Vintage American Cocktails

What Is The Coco Loco?

The Coco Loco is a famous beach and street stand cocktail in Colombia that has spread to other parts of the Caribbean. Now I’ve never been to Colombia and couldn’t find any old recipe books mentioning it, so everything I have learned about it I got from the all-mighty Google. It seems to be a popular beachgoer and tourist drink, each selling using a different recipe. I couldn’t find anything canon on the coco loco, and like so many Caribbean cocktails, it seems comfortable living as a pretty local drink with countless variations. The coco loco is often made right on the beach before the customer. The vendor cuts the top off a coconut, adds the ingredients with the coconut water, gives the coconut a couple of shakes, and puts a straw in the hole. Although even with all the variety, every recipe I tested includes cream of coconut, coconut water, lime juice, simple syrup, vodka, white rum, and silver tequila. So basically, I just stuck to the average of most recipes I found. I do question how old it is and can’t see it being older than the 1950s, at the most. The inclusion of vodka is odd since vodka didn’t leave Russia in large volumes till the bolshevik revolution in 1917. Furthermore, vodka didn’t become a popular cocktail spirit till the 1940s with the invention of the Moscow Mule in LA. If the Coco Loco is older, I imagine vodka was a later addition to boost the ABV to suit American taste.

Variations of the Coco Loco

From what I read, there seem to be as many recipes for the coco loco as people making it. It’s a cheap and easy-to-make cocktail for which tourists can be suckered into paying a high price. Most major Caribbean cruise ships have their recipe for it. The recipe provided here is the sum of all the recipes I could find for it in English and Spanish averaged out. Think of this as a default recipe, but go for it if you want to add something that improves it or makes it unique.

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