Bacardi Cocktail

Daiquiri

The Daiquiri is a sour in its most elemental form: white rum, fresh lime juice and sugar syrup, shaken and served up. Three ingredients, no bitters, no liqueur, nothing to hide behind. It takes its name from a mining district on the south-eastern coast of Cuba, near Santiago, where Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer, is credited with combining local white rum with lime and sugar around 1898. Whether Cox invented it or documented what Cuban workers had been drinking for years is not something the record can resolve. What is not disputed is that it was refined and popularised in Havana at El Floridita by Constantino Ribalaigua Vert. The simplicity is the point and the problem at once. There is nothing in the construction to compensate for a poor rum, juice that was not squeezed fresh, or a syrup made carelessly. Every variable is fully exposed, which is why a properly balanced Daiquiri demonstrates more skill than a ten-ingredient tiki drink.

El Floridita Daiquiri

The El Floridita Daiquiri is the house version from the Havana bar that called itself la cuna del daiquiri, the cradle of the daiquiri. Two things separate it from the shaken original: five millilitres of maraschino, and the fact that it is blended rather than shaken. The maraschino is a seasoning rather than a sweetener. At that measure you would not identify it blind; what you notice is that the lime tastes brighter and the rum tastes rounder. It perfumes the drink without adding anything you could call cherry. The texture is the other half. Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, who ran the bar through the 1920s and 30s, used the newly available electric blender not to make slush but to shave the drink into fine, dry frost. It arrives in the coupe holding its shape like a snowbank and is drunk through a straw as it gives way. Texture as an ingredient in its own right, which almost nobody was doing at the time.

Hemingway Daiquiri

Ernest Hemingway wandered into El Floridita in 1932, tried the house daiquiri and issued his amendment: no sugar, double the rum. The bar named the result the Papa Doble, and its most loyal customer reportedly worked through them in scarcely credible quantities, a drink for a man who distrusted sweetness and wrote like it. The honest truth is that the original Papa Doble is a punishing drink: 120ml of rum, no sugar, all austerity. The version the world now calls the Hemingway Daiquiri is the civilised descendant, with grapefruit joining the lime and maraschino carrying all the sweetness, and it is a better cocktail than its patron ever ordered. He would probably have objected, which is part of the charm. What survives from the great man’s spec is the drink’s character: bone-dry, citrus-forward and bracing, the daiquiri stripped of its plush. Alongside its sibling, the maraschino-kissed Floridita No. 3, it shows how far one bar in Havana stretched three ingredients and a lime press.