The new hypothesis on the table is that coconut-flavored rum is useless.
- It’s nothing you actually want to drink on its own
- It’s neither fish nor fowl: not quite a rum, not quite a liqueur
- For mixological purposes, a decent coconut liqueur will get the job done better
I’ve been back and forth with Beachbum Berry and Adam Kolesar about a new tiki recipe (it will bow soon in Beachbum Berry’s Total Tiki) that is intended to bring rum, coconut and pineapple together with an overlooked ingredient. The recipe began a couple years ago with the Brinley product, but revisiting that today has been underwhelming and frustrating. (Setting aside the fact the product is hard to obtain.) Switching out to a coconut liqueur—the aforementioned Clement Mahina Coco—made it much easier to control the amount of coconut flavor in the drink relative to the other ingredients, and freed up the rum to be rum.