Traditional Mojito
Havana's original, muddled by hand
- Method
- Built
- Style
- Classic
- Glass
- Collins glass
- Time
- 5 min
Ingredients
- 60mlLight RumReal McCoy 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
- —Fresh Limehalf a lime, cut into 4 pieces
- —Demerara Sugar1 tbsp, raw
No Demerara Sugar? Demerara Syrup — the same sugar, already dissolved — adds thickness and weight to the drink
- —Mint10-12 leaves, plus a sprig for garnish
- —Soda Watertop up to taste
- Garnish
- Mint sprig
Make it well
Built, properly.
the lime and demerara sugar together in the bottom of your glass to release the lime juice and oils and dissolve some of the sugar.
Add the mint leaves and press them gently, just enough to release the oils. Bruise them too hard and it turns bitter and grassy.
Add the rum and fill the glass with .
Top with soda water and give it a good or from top to bottom to combine everything.
Garnish with a mint sprig.
On the palate
On the nose it's mint, bruised rather than shaken, so it comes at you grassier and more upfront than in the strained version. On tasting it's rougher and more rustic, with little bursts of raw sugar crunch and a touch of lime pith bitterness that straining would smooth away. Less polished, and a lot closer to how it would have been made in Havana a century ago. Plenty of people prefer it for exactly that reason, and we understand why.
Where it came from
This is the older of the two ways to build a Mojito, muddled straight in the glass rather than shaken. The drink's actual history is disputed (see the Mojito entry for the fuller picture), tangled up in a shaky 16th-century story about Sir Francis Drake's cousin and a spirit called "El Draque" that later became rum-based and renamed. Whatever the truth of that, the build-it-in-the-glass method is the traditional one, closer to how the drink would have been served in Havana bars through the 20th century, before the shaken, bar-speed version became common on busier modern cocktail menus.
Keep pouring
If you like the Traditional Mojito, try these
The bartender’s note
One drink, one story, one bottle worth buying.
Thursday evening, so you have time to shop. No more than that.