Pina Colada

Puerto Rico's national drink and the taste of vacation in a glass. Rum, pineapple, and coconut cream blended into frozen tropical perfection. Umbrella garnish mandatory.

The Piña Colada's creation is one of the most contested origin stories in cocktail history, with two Puerto Rican bartenders each holding credible claims. Ramón Marrero Pérez, known as Monchito, created a coconut-pineapple-rum drink at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan on August 15, 1954, after approximately three months of experimentation; the Caribe Hilton documented this date and the recipe used Coco López, a sweetened coconut cream product introduced in 1954 by Ramón López Irizarry of the University of Puerto Rico's Agricultural Experiment Station. Ramón Portas Mingot at the Barrachina restaurant in Old San Juan maintains a separate claim, asserting that he created a version in 1963. The Caribe Hilton documentation gives Marrero's 1954 claim stronger evidential support, and most cocktail historians including David Wondrich and Ted Haigh accept it as primary. Puerto Rico's legislature declared the Piña Colada the island's official national drink in 1978. The name means strained pineapple in Spanish — piña (pineapple) colada (strained or sieved) — describing either the process of straining fresh pineapple juice or the visual appearance of the frothy, white drink. The Piña Colada became the most commercially successful blended tropical cocktail globally through the 1970s and 1980s, and Rupert Holmes's 1979 song Escape (The Piña Colada Song) embedded it permanently in American popular culture.