A Coconut Old Fashioned With Whiskey and Rum.

It's not a colada!

For whatever reason, I have had coconuts on my mind. 

In the world of cocktails, that mostly means coladas. And so, over the last several weeks, I have written about Piña Coladas, and Unusual Coladas, and even the Bushwacker, a sort of Colada crossbred with a milkshake and a White Russian. (I’m all for cocktail science, but sometimes it goes too far.)

But there’s more to coconut cocktails than Piña Colada variations.

In fact, through the magic of custom-made flavored syrup, you can put coconut into many other types of cocktails. 

Like Old Fashioneds. 

Usually, I don’t write about Old Fashioneds this year. It’s too hot, too sweltering, too … much. Just too much. Especially in Washington, DC, where I usually am. 

But this week I happened to be a few hundred miles north of my home city, near Boston. It wasn’t exactly chilly outside, but it wasn’t warm and muggy either. There was a heavy cloud cover and a cool breeze. Temperatures dropped down to the low 60s.

And as I was perusing recipes, I spotted a simple split base Old Fashioned riff that called for “coconut syrup” — without specifying exactly how to make it. I wanted to make my own drink in that mold.

So I figured: This could be a lesson! A learning! As they say. 

Syrups are great because they are the easiest, least time consuming, least expensive way to incorporate novel flavors into cocktails. 

Once you master syrup making, you can nudge just about any flavor into a drink. 

So this week, we are going to make a three-ingredient coconut syrup that takes less than 5 minutes to prepare, and then we are going to make a Coconut Old Fashioned with rye whiskey, high-proof rum, and a little bit of banana. 

Gimme Some Sugar

Syrups are just sugar (or something sugar-adjacent like honey) and water. If you want a flavored syrup, it’s just sugar, water, and the thing that produces the flavor your are looking for. 

Strawberry syrup: sugar, water, and strawberries. 

Cinnamon syrup: sugar, water, and cinnamon. 

And so on and so forth. 

So this syrup will combine sugar, water, and coconut milk. 

The trick is to figure out how much sugar, how much water, how much coconut, and how to combine them. 

Typically I use one of three methods for making syrups: