From the early nineteenth century up until the 1930s, the notion that the ‘white race’ could not survive outside of the temperate regions of the world was a commonly held (though not uncontested) scientific and medical assertion. While historians have documented scientific and governmental responses to climate, practices of tropical adaptation in the context of colonists’ everyday lives are not well understood. This paper is part of a broader project which aims to addresses this knowledge gap by developing a social history of tropical adaptation across the colonial Asia-Pacific region. My focus is on how ideas about managing a hot climate shaped drinking cultures in the Philippines, Malaya, Queensland and the Northern Territory from the 1880s to the 1930s. The paper will consider whether colonists’ adhered to or contravened medical advice regarding alcohol consumption; the degree to which they embraced drinks produced locally, such as iced pineapple juice; and how attitudes about the revitalising benefits of tea and coffee consumption differed across the colonies. I am interested in how strategies of adaptation were shaped by cultural interactions between migrant and Indigenous peoples, and, how drinking practices could reinforce or challenge colonial hierarchies of race, class and gender.