San Juan, Puerto Rico · 1954
Piña Colada
It needed an invention before it could be a drink.
- Created by
- Ramón "Monchito" Marrero, Caribe Hilton
- Tastes like
- Rich, coconut-forward, tropical in the most literal sense
- Glass
- Hurricane glass or a chilled goblet
- Garnish
- Pineapple wedge and a cherry
Ingredients
- 2 ozwhite Puerto Rican rum
- 1 1/2 ozcream of coconut (Coco López)
- 1 1/2 ozfresh pineapple juice
- 1/2 ozfresh lime juice (optional, but it wakes the whole thing up)
Method
- 1.Shake the can of cream of coconut hard before you open it — it separates on the shelf and the fat is most of the texture.
- 2.Blend everything with about 1 cup of crushed ice until smooth, roughly 20 seconds.
- 3.Or, for the older style: shake hard with ice and strain over fresh crushed ice.
- 4.Pour into a chilled glass and garnish.
The name means "strained pineapple," and it is older than the cocktail — nineteenth-century Puerto Rican references describe a piña colada as a simple pineapple cooler with no coconut in sight.
The version the world knows required a piece of food science first. Coco López, the shelf-stable cream of coconut that makes the drink possible, was developed in 1948 by Ramón López Irizarry, an agricultural professor at the University of Puerto Rico, as a way to make coconut cream usable at scale.
Six years later, bartender Ramón "Monchito" Marrero spent roughly three months developing a house drink for the Caribe Hilton in San Juan and landed on this. Puerto Rico named it the official national drink in 1978.
On the record
The Caribe Hilton's claim is contested. Barrachina in Old San Juan credits Ramón Portas Mingot in 1963, and a persistent folk story hands the invention to the nineteenth-century Puerto Rican pirate Roberto Cofresí, who supposedly mixed coconut, pineapple, and rum to hold his crew's morale together. Only the Hilton claim has documentation behind it.
Thatch note
Cream of coconut is not coconut cream, and neither one is coconut milk. Substituting them is the single most common way this drink goes wrong at home.