Hotel Nacional
The Daiquiri's holiday cousin
- Method
- Shaken
- Style
- Tropical
- Glass
- Nick and Nora
- Time
- 5 min
Ingredients
- 45mlLight RumEl Dorado 3 Year recommended
No Light Rum? Gold Rum — a little oak and caramel where light rum is clean — fine anywhere the drink isn't meant to be crisp
- 15mlApricot LiqueurRothman & Winter recommended
- 30mlPineapple Juice
No Pineapple Juice? Acid Adjusted Pineapple Juice — leave out any other citrus in the drink. It lands more like a sour, so you may need to balance the sweetness, but you could be onto a winner
- 15mlLime Juicefreshly squeezed
- 7.5mlSimple Syrup, 1.5:1
No Simple Syrup? Demerara Syrup — richer, faintly molasses — adds colour and body, which most drinks welcome
- Garnish
- Lime wheel
Make it well
Shaken, properly.
Add the rum, apricot liqueur, pineapple juice, lime juice and syrup to your with ice.
for 10-12 seconds, it needs the to bring all that fruit sweetness into balance.
into a chilled coupe.
Garnish with a lime .
On the palate
On the nose it's tropical straight away, pineapple first and that soft apricot sweetness coming up behind it. On tasting, this is sweeter and fruitier than a Daiquiri and it isn't pretending otherwise, though the lime does enough work to stop it going sticky. The rum stays underneath with a light grassy funk to it. Silky from a hard shake. Sunshine in a glass, basically.
Where it came from
Named for the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, which opened in Havana in 1930, right at the height of Prohibition-driven American tourism to the island. Exactly who first mixed it is disputed between three American bartenders who worked the hotel's bar in its early years: Wil P. Taylor, Eddie Woelke and Fred Kaufman, all of whom have been credited at various points. Charles H. Baker Jr., writing in his well-travelled 1939 book The Gentleman's Companion, names Taylor specifically as the creator. The drink's first known appearance in print, though, is slightly earlier, in the 1934 book Bar La Florida Cocktails. Whoever gets the credit, it became one of the hotel's signature pours during its Prohibition-era heyday.
Keep pouring
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The bartender’s note
One drink, one story, one bottle worth buying.
Thursday evening, so you have time to shop. No more than that.