Cocktails in Puerto Viejo: Tropical Fruit, Cacao & Caribbean Flavours
There are certain drinks that make more sense when you're drinking them somewhere hot.
A cold beer after the beach is one. Rum with plenty of lime is another.
Puerto Viejo has its own collection of flavours to play with: tropical fruit, cacao, ginger, hibiscus, citrus, sugar cane and, of course, rum.
At Cacao Huasi, we've gradually found more and more of them making their way behind the bar.
A cocktail that belongs where you drink it
We like classics.
There's a reason a mojito is still a mojito and a Negroni has survived perfectly well without passion fruit being added to it.
But it's also fun when a familiar drink starts picking up something from the place where it's being made.
Our Caribbean Dark n Stormy starts with rum, lime and ginger, but we use a ginger oleo saccharum—a syrup made by drawing the aromatic oils out of fresh ingredients with sugar.
The result is recognisably a Dark n Stormy, just pulled a little closer to the Caribbean.
That's more or less how we think about the cocktail menu.
Rum belongs here
You can't really talk about drinking in the Caribbean without eventually getting to rum.
Sugar cane has shaped the Caribbean economically, culturally and not always happily for centuries. Rum came out of that history and became one of the spirits most closely associated with the region.
One of the simplest drinks on our menu is also one of the most Caribbean: Ti Punch.
Ours is made with rhum agricole, lime and honey.
Rhum agricole is made directly from fresh sugar-cane juice rather than molasses, so it can be grassy, vegetal and surprisingly expressive.
There isn't much to hide behind in a Ti Punch.
That's rather the point.
Tropical fruit doesn't have to mean sweet
This is something we play with quite a lot.
Passion fruit has enough acidity to stand up to tequila in our Passion Margarita.
Starfruit appears with mezcal, lime and hibiscus-flower chamoy in Lick It Up.
Golden berry becomes a liqueur for the Golden Rush Spritzer, with lime, prosecco and soda.
And raspberry meets the bitterness of Campari in the Campari Berry.
Living somewhere surrounded by extraordinary fruit makes it very tempting to put all of it into drinks.
The trick is making sure the result still tastes like a cocktail rather than breakfast.
And eventually cacao gets into the bar
This was probably inevitable.
We make chocolate here, so cacao tends to escape from the workshop and appear in other parts of Cacao Huasi.
Our Old Fashion Cacao & Corn combines corn whiskey, brown sugar and cacao bitters.
Cacao bitters don't make it taste like a chocolate dessert. They bring some of cacao's darker, aromatic side into a drink that's still very clearly an Old Fashioned.
There's also a Cacao Tonic among the simpler drinks on the menu.
We spend a lot of time talking about cacao as something more complicated than sweetness. Cocktails give us another place to explore that.
Mezcal somehow found its way to the Caribbean too
Mezcal obviously isn't Caribbean. It belongs to Mexico.
But we're curious about flavour before we're particularly worried about borders.
Smoke and agave work surprisingly well with some of the fruits and flavours we have here.
Our Jungle Tonic combines mezcal, tonic and cucumber. Lick It Up takes mezcal in a completely different direction with starfruit and hibiscus chamoy.
And if you'd rather explore mezcal slowly than put it into a cocktail, we also have a Mezcal & Chocolate pairing in the late afternoon.
What to drink at sunset
Honestly, whatever you like.
There isn't a correct Puerto Viejo sunset cocktail.
Something long and cold works particularly well after a hot day—a Dark n Stormy, Jungle Tonic or spritzer. Rum feels at home here. A margarita is difficult to argue with.
Or ignore all of that and order a Negroni.
The important part is probably arriving before the light starts to change.
Our deck looks out across the Caribbean toward Playa Negra and the hills beyond, so late afternoon tends to turn one drink into another fairly easily.
We've written a separate guide to where to watch the sunset in Puerto Viejo if the view is more important to you than what's in the glass.
If you're celebrating something, we've also put together our idea for a different kind of date night in Puerto Viejo.
Stay for something to eat
This is perhaps our recurring advice about evenings at Cacao Huasi:
Don't rush off.
Have a cocktail while it's still light. Order something to eat. Wander through the art exhibition. If there's music happening, stay for that.
Or come after one of our rum, wine or mezcal chocolate pairings and carry on into dinner.
Puerto Viejo evenings don't generally improve by being over-organised.
Neither do cocktails.
