Wine, Cocktails, and Beverages of Panama

Overview

The Panamanian drinks table is broader than its beer scene alone, and the cuisine source documents the range directly through its drinks section. The traditional Panamanian drinks include coffee, the fresh fruit juices known as licuados or jugos naturales, chicha, chicheme, resbaladera, ron ponche, saril, and malteada, which is a list that runs from hot coffee through cold fruit and grain drinks to the eggnog-style ron ponche, and that sits alongside the alcoholic base of rum, Seco Herrerano, and beer.^[1] The beer source confirms the alcoholic context by naming Panama’s rum and seco alongside the beer in the same opening framing (“Panama produces three brands of rum and a similar liquor known as Seco Herrerano, but beer is also quite popular”), which places the three distilled and fermented drinks together as the country’s alcoholic core.^[2] This page covers the non-beer side of that landscape: the coffee, the juices, the traditional cold drinks, and the rum-and-seco spirits, with the panamanian-beer page handling the beer side separately.

A note on scope: the cited sources document the traditional and the spirits side of Panamanian drinking in good detail, but they do not document the contemporary wine-import or craft-cocktail-bar scene. A page covering Panama City’s modern wine lists and cocktail culture would need sourcing from current food media, which is not in the consulted material, and the present page treats the wine-and-cocktail end as an under-sourced follow-up.

Boquete coffee: the signature hot drink

Coffee is the hot drink that defines Panama, and the cuisine source documents the specific origin it comes from. Traditional coffee is grown in the Chiriquí highlands, and the reference to “traditional coffee drying at the Alto Boquete plant of Cafe Ruiz, Boquete, Panamá” establishes Boquete, the highland town on the eastern flank of Volcán Barú, as the centre of the country’s coffee tradition.^[1] Boquete coffee is the Panamanian hot drink that has the strongest international reputation: the Boquete-grown specialty coffees, particularly the Geisha variety, have placed at or near the top of international cupping competitions, and the highland climate that produces them is the same climate the regional-cuisine page frames as the Chiriquí highland regional-cuisine zone.

For everyday drinking, coffee in Panama means the coffee grown in those Chiriquí highlands and brewed strong, typically served as café con leche (with milk) at breakfast and after meals. The Cafe Ruiz reference in the source is the named traditional operation, a long-established Boquete coffee company whose Alto Boquete plant the source documents, and it stands in for the broader Boquete coffee industry that supplies both the domestic table and the international specialty market. The panama-chocolate page covers the way Boquete coffee is also used as a local ingredient in the craft-food scene, paired with Bocas cacao.

Fresh fruit juices: licuados and jugos naturales

The most ubiquitous Panamanian drink is the fresh fruit juice, and the source documents the range. Fresh fruit juices, known as licuados or jugos naturales, commonly include pineapple, passionfruit, papaya, orange, and tree tomato, among others; they are prepared by blending fresh fruit and straining it, are typically heavily sweetened, and are optionally served with condensed milk added.^[1] That preparation (fresh fruit blended, strained, sweetened, and sometimes enriched with condensed milk) is the standard lunchtime beverage across the country, and it is the form in which Panama’s tropical-fruit abundance (documented on the tropical-fruits page) most directly enters daily eating.

The “heavily sweetened, optionally with condensed milk added” detail is the part that distinguishes the Panamanian licuado from a plain fruit juice. The sweetening is deliberate (the fruit is blended with sugar or with the condensed milk that supplies both sweetness and richness), and the result is a thicker, sweeter drink than the unsweetened juices of some other traditions. The condensed-milk variant in particular turns the juice into something closer to a liquid dessert, and it is the form the drink takes when it is meant to be indulgent rather than merely refreshing. The range of fruits (pineapple, passionfruit, papaya, orange, tree tomato) is the same range the tropical-fruits page documents at the crop level, and the licuado is the kitchen end of that crop supply.

The traditional cold drinks: saril, chicheme, resbaladera

Beyond the fruit juices, Panama has a set of traditional cold drinks that the cuisine source documents, and saril is the most distinctive of them. Saril is “a drink containing sorrel sepals, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, water, and a splash of rum,” which gives it a specific, spiced composition: the sorrel (hibiscus) sepals supply the deep red colour and the tartness, the ginger and the warm spices (cinnamon, cloves) supply the aromatic base, and the splash of rum supplies the alcoholic edge.^[1] Saril is thus a spiced, slightly alcoholic hibiscus drink, and it belongs to the broader Caribbean tradition of sorrel-based drinks that runs across the region, adapted to the Panamanian preference for a rum splash.

