With its distinctive transportive taste, coconut is a flexible constructing block in lots of cocktails. It’s a elementary ingredient within the tropical drink canon, the place coconut cream supplies wealthy texture to classics such because the Piña Colada and the Painkiller. However in different types, too, the salty-sweet taste of coconut has develop into a strong software within the bartender’s arsenal, effectively past the tropical classics. 

Coconut water, for instance, works effectively as a stand-in for soda water in highballs, as within the beloved Caribbean drink Scotch and Coconut, or its agave-forward riff, the Snake Eyes. It even works in a spritz, alongside a mineral-forward rosé in Chantal Tseng’s The Americanah. “Coconut water is an effective way to make the dilution in a cocktail extra attention-grabbing with out altering the feel of the drink,” says Vince Brilliant, former bartender at Chicago’s now-shuttered Misplaced Lake. He leans on a coconut water syrup in his low-proof Rob Roy riff, the Home No. 3. For coffee- or tea-based drinks, some bartenders change the water concerned in brewing with coconut water, which supplies added depth. For the Mezpresso Martini, Jay Sanders makes a coconut water chilly brew, whereas Takuma Watanabe’s Tea Ceremony mixes it with matcha.

However to get coconut taste with out including extra quantity to a drink, “coconut blasting”—a method developed by bartenders at The Rockwell Place in Brooklyn—gives a extra environment friendly shortcut. Used as a “ending transfer,” the tactic includes dashing a tincture constructed from a coconut-washed impartial spirit right into a cocktail earlier than serving. Coconut-washed Campari, in the meantime, can convey “aperitiki” tones to the Italian classics, comparable to Negronis, or add an extra-tropical dimension to a Jungle Hen.

Alternatively, you possibly can coconut-wash your complete cocktail. For the Negroni Riposato, Federico Pasian makes use of an ingenious method for imparting refined coconut taste to a batched Negroni. He provides just a few ounces of coconut oil to a bottle earlier than capping the bottle and rotating it a number of instances atop a tray stuffed with ice till the fats solidifies; he then pours within the Negroni to take a seat and take in the flavour. Whereas Pasian’s Negroni provides nuance to the template with a bourbon base, porcini bitters and hazelnut liqueur, we’ve discovered that the method can also be suited to a less complicated Negroni recipe, diluted with coconut water for a contact of salinity that balances out the inherent sweetness of the drink.

Maybe probably the most overtly coconut-forward cocktails, nonetheless, are these served in, effectively, coconuts. Whether or not it takes the place of a rocks glass, as in Morgan Schick’s “Wilson” cocktail, or turns into an integral a part of the drink-making course of, as in Ryan Casey’s coconut-aged Negroni, serving cocktails in coconuts is a quick observe to tropical taste with countless potentialities. As Casey observes, “Fairly frankly, it looks like there’s a possibility to do loads of different issues in [coconut].”