shiny, who leans on a coconut water syrup in his low-proof Rob Roy riff, the Home No. 3.
In oil kind, coconut lends its signature taste by fat-washing. Infused into rhum agricole, for instance, it bolsters the tropical taste in Leanne Favre’s Ti’ Punch variation, Lime In Ti’ Coconut. Infused into gin, in the meantime, it supplies “a whisper of coconut” in Garret Richard’s revamped Blue Hawaii, softening the spirit so its botanical profile shines.
However to get coconut taste with out including extra quantity to a drink, “coconut blasting”—a approach developed by bartenders at The Rockwell Place in Brooklyn—affords a extra environment friendly shortcut. Used as a “ending transfer,” the strategy includes dashing a tincture constructed from a coconut-washed impartial spirit right into a cocktail earlier than serving.
Maybe probably the most overtly coconut-forward cocktails, nonetheless, are these served in, nicely, coconuts. Whether or not it takes the place of a rocks glass, as in Morgan Schick’s “Wilson” cocktail, or turns into an integral a part of the drink-making course of, as in Ryan Casey’s coconut-aged Negroni, serving cocktails in coconuts is a quick observe to tropical taste with infinite potentialities. As Casey observes, “Fairly frankly, it looks as if there’s a possibility to do quite a lot of different issues in [coconut].”
