The Three of Strong comes out of Lost+Found Drinkery in Nicosia, Cyprus — a real, well-regarded bar that has appeared on the World's 50 Best Bars list repeatedly since the mid-2010s — where Difford's Guide credits bartender Dinos Constantinides with creating the drink in 2019. Beyond that one Difford's page, we could not find this specific recipe corroborated in any other cocktail-history source, book, or competing recipe database; the bar and the bartender are verifiably real, but the drink's creation story is documented-but-unverified rather than settled history, and we're treating it that way. The original build calls for house-made "Grandpa's Lemonade," prepared in a Thermomix — simplified here to fresh lemon juice and a rich sugar syrup, which is the same substitution Difford's own page makes. What's left is a modern tiki drink built on a cacao-and-coffee spiced rum, cut with an Aperol-style aperitivo liqueur for bitterness and passion fruit for tropical weight.
One page, one bar, one bartender's word for it — that's the whole paper trail on this one.
A Small Bar's Big Reputation
Lost+Found Drinkery is a tiny, twenty-seat room with a checkerboard floor that Dinos Constantinides opened in 2013 and has since built into one of the most consistently recognized bars to come out of Cyprus, a regular on the World's 50 Best Bars roster from 2015 through 2023. That reputation is real and independently verifiable — the bar's standing isn't in question.
The Three of Strong specifically is another matter. Difford's Guide is, as far as we can determine, the only place this drink and its 2019 creation date are recorded. We found no independent write-up, interview, or menu archive confirming it, so consider the attribution plausible — consistent with a working bar's real output — but not independently confirmed.
The Spec
One spiced rum carries both the cacao and coffee notes that would otherwise take two or three separate liqueurs to build, an Aperol-style aperitivo liqueur adds bittersweet snap, and passion fruit and lemon round it into a shaken tiki sour with real acidity underneath the sweetness.
One rum instead of three liqueurs
Classic tiki architecture usually stacks a base rum against a separate spice liqueur and a separate sweetener. A cacao-and-coffee spiced rum collapses that into one bottle, which is a distinctly modern, craft-bar shortcut rather than a mid-century technique — it's the clearest sign this is a 2010s drink wearing tiki clothes.
Aperitivo instead of another rum
Where a Beachcomber-era drink might reach for a second rum or an anise rinse for complexity, this one reaches for an Aperol-style aperitivo liqueur. The bitter-orange snap cuts the passion fruit's sweetness and keeps the drink from reading as a simple tropical punch.
Bottom Line
Whatever the full story behind its name and its 2019 creation date, the Three of Strong is a sound modern-tiki build: one spiced rum doing double duty, real bitterness from the aperitivo, and passion fruit and lemon keeping it drinkable rather than sweet.