The Hawaiian Stone Sour is Difford's Guide's tiki-leaning spin on the Stone Sour — a bourbon sour built with orange juice that was first written down by Jacques Straub in 1914, given its signature citrus by Tom Bullock's 1917 The Ideal Bartender, and later revived by Dale DeGroff. This version drops the orange for pineapple and adds a dash of pimento (allspice) bitters, pushing the drink toward Polynesian-bar territory without changing its underlying sour structure. Difford's own page credits it as "adapted from a recipe created in 2000 by Dale DeGroff 'as a poolside drink for a regular guest at the Rainbow Room's Promenade Bar'" — a detail consistent with DeGroff's real tenure running that bar from 1987 to 1999, but one we could not find corroborated anywhere outside Difford's Guide itself. Treat the attribution as documented-but-unverified, not settled cocktail history.
Same sour bones as the original, just wearing a Hawaiian shirt — pineapple in, orange out.
A Documented Variant, Not a Documented Drink
The Stone Sour itself has real cocktail-history bones. Jacques Straub's 1914 Drinks includes an early frappéd version, and Tom Bullock's 1917 The Ideal Bartender added the orange juice that became the drink's defining move. The style faded during Prohibition and resurfaced decades later; Dale DeGroff popularized a bourbon version in The Craft of the Cocktail, though even he admitted, "I don't know who coined the name first, but it came from California."
The "Hawaiian" version is a separate claim. Difford's Guide states it is adapted from a recipe DeGroff created in 2000 as a poolside drink for a regular guest at the Rainbow Room's Promenade Bar — plausible given DeGroff's documented career there, but a specific story we could not find repeated in his own writing, in interviews, or in any cocktail history independent of Difford's Guide. This page is, as far as we can verify, the only place the story is told. We're passing it along as Difford's stated lineage, not as an independently confirmed fact.
The Spec
This follows Difford's published build: bourbon-sour proportions with pineapple standing in for orange, a rich 2:1 syrup to balance the fruit's acidity, and a dash of pimento (allspice) bitters for the spice note that nudges it from "bourbon sour" toward "tiki bar."
Pineapple instead of orange
Swap the classic Stone Sour's orange juice for pineapple and the drink shifts from "brunch sour" to "tiki bar" without touching the bourbon or the citrus backbone. It's a one-ingredient move, but it's the whole reason this version earns the word "Hawaiian."
A dash of pimento bitters, not orange bitters
Pimento (allspice) bitters bring a warm, clove-forward spice that plays the same role falernum or allspice dram would in a rum-based tiki drink — it keeps the pineapple from tasting flat-sweet and gives the bourbon something spiced to lean against.
Bottom Line
Whatever the truth of its poolside origin story, the Hawaiian Stone Sour is a sound, simple idea: take a real sour with real history, swap one juice, and let a dash of spice bitters do the rest. Judge it on the glass, not the legend.