All the Ways to Coconut Your Cocktail

Coconut is a fundamental ingredient in the tropical cocktail canon, where coconut cream provides rich texture to classics like the Piña Colada and Painkiller. But beachy drinks aren’t the only ones that benefit from a salty-sweet hit of tropical flavor. Here’s how bartenders are incorporating coconut into cocktails, from Espresso Martinis to Margaritas, year-round.

“Coconut water is a great way to make the dilution in a cocktail more interesting without changing the texture of the drink,” says Chicago-based bartender Vince Bright. The ingredient is key to classics like the beloved Caribbean drink Scotch and Coconut, and its subtle tang offers a good complement to mineral-forward ingredients in, say, a spritz. For coffee- or tea-based drinks—like the cold brew-infused Mezpresso Martini and the matcha-spiked Tea Ceremony—brewing with coconut water provides added depth. Combining coconut water with equal-parts sugar, meanwhile, makes an easy syrup that Bright uses in his low-proof Rob Roy riff, the House No. 3.

To get coconut flavor without adding more volume to a drink, bartenders at The Rockwell Place in Brooklyn developed a technique they call “coconut blasting.” To do it, they bottle coconut oil-washed Everclear in a dasher and add drops of it to everything from Daiquiris to Negronis, lending them “just a whisper” of tropical notes.

For a more intense coconut flavor, consider fat-washing the base spirit or the entire cocktail. In his Negroni Riposato, Federico Pasian uses an ingenious method for his batched Negroni: He adds a few ounces of coconut oil to a bottle, caps it, then rolls it on its side over a tray filled with ice so that the fat solidifies. Once set, he pours the batched drink into the bottle and allows it to sit and infuse. Pasian’s is built with a bourbon base, porcini bitters and hazelnut liqueur, but we’ve found that the technique is also suited to a simpler Negroni recipe, diluted with coconut water for a touch of salinity to balance out the inherent sweetness of the drink.

Whether it takes the place of a rocks glass, as in Morgan Schick’s Wilson cocktail, or becomes an integral part of the drink-making process, as in this coconut-aged Negroni, serving cocktails in coconuts not only imparts flavor, but also makes for an impressive presentation.

If you can’t find fresh coconut, or if you want to fast-track its flavor, consider a flavored spirit—there are actually good ones now. For example, Bimini Gin, which itself is fat-washed, shines in spirit-forward drinks like the Yolanda. Planteray’s coconut rum, meanwhile, is made with sun-dried coconut flesh and easily upgrades decadent drinks like an Espresso Martini. Former Punch executive editor Chloe Frechette describes the rum as “richly flavored with no trace of artificiality.” While coconut rums of the past may have been too cloying, this one, she says, is “even good enough to wash away the memories of bad coconut rum.”