Name: Tiki Sour: Pina Colada
Brand: Corporate Ladder Brewing Company
Availability: InStock

Tiki Sour: Pina Colada is back at Corporate Ladder Brewing Company after an absence long enough that the brewery put the word LONG in capital letters when it announced the return.

The beer is a gluten free sour at 8.5 percent, conditioned on pineapple puree and cream of coconut. Corporate Ladder frames it as a straight read of the cocktail rather than a riff on it, and the brewery's own tap list description asks for copious amounts of both ingredients.

That second ingredient is the one carrying the concept. Cream of coconut is not coconut milk and not plain coconut cream. It is a sweetened, emulsified product that was worked out and commercialized in Puerto Rico around the middle of the last century, and the pina colada in its familiar form dates from roughly the same moment and the same island. The newsletter puts the drink's roots in 1950s San Juan. Corporate Ladder's tap list is more careful, calling the origins disputed but most likely Puerto Rican.

What that does to a sour is worth thinking about. Fat and sugar both blunt the perception of acidity, and cream of coconut brings a good deal of each to a base that is built on acid. Pineapple pushes the other way, since it arrives acidic already. The brewery describes the result as tropical, creamy and tart, which is a reasonable way to describe a beer being pulled in two directions on purpose.

The can commits to the theme without overworking it. A coconut is split open across the front with a black and white beach scene set inside the shell, a pineapple propped against one side and a small figure caught mid-jump above it.

Tiki Sour: Pina Colada is pouring on draft at the Palmetto beer garden now and is available in 16 ounce four-packs to go, with online ordering for taproom pickup. The photo the brewery sent with the announcement was taken at the edge of a swimming pool, which is at least honest about the intended setting.

Editor’s Take

Cream of coconut is one of the great unsung industrial products. It is not a state that coconuts arrive in unassisted. Somebody had to sit down and decide that coconut ought to be sweetened, emulsified and made shelf-stable so a bartender could reach for it without first going at anything with a machete. The pina colada exists downstream of that decision. Corporate Ladder has put the actual stuff in a beer rather than reaching for a flavoring, which is the difference between doing the bit and doing the bit properly.

The part I keep circling back to is the 8.5 percent. A pina colada is a drink engineered to taste as though it is not doing anything to you, and Corporate Ladder has carried that quality across into a beer with the strength of a double IPA. The brewery calls it vacation mode in a glass. Accurate, and admirably literal.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Tiki Sour: Pina Colada Is Back, Cream of Coconut and All

Off the tap list long enough that the brewery announced the return in capital letters, Tiki Sour: Pina Colada is back at 8.5 percent, conditioned on pineapple puree and cream of coconut.

Source & Editorial