Review: Passoa Passion Fruit Liqueur

I experience zero shame telling you that I love the flavor of passion fruit. My go-to sparkling water is passion fruit infused, and passion fruit in a cocktail ingredient list is certain to catch my eye and guarantee an order. (Pornstar Martini? Well… only on special occasions.)

Fresh passion fruit is far from a simple ingredient to obtain due to its general scarcity, so most drinks you’ll find made with the stuff (outside high-end tiki bars) tend to rely on passion fruit syrup.

Passoa offers another option: passion fruit in liqueur form, one of only a handful on the market (notably including one from Chinola). Let’s give it a whirl.

Passoa Passion Fruit Liqueur Review

Passoa is a red liqueur that looks a lot like grenadine in the glass. It’s made with real passion fruit but it is artificially colored.

Unlike Chinola, it’s tough to pick out the passion fruit on the nose, as the aromas are alternately syrupy sweet and layered with berries — strawberry and cherry, namely. There’s a sharpness to the aroma that belies the fact that this is just 10% abv, and which feels decidedly industrial at times, almost cough syrupy. Time in glass — or mixed with sparkling water (a 1:2 ratio is recommended) makes things much more agreeable, particularly on the palate, which brightens up with a mixer.

That said, while it offers an enjoyable, generalized fruity sweetness as a mixer, the liqueur never really approaches that indescribably floral-tropical quality that makes passion fruit such a unique delight. You might hold on to a bottle of Passoa for use in an emergency, but just don’t expect the punch from it that you get from the real deal.

20 proof.

B / $21 [BUY IT NOW FROM FROOTBAT]

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