Unusual Coladas

A Piña Colada with absinthe! A Piña Colada with sherry!

Every so often, I’ve visited a cocktail bar and had a drink that was not only so good but so unusual — so specific and distinctive and different even from the novel cocktails that I — that it stuck with me for years after.

These rare cocktails are not necessarily the abolute best I’ve ever had, although they are always very good. But they are the most memorable. Over time, they become objects of fascination, and almost inevitably, I make an effort to reproduce them at home. 

No drink meets this description more fully than the Absinthe Colada at Maison Premiere in Brooklyn. I first encountered it five or six years ago, and I have been obsessed with it ever since.

The cocktail is just what it sounds like: a Piña Colada — but made with a base of absinthe.

Absinthe is strong, weird, intense stuff. It’s herbal, anise-y, a little bit flowery, and very high in alcohol content, with some expressions coming in as high as 130 proof. Most cocktails that employ it call for just a few drops, or a mist to coat the inside of the glass, Sazerac style. I typically dispense the stuff from a little mist bottle or an eye dropper, not a jigger, because even quarter-ounce portions are relatively rare. Absinthe is an accent, a grace note, a supporting player that brings the rest of the mix into harmony. 

The Absinthe Colada uses a full ounce of absinthe.

Yes, it’s accompanied by a half-ounce of grassy rhum agricole, just to keep the underlying Piña Colada vibes in place.

It’s one of the few cocktails I have encountered that puts the spirit in the lead role, and thus one of the most absinthe-heavy drinks I have ever consumed. The Absinthe Colada is a more cowbell situation, where a background element is brought to the fore and given pride of place in an ensemble.

It’s more than a little bit odd. It’s also spectacular. 

Fundamentally, the Absinthe Colada is just a riff on the Piña Colada, with a few adjustments to the structure and a subtly minty grace note. It’s probably the most prominent entry in the subcategory of Colada riffs that I think of as Unusual Coladas, which take the core idea of the Piña Colada and then twist it in some unexpected direction. 

Nor is it the only drink in this subcategory. There’s also the Sherry Colada, which you can think of as the inverse of the Absinthe Colada. 

Like the Absinthe Colada, it’s a contemporary cocktail bar drink: I recently had one at the bar at Eastern Standard in Boston¹, and at times the drink has also appeared on the menu of The Baldwin Bar, another excellent Boston-area cocktail joint. 

Where the Absinthe Colada showcases its star spirit’s ability to stand out, the Sherry Colada relies on sherry’s ability to mimic other spirits, standing in for all or part of the base in riffs on well-known cocktails, like the Margarita. The Sherry Colada is a drink that takes an understudy and puts it in a lead role. 

It’s pleasantly nutty and nuanced. And compared to both its rum-based counterparts and the boozy absinthe version, it is also surprisingly low-proof. 

As I said, you can find these drinks on fancy cocktail bar menus. But you can also make these drinks at home. Once you have the ingredients, they’re fairly easy to execute: For these coladas, you don’t even need a blender. 

So this week, we are going to make two very different Unusual Coladas — and demonstrate just how far you take the Colada format. 

It’s gonna be a colada fun! (Say it like “whole lotta fun.” Sorry, sorry…I think I may be going coco-nuts.)

Absinthe Minded

We’ll start with the Absinthe Colada. 

A big part of why I like this drink is its simplicity. Essentially, it just takes the core Colada elements — boozy spirit base, coconut, and pineapple — and reworks the proportions a little bit, swaps in absinthe, then finishes it off with a grace note of crème de menthe. 

If you don’t have the specific rum or crème de menthe the recipe calls for, you may have to make some substitutions (more on that below). But this is quite straightforward to make. 

The most difficult part of Maison Premiere’s recipe is preparing, in advance, the custom “coconut syrup” — a 3:1 mix of coconut cream and coconut milk, heated on the stove. 

But after some experimentation, I have come to the conclusion that you just…don’t have to make that ingredient in advance. There’s an easier way to do it.