classic daiquiri
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daiquiri
If I’m ever stuck on an island for the rest of my life and could only drink one cocktail until I die, this better be it. Nothing beats the classic daiquiri.
What is a daiquiri?
Rum, lime, sugar.
Not to be confused with a strawberry daiquiri or banana daiquiri or any of its frozen daiquiri counterparts that are beloved by boomers. No hate — a frozen rum cocktail is a beautiful thing.
But the classic daiquiri recipe is a simple stunner. (Unless I’m feeling fancy and opt for a Hemingway Daiquiri.)
Daiquiri Ingredients
0.75 oz cane syrup
1 oz fresh squeezed lime juice
2 oz rum of your choice
(I love a Split base of high quality white and jamaican rums — like Probitas and appleton estate)
How to Make a Daiquiri
Combine all ingredients into a shaker tin, shake with ice, and double strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a freshly cut lime wedge. A pretty one — not an ugly one. No #sluttylimes.
The History of the Classic Daiquiri
Classic cocktail origin stories are weird, because usually a lot of drunk people are involved, so the facts tend to get… murky. So, always take everything you read on the internet with a grain of salt.
Like most great rum drinks, Cuba is involved. And like most Cuba stories, the United States is involved. In the early 1890’s, a U.S. engineer named Jennings Stockton Cox was in Cuba working the iron-ore mines in the tiny town of — you guessed it — Daiquiri.
He and his fellow engineer buddy, Francesco Domenico Pagliuchi, f*cked around with their monthly military Bacardi Carta Blanca ration and landed on a concoction of rum, lime, & sugar, shaken and served over crushed ice. Which the whole crew drank a lot of. Like 3-4 drinks before their AM shift. And they loved it so much, they apparently started instructing bartenders on the recipe when visiting local bars (every bartender’s favorite customer).
The recipe appeared for the first time in print in 1914, in a cocktail book named Drinks, where it was misspelled as “Daiguiri Cocktail”. Probably not the only error to be found in a book about alcohol written in 1914, honestly.
Fast forward to 1948, and a Cuban newspaper posted an obituary for a Havana bartender Emilio “Maragato” Gonzalez from Havana's Hotel Plaza, crediting him as the inventor of the ‘Daiquiri’. Francesco, being the (annoying? loyal friend?) busybody that he was, wrote the editor essentially saying “nah, my buddy Cox at the Daiquiri mines was the inventor — not the dead guy.”
Fact-checking an obituary has to be one of the pettier things I can think of.
Lots of dead guys later, the Daiquiri is considered one of the best classic cocktails of all time. (Emilio, by the way, is credited with being the first to use brown sugar and serve the cocktail up — so I think he still gets credit for the classic in the form that we all know and love today. And in the 1920’s, the famous Cuban bar Floridita started making a blended frozen daiquiri, to the joy of Earnest Hemingway and TGIFriday’s.)
