Tropical Mocktail Recipes That Don’t Use Pineapple or Coconut

When you like tropical drinks, you’ll often find yourself drowning in pineapple or coconut juice. While delicious, the word ‘tropical’ can mean a lot more than the classic fruits most commonly found in the Pacific region. There’s a whole eastern hemisphere of tropical vistas that are filled with equally delicious ingredients, so here are three examples you should try.

Kiwifruit Recipes

The kiwifruit is perhaps the most famous tropical fruit from the east. Despite its name, these sour green fruits were native to China long before they became associated with New Zealand and its brown, fuzzy national bird. Since going global, these big berries have found their way into a lot of tropical recipes.

In fact, kiwifruit is the only fruit on this list that features in tropical media a lot, often beside Pacific ingredients. For example, some games on the internet are inspired by the chilled atmosphere of a tropical beach and the sweet drinks you can find on them. For those that play online bingo, games like Paradise Reels feature the kiwifruit front and centre as a special symbol.

As for mocktails that feature kiwifruit, you can make a kiwi margarita mocktail if you have lime juice, soda water, salt, and some n/a tequila. Muddle several kiwis together in a shaker with ice, 30ml of lime juice, 120ml of n/a tequila and a pinch of salt. Serve them in cocktail glasses, topped up with soda water, and you can garnish them with more kiwi if you like.

For something more varied, you can try a kiwi orange spritzer mocktail. To make it, you’ll need kiwis, orange juice, ginger beer and natural sweeteners like honey, agave or syrup. Mull kiwis in 120ml of orange juice together until the kiwis are mush. Then add three or four tablespoons of your sweetener, and top with ginger beer.

Lychee Recipes

The lychee is a sweet fleshy fruit from the tropical Indochina Peninsula, though there are other cultivars found further east in the Philippines and Indonesia. They’re small and red, but peel to reveal a shiny white flesh with a stone inside. That flesh tastes subtly of rosewater, with a watery sweet texture similar to strawberries but with a citrusy kick.

While they are delicious to eat by hand, you’ll want to find lychee juice when making a drink. To make a lychee mocktail martini, you can add 70ml of lychee juice or nectar and 15ml of lime juice into a shaker with ice. It helps to chill your glass beforehand, too. Then you can add a teaspoon of grenadine to add more taste and colour to the drink. If you don’t like ice chunks, strain the drink as much as you can. You can also swap the lime juice for equal parts orange juice to lychee juice, and two teaspoons of grenadine to make a lychee sunrise mocktail.

Date Recipes

Lastly, we have dates. They don’t have the vibrant colour of most tropical fruits, but their sweet, honey-like taste is undeniable. Most often, they’re served dried so they have a deep, sugary flavour that’s similar to caramel. While they are cultivated in places like California and Mexico today, dates first grew on palm trees in the Middle East and the Indus Valley. This makes them one of the oldest fruits that humanity has enjoyed.

Like with lychee, you’ll want to get your hands on date syrup. It’s sold as a fruity kind of molasses. You can also keep some dates handy for garnish. From there, you can make an old fashioned mocktail but swap the citrusy orange out for the sweeter date instead. Shake 70ml of n/a bourbon with 30ml of date syrup and a dash or three of bitters, then strain into a lowball glass. If a recipe calls for sugar syrup, you can try adding date syrup instead for a more complex, fruity taste.

Those are three fruits that might not come to mind when you think ‘tropical’ but fit the bill. Try them out for yourself or, if you find that drinking them is more fun than making them, seek someone out who can handle a shaker.