Classic

Daiquiri

A beautiful one spirit cocktail, straight from the Caribbean

Ingredients

60mlLight RumThe Real McCoy 3 Year recommended
22.5mlLime Juicefreshly squeezed
15mlSemi-Rich Simple Syrup

Make it well

Shake

Directions

1. Squeeze your limes now, not earlier. Lime juice starts losing its edge within the hour and this is the drink where you'll taste it most. 2. Add the rum, lime juice and syrup to your shaking tin. 3. Add ice and shake hard for 10-12 seconds. Really commit to it, there are only three ingredients here and the shake is doing the dilution, the chilling and the texture all at once. 4. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Get the glass in the freezer before you start, there's no ice in the finished drink so the glass is the only thing keeping it cold. 5. Garnish with a lime wheel.

Taste

On the nose it's lime, mostly, with a clean sugarcane sweetness coming up behind it from the rum. On tasting it's sharp first, then the sugar catches up and rounds it off, and the rum turns up last with a faint grassy, almost buttery Barbados note. This spec is drier than most daiquiris you'll be handed and we prefer it that way, the lime gets to be the point rather than something the syrup has to survive.

Origin

The Daiquiri is named after a place rather than a person: Daiquirí, a small iron-mining town on the southeastern coast of Cuba. American troops landed there in 1898 and American mining money followed them, so the drink is a fairly direct product of that occupation, whether or not anyone holding one thinks about it. The name usually attached to it is Jennings Cox, an American engineer running the mines. What Cox was actually doing when he made the first one depends entirely who's telling it. One version has him with a Bacardi ration for the mine workers and time on his hands, mixing the rum with the limes and sugar to hand. The version everyone repeats has him running out of gin with guests on the way. Cox apparently thought the result was just a rum sour, and it took a guest to suggest it might deserve the name of the town. It reached America in 1909, when Lucius W. Johnson, a medical officer aboard the USS Minnesota, was shown round the old battlegrounds, met Cox, drank one, and carried the recipe home to the Army and Navy Club in Washington. It hasn't really left since.

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