IYSLPC

IYSLPC = If You STILL Like Piña Coladas

Went into this hoping to improve on my old Piña Colada recipe from June 2016, which many people seemed to enjoy. Turned out to be a tougher job than anticipated, especially in balancing the pineapple and coconut. I think I succeeded, especially if you think that cold things should be cold. I definitely succeeded in making something just as good, with fewer ingredients. Here’s a little rundown of the whats and whys and why nots:

WF Coconut Custard - This is a poorly named concentrate. I don’t get any custard from it. Just a thick, smooth heavy cream with a little built-in coconut that doesn’t taste like suntan oil. The coconut tastes halfway between the coconut in Coco Lopez and the coconut in Malibu rum, but is light and needs another coconut to not get buried, which is where a touch of FA Coconut comes in. That more natural coconut flavor boosts the coconut and pulls it more in the coconut cream direction. FA Coconut is one of the few ingredients carried over from the original recipe. Why not TFA Coconut and TFA Coconut Candy? Well, for one thing, TFA Coconut is one that few people have. They’d sub TFA Coconut Extra and ruin it with suntan oil unless they’re making a large batch or using a dilution, since the original recipe used it at only 0.5% and I think Extra is about four times more potent. And it’s unnecessary thanks to WF Coconut Custard. TFA Coconut Candy has coconut flavor similar to WF Coconut Custard and it is creamy but wasn’t creamy enough for the original recipe, so I used FA Cream Fresh in that one. FLV Cream would have been better or at least easier, but I didn’t have that at the time and kept having to create version after version to force Cream Fresh to do what I wanted it to do. WF Coconut Custard is creamy enough by itself, eliminating the need for both Coconut Candy or any additional cream flavors.

FA Jamaican Special - Another carryover from the original recipe, at the same %.. It leaves me with the impression that there was some dark but unspiced rum in there, and that’s all I needed it to do. But why not VT Light Rum, you love VT Light Rum?! Because WS-23, that’s why. I do love the authentic booziness of VT Light Rum but it just doesn’t work for me with the WS-23 - it causes a weird clash of warm and cool. If you don’t care about “cold things should be cold,” or you care more about “cocktails should be boozy AF,” this would be the one thing I’d recommend subbing here. Sub VT Light Rum for WS-23 at the same amount. That’ll get you your booze without hurting the recipe. Personally, it always bothered me that I could not get cooling to work with the original recipe. Piña Colada is supposed to be frozen, dammit. But I could not get Koolada or Polar Blast to work with it. Koolada had a cardboardy off note and they both ate into the creaminess of the coconut something fierce. By front-loading the cooling using WS-23, I could finally freeze this sucker without sacrificing my coconut cream on the altar of coolant.

INW Pineapple - The third carryover, dropped down from 5.5% to 3% to get the pineapple-coconut balance right. I looked at this one differently than before. The original recipe was eventually built around INW Pineapple, which is so thin it required support from two other pineapples to put a good amount of pineapple meat on those bones and hold up against all that coconuttiness without things getting weird. But this time INW Pineapple is the one in the backup role. I thought VT Sugarloaf Pineapple might even be able to do it alone, but it imparted a strange lemony flavor when I tried to push it hard enough to balance properly. INW Pineapple makes a clean backup to bring the pineapple forward without any BS. VT Sugarloaf is the main reason why this recipe is better than the original that I worked so hard on so long ago. I think it makes the difference between a piña colada blended with fresh island pineapple and piña colada made from canned juice. It tastes fresher and more refreshing and has a dense base that gets down into that coconut. After testing 14 other pineapples, I never even bothered trying to use any of them pineapples until I reached for INW Pineapple to back it up. Even if you don’t care to try this recipe, get this flavor. I could easily be the difference between success and failure for whatever you’re trying to do with pineapple, as long as you don’t mind a short steep to get rid of a little metallic off-note that it has off a fresh shake.

Sweetener. Unnecessary here. Add some if you must, but try it without first.

Cover art by @mlNikon!