Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Great Escape!

A grownup, spirit-forward take on the Pina Colada. Because it's 2025, and booze.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. I can’t hold off any longer. I need to make a fancy rum cocktail. I need to make a strong rum cocktail. I had an inspiration: Combine two of the best flavored rums I’ve ever tasted in one glass. Make a stirred, spirit-forward “pina colada” with no creme de coconut or pineapple. I did not succeed in making that drink. But the drink I eventually made was really good, so let’s talk about that. Time for a Great Escape. Here’s the recipe:

Great Escape

1 ½ oz Planteray Cut and Dried Coconut Rum

1 ½ oz Planteray Mr. Stiggins’ Pineapple Rum

½ roasted pineapple ring

¾ oz organic coconut water

¾ oz pineapple syrup

¼ oz lime juice

2-3 drops saline

Muddle the pineapple ring in the bottom of your cocktail shaker. Add the rest of the ingredients to the shaker, shake, and double strain into a mai tai glass over ice. Garnish with a roasted pineapple wedge, dehydrated lime wheel, and umbrella.

Roasted Pineapple Rings

4 fresh pineapple rings

¼ cup rum

¼ cup light brown sugar

Combine the rum and brown sugar in a saucepan over low heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Marinate the pineapple rings in the rum mixture for an hour. Fry the rings in a saucepan or skillet until browned. Store in an airtight container in the fridge.

Planteray is my favorite rum brand, especially now that they’ve completed their name change from “Plantation.” Both rums use actual fruit in their distillation — no artificial flavors here. The end results are wonderfully tasty.

My first step in building this drink was tasting both rums together, 50/50, in a shot glass. It was clear that the rums were naturally flavored, but it was also apparent that they had had sugar added after distillation. That’s not uncommon; sipping rums like Bumbu have so much sugar added to them that they don’t qualify as rum anymore. It’s not unexpected to find sugar here to support the fruit flavors, but it would have to be factored in when adding extra ingredients.

I hadn’t worked with coconut water before, but I wanted an alternative to artificially flavored creme de coconut. I was very pleased to find a bitter note in the coconut water that would help balance out the sweetness in the rums. I was less pleased when the pineapple flavors in the rum were snuffed out with the addition of the coconut water. I had hoped to avoid it, but more sweetness and more pineapple was needed in the drink to balance the bitter coconut.

Rather than pineapple and simple syrup, I chose to make a pineapple syrup to boost the caramel notes in the drink and tamp down the raw flavors of the pineapple juice. That made for a drink that was good, but still seemed heavy and dull. I wanted to make a stirred drink, but shaking the cocktail immediately improved it. The general rule of thumb is: Shake a cocktail that has fruit juice, stir one that has only spirits. Shaking this drink made it lighter and frothier — simply a better drink. Lime juice also provided some needed acid, and saline helped blend the bitter and sweet elements.

I roasted some pineapple rings to serve as a garnish, but they were a bit wet to work with on top of a glass. They smelled heavenly, though; all the caramel and pineapple I’d hoped for in the glass was right here. In a flash of inspiration, I muddled one of the pineapple rings into the cocktail. Perfect — that last little touch the drink needed.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Cut and Dried Coconut Rum: If this is too pricey or rare, look for Siesta Key Coconut Rum. It’s all natural and uses toasted coconut as its flavoring. Do not use Malibu. It uses artificial coconut flavor and so much sugar that it’s rum adjacent at best.

Mr. Stiggins’ Pineapple Rum: It’s harder to find a natural pineapple rum, but it’s also easier to find this bottle in stores. If you must, try Bacardi Pineapple, but I’d rather that you upped the pineapple syrup in the drink and use a good aged rum like Planteray Special Dark or Pussers instead.

Roasted pineapple rings: If you don’t have the wherewithal to make this cocktail, at least make the rings. They’re a lovely dessert in their own right.

Coconut water: CocoVita can be easily found in most grocery stores. I deliberately avoided creme de coconut. It’s a common bar ingredient, but full of emulsifiers and sugar.

Pineapple syrup: Pineapple juice and demerara sugar, equal portions, heated until the sugar dissolves. Easy peasy.

Lime juice: A quarter of a lime will give you just enough juice. Sing the words for the ones in the back: “Plastic fruits make plastic juice.”

Saline: 2:1 water to sea salt, shaken and put in a dropper bottle for cocktails. You don’t want to add enough saline to make the drink salty, just enough to enhance the flavors.

In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below!

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We aren’t linking to Amazon anymore, because fuck Bezos. Go read And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. Rum and America have been inextricably tied together, for good or ill, since the beginning. This book provides a fun tour of that history as seen through the bottom of a glass.

You can find me on Bluesky at @samuraigrog!

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