The other traditional cold drinks the source names (chicha, chicheme, resbaladera, and malteada) round out the non-alcoholic cold-drink set. Chicheme is the corn-and-milk drink that is particularly associated with La Chorrera (the la-chorrera page documents it as one of that city’s signature products), and it is a cold, slightly sweet, corn-based beverage distinct from the fruit juices. Resbaladera is a rice-and-barley-based cold drink in the same family. Malteada, the source records, is “a malted eskimo-like milkshake without ice cream,” which is a specific kind of malted-milk preparation rather than a conventional milkshake.^[1] Together these form the traditional cold-drink layer that sits alongside the more ubiquitous licuados, and they are the drinks most tied to specific regional and historical origins within Panama.

Ron ponche and the Christmas drink

The seasonal drink in the Panamanian calendar is ron ponche, and the source documents it as the traditional Christmas beverage. A traditional drink called ron ponche (eggnog) is served, particularly in the holiday context, which places ron ponche as the eggnog-style, rum-based drink tied to the Christmas season.^[1] The holiday-foods-panama page covers ron ponche as the drink of the Christmas spread, and it sits in this page’s landscape as the seasonal entry, the drink that appears at one time of year rather than year-round, in the same way the Christmas tamales and arroz navideño are the seasonal foods.

Rum, Seco Herrerano, and the spirits base

The alcoholic base of Panamanian drinking, beyond beer, is rum and Seco Herrerano, and the beer source frames the two together. Panama produces three brands of rum and a similar liquor known as Seco Herrerano, which establishes the distilled-spirits side of the drinking culture as a rum-plus-seco pairing.^[2] The three rum brands (the source does not name them, but they are the products of the country’s distillers, Varela Hermanos among them) are the aged, sipping-and-cocktail rums, and Seco Herrerano, covered in full on the seco-herrerano page, is the clear, triple-distilled sugarcane spirit that serves as the country’s neutral mixing base. The seco-herrerano page documents the Chichita Panamá, the seco con leche, and the coconut-milk mixed drinks that are the seco’s standard preparations, and this page’s ron ponche and saril-with-rum-splash are the drinks that use rum as their base.

What is sourced, and what is not

The cited sources document the traditional-drinks and spirits side of Panamanian drinking with usable detail: the coffee origin, the licuado range, the saril and chicheme and ron ponche recipes, and the rum-and-seco spirits base.^[1][2] What they do not document is the contemporary wine-import and craft-cocktail-bar scene: Panama City’s modern cocktail culture, its wine lists, and its craft-cocktail movement are not covered in the encyclopedic sources, and a page that treated the modern beverage scene would need sourcing from current food media (the Panama City cocktail bars documented on the panama-city-restaurants page are the closest available reference). This page is the traditional-and-spirits frame for the country’s drinking, marked confidence: medium to reflect that the traditional side is well sourced while the modern wine-and-cocktail side is not.

The everyday drinking rhythm

The Panamanian drinks landscape has an everyday rhythm that the catalogue of named drinks can obscure, and it is worth stating the rhythm plainly because it is how the drinks are actually encountered. The day starts with coffee (the Boquete-highland coffee documented above, served as café con leche at breakfast), and the coffee continues as the after-meal and the social drink through the morning and the afternoon.^[1] At lunch, the fresh-fruit juice (the licuado) is the standard accompanying beverage, and the range of fruits (pineapple, passionfruit, papaya, orange, tree tomato) gives the lunchtime juice its daily-variety character: the juice changes with the fruit, even as the meal it accompanies may not. Through the afternoon and into the evening, the alcoholic drinks enter (the beer that is the volume leader of social drinking, the rum and the seco that anchor the cocktail and the mixed-drink end), and the saril, the chicheme, and the ron ponche occupy the specific, traditional, and seasonal niches within that broader flow.^[2]

That rhythm (coffee in the morning, juice at lunch, beer or spirits in the evening) is the everyday structure of Panamanian drinking, and the individual drinks this page catalogues are the elements that fill it. The traditional cold drinks (saril, chicheme, resbaladera) and the seasonal ron ponche sit as specialty layers on top of the everyday coffee-juice-beer core, appearing at particular times, in particular regions, or on particular occasions rather than as daily defaults. Reading the landscape through the everyday rhythm, rather than as a flat list of equally-common drinks, is what gives a visitor an accurate sense of which drinks to expect where: coffee everywhere in the morning, juice everywhere at lunch, beer everywhere in the evening, and the traditional and seasonal drinks as the regional and occasion-specific entries layered on top.

Quick reference

Where to read next

The panamanian-beer page covers the beer side of the country’s drinking, and seco-herrerano covers the signature sugarcane spirit in full. The tropical-fruits page covers the fruit that supplies the licuados, and holiday-foods-panama covers ron ponche as the Christmas drink.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-03