St. John Frizell keeps detailed notes, enabling me to tell you the precise date that the Angostura Colada made its public debut: October 2, 2013. Frizell was the longtime owner of Fort Defiance, the Brooklyn bar situated in the waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook that shuttered in the wake of the pandemic. In August of that year, Zac Overman, then a cub bartender working for Frizell, had persuaded his boss to green-light a weekly pop-up tiki night. It was first known as Forbidden Island, and later renamed Sunken Harbor Club on (per Frizell’s notes) January 23, 2014.
Overman’s approach to campaigning had been to let his drinks do the talking. “He really had to work on me,” recalls Frizell, who spent much of his cocktail upbringing under Audrey Saunders at Pegu Club, a Manhattan bar known for its tightly composed drinks. “It took him weeks of bringing blue drinks to my desk—dropping them and then walking away—for me to relent.”
Fort Defiance, Overman says, “always had an expat-bar vibe, and there was a huge influence on the cocktail list from the travel writing and drinking of Charles H. Baker Jr., so it was a pretty natural fit to work in a night dedicated to more ostentatious and escapist tropical drinks.” The public response, he says, was great. “Red Hook at that time didn’t need much of an excuse to have a good time, and Thursday nights pretty quickly grew into a big party.”
Overman’s Angostura Colada was one of two Sunken Harbor Club cocktails that quickly became crowd favorites and signatures of the Thursday-night tiki program. (The White Zombie, also by Overman, was the other.) As the name suggests, it’s a play on the Piña Colada. Yet the drink is hardly a typical tropical cocktail. In fact, it’s not a typical cocktail at all. Instead of a traditional rum base, Overman opts for one and a half ounces of Angostura bitters (44.7 percent ABV) and a half-ounce of Smith & Cross overproof rum (57 percent ABV).
Overman says he owed the liberty to go so heavy on the bitters to another unusual yet influential cocktail, the Trinidad Sour, a drink created in the late aughts by Giuseppe González that combines orgeat, lemon and whiskey with a lot of Angostura bitters. “Let’s be honest, the Ango Colada is a trashy Trinidad Sour,” says Overman. “[The Angostura Colada] wouldn’t exist without that drink. I wouldn’t have thought to use bitters as a base spirit otherwise.”
According to Frizell, the idea sounded ludicrous on paper. “When [Overman] proposed the idea to me, I thought he was insane. I mean, there’s no way that that drink was going to work. And of course it does and it works wonderfully.”
The Angostura Colada also bucked the growing trend of housemade everything. “Around that time, there were a lot of bars making their own bespoke, artisanal cream of coconut, but I unabashedly love Coco Lopez, and applying the Trinidad Sour formula to a Lopez-based Piña Colada to balance the sweetness just seemed like the move,” Overman says. “It was one of those rare one-and-done recipes—I haven’t really tweaked it since.”
Despite its misfit demeanor (or maybe because of it), tiki practitioners across the country embraced the Angostura Colada and started including it on their menus. One notable homage came when tiki aficionado Martin Cate, who runs Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco, featured the Angostura Colada on the debut drinks menu he wrote for Max’s South Seas Hideaway, a two-story, 200-seat tiki bar in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Angostura Colada remains on the menu at Max’s nearly five years later.
Allie Stage, a longtime bar manager at Max’s, says, “I remember from our days of training back in 2019 that the Angostura Colada was placed on the menu as an ode to Zac Overman and his modern classic cocktail, as there aren’t many in the world of tiki.”
But Cate’s first encounter with the Angostura Colada was not at Fort Defiance. His first taste came in Anaheim, California, on a visit to Trader Sam’s Enchanted Tiki Bar at the Disneyland Hotel, where apparently the cocktail hadchecked in under a pseudonym. “They called it the Angolada, but it’s clearly our drink,” says Frizell. “I don’t know if it gets any more complimentary than that—to be ripped off by Walt Disney.”
After years in distant lands, by October 2021 the Angostura Colada was on the cusp of a kind of Brooklyn homecoming, but not before undergoing a makeover. Frizell and his business partners were reviving the Sunken Harbor Club concept, not as a pop-up but as a brick-and-mortar establishment—this time in downtown Brooklyn, located on the floor above the landmarked restaurant Gage & Tollner. Frizell felt the club’s return wouldn’t be complete without favorites like the White Zombie and Angostura Colada on the menu.
He enlisted Garret Richard to not only manage the bar but also revisit these touchstones of the original pop-up. At the time, Richard was in the midst of co-authoring the modernist cocktail recipe book Tropical Standard, a book that recognized tiki as one of the first cocktail movements to embrace 20th-century advancements like ice machines, drink mixers and blenders. Richard’s approach in the book and at Sunken Harbor Club was to apply 21st-century techniques to further enhance the innovations introduced by tiki’s forebears.
In reinventing the Angostura Colada, Richard incorporated acid-adjusted pineapple juice, allowing that flavor to pop more while dialing back the drink’s perceived sweetness, and allowing the lime from the original recipe to be left out. Richard also cut the Coco Lopez with coconut milk to reduce its sweetness to that of a standard simple syrup. To mix the drink, he flash-blended the liquid ingredients with a measured amount of crushed ice, then dumped that mixture onto fresh crushed ice in the glass—a way to orchestrate time-delayed dilution and to better release the drink’s aromatics.
That version of the Angostura Colada became known as “2.0.” Today, Sunken Harbor Club’s menu has a “3.0” iteration, the goal of which, Richard tells me, is to “put more ‘colada’ in the Angostura Colada.” To that end, the cocktail is prepared in a blender using pineapple chunks and xanthan gum to help stabilize the blend, keeping the ice and liquid better incorporated. The fresh fruit flavor and the slushy-machine texture are two quintessential markers that bring to mind the classic beach bar colada.
Overman, who moved to Seattle in the 2010s to run bars like L’Oursin and Bar Bayonne, now watches the cocktail world’s ongoing fascination with the Angostura Colada from a distance. “It’s pretty fun and trippy—I get tagged on social media every once in a while because some dude in Germany or Argentina found the recipe online and decided to make one and post it,” he says. “It’s hilarious to me that this very whimsical and tongue-in-cheek ripoff drink has had this kind of staying power, but it’s obviously also very flattering.”