The Lore, the Legend, The Piña Colada
By Richard Boccato and Giuseppe Gonzalez of Painkiller, NYC

Like all great drinks, there are stories regarding the origins of the Piña Colada that are as rich and complex as its consistency. The thousands of myths and legends that are culled from the pantheon of cocktail folklore invariably fall somewhere between fact and fiction. With that in mind, we humbly submit the following thesis for your consideration.

Before we begin, we would like to acknowledge George Sinclair at www.thinkingbartender.com for his exhaustive research on the subject of the Piña Colada. We are fortunate to have access to this information and we could not justify our hypothesis without referencing Mr. Sinclair’s contributions.

By many accounts, the earliest mention of this cocktail dates back to the 1800‘s, when a Puerto Rican pirate by the name of Roberto Cofresi favored a drink with white rum, coconut milk and pineapple. It is almost futile to debate what his white rum may or may not have tasted like, the difficulties of juicing fresh pineapples in the 1800’s, or the fact that there is no written recipe for his “cocktail”. Cofresi died in 1825, and for all intents and purposes so did the story of his prototype for what we now call the Piña Colada. For the sake of argument, we will agree that a Piña Colada is simply rum, some form of coconut (we will explain why this matters later), and pineapple.

There are references to a drink called the “Piña Fria” (cold pineapple) in 1910. In an excerpt from “IN CUBA AND JAMAICA” by H. G. de Lisser, the author states that:

“You ask for “Piña Fria, and he takes a pineapple and peels it and cuts it into large chunks and pounds it up with white sugar and ice and water, and hands the concoction to you in a huge, thick tumbler, and you find it delicious.”

In essence, this appears to be a pineapple Daiquiri of sorts but the fruit is muddled, Caipirinha style. The argument could clearly be made that this is indeed the predecessor to the Piña Colada; however we believe that such an argument literally does not hold enough (coconut) water to be plausible. Furthermore, this cocktail is not “blended” or “frozen”. Commercial blenders were not highly prevalent in bars during the early 20th century since the device was invented in 1922 (the famous Waring blender did not arrive on the market until 1935). More importantly, a Piña Colada when translated into English means “strained pineapple.” This is not a reference to the juice itself but instead an indication of how the drink is supposed to be served. In Spanish, a more enlightening translation would be “strained/cored-out pineapple.” Therefore, a Piña Colada served in anything other than a cored pineapple is (technically) not a Piña Colada. Recipe references would do best not to omit such an obvious fact as the vessel that a drink should be served in when that information is specifically stated in the cocktail’s name.

In 1922, TRAVEL magazine mentions a cocktail of Cuban origin called the Piña Colada:

“But best of all is a Piña colada, the juice of a perfectly ripe pineapple — a delicious drink in itself — rapidly shaken up with ice, sugar, lime and Bacardi rum in delicate proportions. What could be more luscious, more mellow and more fragrant?”

Like the earlier “Piña Fria”, once again here we find no mention of coconut in any form. This is also a pineapple “Daiquiri”, and it was quite possibly served in a pineapple. It is around this time that the roots take shape for what we now consider to be the true forefather of the modern Piña Colada.

In 1926, there is mention of a cocktail called the “Pineapple Crush”

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