![]() Food52 adds a spritz of lime juice and DeGroff adds Angostura bitters, which makes their piña coladas particularly refreshing, though you may not need either depending on the pineapple juice you use. (Wilson says that, despite the name, which means “strained pineapple”, it’s easier to keep the drink from separating if you don’t bother, but his would be better served with a spoon than a straw.) Fresh pineapple juice neatly avoids this problem, and seems to hit the spot flavour-wise, too. I find the tinned pineapple rings too sweet and the fresh fruit distractingly acidic … and both rather fibrous. The others all use pineapple juice instead, which, to my surprise, I prefer. Moore reckons “it’s not essential to use fresh fruit to make a decent piña colada, though it certainly adds to the drama if you do” so I try her recipe with tinned pineapple rings, and save the fresh stuff for Wilson’s recipe. Pineapple is non-negotiable (unless you’re a maverick, like Conigliaro, but as we’ve established, he’s already been disqualified anyway). ![]() After all, there is nothing inherently naff about pineapple, coconut or rum – and the jury is still out on those parasols. With such great ingredients, it shouldn’t be hard to restore the drink’s faded glamour. Invented in a luxury hotel bar in Puerto Rico in the 1950s for wealthy tourists looking for a taste of the Caribbean, I imagine early customers were more Don Draper than Shirley Valentine – indeed, Hollywood legend Joan Crawford apparently claimed the Caribe Hilton’s creation was “better than slapping Bette Davis in the face”. Victoria Moore hits the nail on the head in her book How to Drink: “At some point around the 1980s … piña colada stopped being a drink and became an excruciating razzmatazz of an event guaranteed to arrive at your table like a carnival float, in an obscenely large glass, decked with thrillingly garish paraphernalia such as a fuchsia paper parasol or six.” While I’m not averse to the odd parasol, or indeed a flamingo-shaped stirrer, she has a point. Even the great mixologist Tony Conigliaro names it as his guilty pleasure – as if this totally tropical taste were something to be ashamed of. ![]() T here are two types of people in this world: those who admit to liking piña colada, and pretentious idiots.
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