Chinola Cocktails: 5 Recipes to Make with Passion Fruit Liqueur
| August 2, 2026
Chinola has quietly become one of the hardest working bottles on my bar. It shows up in more of my recipes than any other liqueur, in everything from margaritas to tiki drinks, and people ask me about it constantly. So this is the roundup: every Chinola cocktail on this site in one place, plus what the liqueur actually is and what to do if you can't find a bottle.
What is Chinola?
Chinola is the Dominican word for passion fruit, and the liqueur lives up to the name. It's made in the Dominican Republic from fresh passion fruit blended with neutral cane spirit and cane sugar, with no artificial flavorings, and bottled at 21% ABV. That's the thing that sets it apart from most fruit liqueurs: it tastes like actual fruit juice with a kick, not candy. There's also a second bottle, Chinola Mango, which earns its spot in the last drink on this list.
Because it's basically tart passion fruit juice with sugar and alcohol, Chinola is one of the easiest liqueurs to swap into drinks you already know. Anywhere a recipe calls for passion fruit syrup or another passion fruit liqueur, it slots right in.
1. Passion Fruit Margarita (the Dominican Daisy)
The most popular Chinola drink on the site, and the best place to start. A margarita is just a daisy template with orange liqueur, so swapping the orange liqueur for Chinola turns it into a passion fruit margarita, sometimes called the Dominican Daisy. Nothing exotic to buy beyond the bottle itself: tequila, lime, Chinola.
Get the Passion Fruit Margarita recipe
2. The Saturn
One of the rare tiki drinks built on gin instead of rum, and one of my favorite cocktails, period. The classic calls for passion fruit syrup, but Chinola handles that job beautifully alongside lime, falernum, and orgeat. If you've written off gin in tiki drinks, this is the one that changes minds.
3. Passionfruit Daiquiri with Cachaça
A daiquiri is the best template there is for showing off a spirit, and here the spirit is cachaça, Brazil's sugarcane cousin of rum. Its grassy funk plays really well against Chinola's tartness. If you don't have cachaça, a white rum works and gets you a more traditional passion fruit daiquiri.
Get the Passionfruit Daiquiri recipe
4. Lost Lake
Paul McGee's modern tiki classic from the late, great Chicago bar of the same name: aged Jamaican rum, pineapple, maraschino, Campari, and passion fruit. The original uses passion fruit syrup, and this is a perfect example of the 1:1 swap trick from earlier, since Chinola stands in without missing a beat. The most complex drink on this list and worth every bottle it asks for.
5. Mango Mezcal Ranch Water
The mango bottle's turn. Mezcal brings the smoke, Chinola Mango keeps it tropical, and it's still built right in the Topo Chico bottle like a proper Ranch Water. If you see the mango version on a shelf and wonder whether it's worth it, this drink is the answer.
Get the Mango Mezcal Ranch Water recipe
What can you substitute for Chinola?
Going the other direction works too. If a recipe here calls for Chinola and you can't find it, passion fruit syrup covers the flavor in a pinch (drop any other sweetener in the recipe to compensate, since syrup is sweeter), or look for another passion fruit liqueur like Passoã, which is sweeter and less tart but gets you in the neighborhood.
If you make any of these, I'd love to see it. Tag me on Instagram or find more passion fruit experiments on my YouTube channel.
