Classic
Traditional Mojito
Havana's original, muddled by hand
Ingredients
- 60mlLight RumReal McCoy 3 Year recommended
- —Fresh Limehalf a lime, cut into 4 pieces
- —Demerara Sugar1 tbsp, raw
- —Mint10-12 leaves, plus a sprig for garnish
- —Soda Watertop up to taste
Make it well
Build
Directions
1. Muddle the lime wedges and demerara sugar together in the bottom of your glass to release the lime juice and oils and dissolve some of the sugar. 2. Add the mint leaves and press them gently, just enough to release the oils. Bruise them too hard and it turns bitter and grassy. 3. Add the rum and fill the glass with crushed ice. 4. Top with soda water and give it a good swizzle or stir from top to bottom to combine everything. 5. Garnish with a mint sprig.
Taste
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.
Origin
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.
The bartender’s note