tropical drink , to contemporary Western ears, is a generic term for any fruity rum punch or frozen colada. But this is a blinkered view of a much broader drink category that stretches back hundreds of years, crosses many cultural divides, and encompasses a wide variety of alcoholic beverages. These can be divided into two main categories: indigenous drinks made in the tropics before European contact and the hybrid drinks that resulted after the Old World invaded the equatorial regions of the New.
Pre-contact tropical drinks existed almost everywhere that pre-contact tropical peoples did. Equatorial Central and West Africans brewed palm wine, while tropical East Africans fermented millet seeds into a strong, bitter intoxicant called pombe. In South America, Amazonian tribes brewed chicha, a low-ABV maize beer, while the Miskito people of Central America fermented bananas into mishlaw. The Kalinago of the Caribbean islands chewed cassava bread, spat it into a bowl, and waited for the enzymes in their saliva to ferment it into ouicou. In the South Pacific, Vanuatu islanders fermented the kava plant in much the same way, chewing its psychoactive root and then spitting it into coconut milk. In the Philippines, Bataan natives soaked berries in sugar-cane juice, which fermented in large clay jars into bashee.
Moving farther east, we encounter not just fermentation but distillation. Throughout Indonesia and the Indian subcontinent, palm sap (and sometimes rice or coconut) was distilled into an aqua vitae called either toddy or arrack. See aqua vitae; toddy; and arrack. It was here in Southeast Asia, with the arrival of English and Dutch traders, that the “hybrid” tropical drink template was born. See Southeast Asia. By the early 1600s, European traders were mixing the local arrack with local citrus juice and sugar to make what would come to be called punch (historian David Wondrich suggests that Sri Lankan natives may have invented a proto-punch called vinperle even before East met West). See punch.
Sailors brought punch back with them to Europe and, more important to the development of the hybrid tropical drink, to Europe’s fledgling Caribbean colonies, which conveniently happened to grow the prized tropical produce that went in Southeast Asian punches (courtesy of Columbus, who had introduced both limes and sugar to the West Indies). Here British and French planters folded a new ingredient into punch: rum, which they’d begun distilling from the leftovers of the sugar-making process in the mid-1600s.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the bones of Caribbean punch—rum, lime, and sugar—had also become the spine of the modern, single-serving tropical drink. Jamaica mixed rum, lime, and sugar into Planter’s Punch; Martinique swizzled them into Petit (or Ti’) Punch; and Cuba shook them into the Daiquiri and Mojito. See Daiquiri; Mojito; Planter’s Punch; and Ti’ Punch. Prohibition brought these drinks to the attention of the United States, where after Repeal proto-tiki bartenders fleshed out the Caribbean rum-lime-sugar formula with multiple fruit juices and spice-infused syrups. See fruit juice. These faux-Polynesian concoctions dominated the tropical drink category in the years following World War II, which also saw the rise of two other mainstays of the contemporary tropical drink—pineapple and coconut—courtesy of the Piña Colada, which began life in 1954 at a Puerto Rican hotel bar. See Piña Colada.
Farther south, late twentieth-century tourists also discovered the hybrid tropical drinks of Brazil, where transplanted Southeast Asian punch had evolved over time into the Caipirinha (lime, sugar, and the local sugar-cane distillate cachaça) and the Batida (cachaça blended with mango, papaya, or any other tropical fruit at hand). See Caipirinha and Batida.
In the twenty-first century, tropical drink mixology continues to evolve. Thai basil, lemongrass, persimmon, sandalwood, and ever more exotic ingredients now find their way into punches, coladas, and neo-tiki drinks at craft cocktail bars. Meanwhile, in the tropics themselves, indigenous peoples still ferment and consume
Berry, Jeff. Potions of the Caribbean. New York: Cocktail Kingdom, 2015.
Peters, Carl. New Light on Dark Africa: Being the Narrative of the German Emin Pasha Expedition. London: Ward, Locke, 1891.
Wondrich, David. Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl. New York: Perigree, 2010.
By: Jeff Berry