Cocktails We Love is a new column on Boozist highlighting the best cocktails in Chicago as well as ones you can make in your own kitchen. Have a suggestion? Send it our way!

The Payapa Sling might be the world’s greatest cocktail, but you’ll never know.

Making a drink shouldn’t be all that difficult. Pour some stuff in a shaker, shake, pour. See? It’s really only two words repeated. Well, that’s not the case when you get the dumb idea to use papaya juice in your cocktail.

Never in my life thought to myself, “Self, you should really make a Papaya Sling.” It’s not even in my top five fruits whose origins I don’t know. When the First Lady of Boozist made some crazy fish dish for dinner though, I couldn’t let an entire half of a papaya go to waste. So I decided to juice it.

I’ve juiced more fruit than Wrigley in my day, but they’re normally lemons/limes/oranges. This was a different beast. You can’t even call it juicing. I just smashed the fruit and collected any liquid that remained. I’ve would have been better off with a rolling pin. The result was less than four ounces of juice from a bigass payapa (Google it if you have to). It was also a complete mess, as you can see from the photo above.

The upside? The Papaya Sling is a glorious cocktail. Quite possibly the best drink I’ll never make again. I’ve included the recipe below in case you’re one of those fancy types that has an actual juice extractor. If so, by all means go for it.



Papaya Sling Recipe

2.5 oz gin (I used Nolet’s)

2.0 oz fresh lime juice

1.0 oz fresh devil papaya juice

papaya juice 4 dashes bitters (I used Angostura)

Club Soda

Fill a penguin-shaped mixing glass with ice. Add everything but the soda and shake it like a cocktail filled shaker. It’s fresh juice, so be aggressive. Strain into ice filled glass, ideally a cocktail glass instead of my beer glass. Top up with soda.