Shawn Soole
January 11, 2007

Some classics weren’t created by bartenders; they were created out of pure necessity. Jennings Cox, an American engineer working in the copper mines outside Santiago had to entertain local engineers one night and found he was out of gin. Cox collaborated with a visiting engineer, Pagliuchi and came up with a mixture of rum, sugar & lime juice. Cox named it the Daiquiri after the mine that this beautiful, simple cocktail was created.

Cox and Pagliuchi created this in 1896, but it wasn’t until 1912 that Constantino Ribalaigua Vert of Havana’s “El Floridita” brought this cocktail to infamous cult status. “El Floridita” is now known as the cradle of the Daiquiri. Ernest Hemmingway, the hard drinking, noble prize winning author spent much of the thirties and forties drinking frappe Daiquiris at the bar. In “Islands in the Stream”, as the hero stares into his Daiquiri, he is reminded of the bow of a ship cutting through the waves.

To this day, there is a stool with a bronze statue of Hemmingway sitting at the bar. In his honour you can try the Papa Double, a double shot of rum and lime juice. As Hemmingway was a diabetic they created the “Hemmingway Daiquiri”, a double shot of rum, a splash of maraschino liqueur & lime juice and grapefruit juice. How the Daiquiri came to America seems to have happened just after the Spanish-American War through US Admiral Lucius Johnson. He introduced it to the Army & Navy Club in Washington, DC and now a plaque in their Daiquiri Lounge honours his place in cocktail history.

The daiquiri is one of the simplest most balanced cocktails from Cuba. It is the perfect blend of lime juice, sugar syrup and rum shaken hard and double strained. It is one of the core fundamental cocktails that everyone should know how to make. If you know this one, you should be able to make a Tom Collins along with a plenty of classics. Like the most of classics, there are many right ways to make the cocktail but so many more ways to screw it up.

CLASSIC DAIQUIRI RECIPE

(This is one for the little known co-creator of the classic, I invented this in 2006)