Brewing a Christmas Drink With Roots in Puerto Rico
It began inside Debbie Quiñones’s apartment in East Harlem in the winter of 2002. An old family friend had recently died without passing on her secret recipe for coquito, the traditional Puerto Rican Christmas drink that tastes something like eggnog on a beach vacation. Ms. Quiñones invited a few friends over, many with a bottle of homemade coquito in tow, and turned her party into a competition.
Seven years later, as a winter storm dumped buckets of snow on the city, some 200 people gathered Saturday night at Museo del Barrio to select the best coquito in New York. It was the eighth annual Coquito Masters contest, the culmination of weeks of preliminary contests held across New York by the International Coquito Federation, the brainchild of Ms. Quiñones.
“Coquito is a very important tradition in the Puerto Rican community,” Ms. Quiñones said. “Everyone has their own recipe.” And behind every recipe, she added, “there’s always a grandmother or an aunt or an old town.”
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