A Tiki-ish Daiquiri Colada With Coconut and Apricot

Is it a tiki drink? A fruity colada? Or a Daiquiri? Yes. The answer is...yes.

I write this newsletter with themes in mind: a recurring drink structure, or a repeat ingredient. 

This year, for example, we have looked at a handful of drinks involving apricot booze — both liqueur and brandy. And we spent much of the summer making decadent, silly, delicious, strange Piña Colada variations with coconut cream. 

The themed approach has several advantages. It helps reinforce ideas and concepts, demonstrating how so many seemingly unrelated cocktails are connected by lineage, construction, or flavor pairings. Where repeat ingredients are concerned, it also makes things easier for readers, who can get multiple uses from a single bottle of liquor.

There’s something enjoyable — or at least I hope— about seeing the same supporting players pop up over and over again, to amuse and perhaps antagonize, like Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Will Captain Picard be tortured with the riddles of existence again? Will there be Cynar? Yes, and yes.

These motifs also help me figure out what to write about each week: I’m always looking for drinks that build on ideas we have already touched on, or that echo each other in unexpected ways. 

So before the summer closed, I felt compelled to write about the Tradewinds, a devastatingly delicious tiki-ish drink that combines coconut cream and apricot liqueur.

It’s not just the ingredients that are familiar.

This cocktail also works from a structure and theory that is quite similar to what we looked at last week: It is a tropical drink, born of the decadent, silly spirit of the 1970s. But at heart, it’s basically just a riff on a Daiquiri — or, if you prefer, a Planter’s Punch — that complicates the formula with:

• A split base of two rums 

• A citrus swap from lime to lemon

• A split sweetener (coconut and apricot)

• A dash of bitters 

With an equal parts (plus bitters) construction, it’s incredibly simple to make, and even after a summer of over-the-top coladas, I was surprised at how delicious it was. 

Indeed, I am almost embarrassed by how much I enjoy this drink. Almost — but not actually embarrassed, because no one should ever be embarrassed by their enjoyment of something wonderful. 

Planter’s Punch Out

Tiki drinks often look quite complex on the page. But most are fairly simple evolutions and elaborations of a few simple ideas. 

That’s definitely true with the Tradewinds. With six ingredients and a five-ounce total volume that doesn’t straightforwardly match the proportions of a basic sour, you might not immediately recognize this cocktail as a species of Daiquiri. 

But that’s really what it is — a rum-based sour, just somewhat more complicated, as tiki drinks tend to be. 

So to understand how this drink works, let’s once again return to the Daiquiri and the Planter’s Punch and perform a basic structural breakdown. 

Daiquiri → Planter’s Punch 

Rum → Rum

Lime → Lime

Sugar/syrup → Sugar/syrup

[nothing] → bitters or other spice element, such as Allspice Dram 

The preparation methods obviously differ: Planter’s Punch is typically served over crushed ice or flash blended, while a Daiquiri is usually served shaken/up. But conceptually, they are very similar drinks. The Planter’s Punch just adds a little bit of spice.

In last week’s newsletter, we showed how this structure could be transformed into the Island of Martinique by employing Martinique rhum and then taking the “sugar/syrup” portion of the drink and replacing it with a combination of honey syrup and sweet-and-spicy falernum. A separate variation on the drink combined honey syrup with nutty orgeat. But both were fundamentally drinks in the Daiquiri/Planter’s Punch mold, with some complications.

For the Tradewinds, we’ll perform a similar transformation.

But this time, it will be a little bit more elaborate, affecting basically every element of the cocktail.