Hotel Nacional

Wayfinder

The Hotel Nacional is a pineapple daiquiri with ten millilitres of apricot brandy in it, and that small measure is what makes it worth knowing. Pineapple and rum on their own are holiday drinking. Add stone fruit underneath and the whole thing acquires depth: the apricot's kernel note runs beneath the pineapple and gives the drink a finish it otherwise would not have. It is named for the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, the clifftop hotel that opened in Havana in 1930 and went on to host most of the twentieth century, from Churchill and Sinatra to the mob conference of December 1946. The drink is generally attributed to its bar in the 1930s. It sits between the daiquiri's discipline and the piña colada's abandon, which is a useful place for a drink to be. The rum, the lime and the small syrup measure keep the sour structure intact, and the fruit sits on top of that rather than replacing it.

ShakenClassic

Glassware: Coupe Glass

Garnish: Pineapple Wedge

Ingredients

Serves

White Rum

45ml

A Cuban-style white rum, and the frame the fruit sits on. Something with a little character rather than a very light one, or the pineapple takes the drink over entirely.

Fresh Pineapple Juice

30ml

Fresh rather than carton, and this is not fussiness: fresh juice foams under a hard shake and carton juice does not, which changes the texture of the finished drink completely.

Fresh Lime Juice

15ml

The daiquiri structure holding the fruit in order. Fifteen millilitres keeps this a sour rather than a fruit cup, and it stops the pineapple's sweetness running away with it.

Apricot Brandy

10ml

Ten millilitres, and the entire reason the drink exists. The apricot's kernel note runs underneath the pineapple and gives the finish a depth that fruit and rum alone do not produce.

Simple Syrup

5ml

Adjustable, unlike everything else here. Five millilitres suits average pineapple; a very ripe fruit needs none and an out-of-season one may want ten. Taste the juice before you build.

Instructions

Add the rum, pineapple juice, lime juice, apricot brandy and simple syrup to a shaker.

Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds: the pineapple wants the foam.

Double strain into a chilled coupe.

Garnish with a wedge of pineapple.

Expert Tip

Use fresh pineapple juice and shake it hard. Fresh juice foams, and that foam is a substantial part of the drink's texture; carton juice has been heat-treated, does not foam, and tastes cooked and flat by comparison. Twelve seconds of genuinely hard shaking is what builds the head. Treat the syrup as adjustable. Five millilitres is the printed measure and pineapple ripeness swings enormously. A very ripe fruit needs none at all; an underripe or out-of-season one may want ten. Taste the juice first, which takes a second and saves the drink. Do not skip the apricot. Without it this is a competent pineapple daiquiri and nothing more, and ten millilitres is doing all the work that makes it something else.

Flavour Profile

PineappleApricotLimeGoldenRounded

Where It Comes From

The Hotel Nacional de Cuba opened on a clifftop above the Malecón in 1930 and spent the following decades as the address in Havana. Churchill stayed there, so did Sinatra, and in December 1946 it hosted the conference of American mob bosses that Lucky Luciano convened, which is the detail everyone remembers.

Attribution beyond the hotel itself is thin, and the various names attached to the drink are not well enough evidenced to state as fact. What is clear is that it belongs to the same Havana moment as the Floridita daiquiris, and that it shares their assumption that a rum drink should still have structure.

The Apricot Measure

Ten millilitres in a drink of a hundred is a small measure doing a disproportionate amount of work.

Pineapple is loud, sweet and one-dimensional on its own: it occupies the front of the palate and leaves nothing behind it. Apricot liqueur is stone fruit with a kernel note, which is a completely different register, and it sits underneath rather than alongside. The result is that the pineapple arrives as it always does and then, instead of stopping, hands over to something rounder and slightly bitter.

Take it out and you have a pineapple daiquiri, which is a perfectly nice drink with no particular reason to have a name.

Why It Keeps a Sour Structure

A great many tropical rum drinks abandon the sour framework once fruit juice is involved: the pineapple or the orange takes over the sweetening and the citrus becomes decorative.

This one keeps it. Fifteen millilitres of lime against forty-five of rum is a real sour measure, and the syrup is a trim rather than a sweetener. What that buys is a drink you can have two of. The colada end of the spectrum is easy company and finishes the evening for most people after one; this stays sharp enough to come back to.

Pineapple, and Why Fresh Matters

Fresh pineapple juice and carton pineapple juice are not the same ingredient. The carton version has been pasteurised, which cooks off the volatile aromatics and leaves a flat, jammy sweetness behind.

More importantly for this drink, fresh juice contains proteins that foam under a hard shake. That foam is a real part of the texture, and a Hotel Nacional made with carton juice arrives thin and looks wrong as well as tasting duller. If you are juicing a pineapple anyway, the core is worth including: it is where a good deal of the acidity lives.

How to Serve It

Shaken hard for twelve seconds, double strained into a chilled coupe, with a wedge of pineapple.

Cold, and reasonably soon after making it, because the foam settles. It suits a warm afternoon better than an evening, and it goes with food better than most rum drinks do, which is presumably why a hotel bar was pouring it.

The Spirit

White Rum

White describes a filter rather than an age. A good deal of light rum spends time in oak and then has the colour taken back out with charcoal, which leaves the roundness that ageing gave it and none of the shade.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Hotel Nacional cocktail?

White rum, fresh pineapple juice, lime and a small measure of apricot brandy, shaken and served up. It is attributed to the bar of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana in the 1930s, and it is a pineapple daiquiri with depth added.

What does the apricot brandy do?

It supplies the finish. Pineapple is loud and one-dimensional on its own, and the apricot's kernel note sits underneath it and gives the drink somewhere to go after the fruit. Without it this is just a pineapple daiquiri.

Can I use carton pineapple juice?

You can, and the drink will be noticeably worse. Carton juice has been pasteurised, which flattens the aromatics and, more importantly here, stops it foaming under the shake. That foam is a real part of the texture.

How much syrup should I use?

Five millilitres is the standard measure and it is the one thing in the recipe worth adjusting. A very ripe pineapple needs none at all and an out-of-season one may want double. Taste the juice before you build.

Master the Techniques

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

Mary Pickford

The Mary Pickford is Prohibition Havana's love letter to the movies: white rum, fresh pineapple, a blush of grenadine and a whisper of maraschino, mixed in the early 1920s for the actress it is named after. Pickford was the first great star of the silent era and a co-founder of United Artists, and she was in Havana with Douglas Fairbanks while their own country was dry. The attribution usually lands on Fred Kaufman at the Sevilla-Biltmore, though record-keeping in that city in that decade was not what it might have been. The build is fruit-first with two precision seasonings. Real grenadine tints the pineapple rose-gold without candying it, and maraschino's dry cherry-and-almond funk supplies the structure that keeps prettiness honest. Both pour at 7.5ml and both matter more than that measure suggests. It reads sweet on sight and finishes considerably drier than its colour promises, which is the whole trick.

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 Presidente

El Presidente was created in Havana during the 1910s or 1920s, most likely at the Vista Alegre bar, and named in honour of Mario García Menocal, President of Cuba in that era. It emerged from the same scene that produced the Daiquiri and the Mojito, shaped by Prohibition-era American tourists who arrived with money, time and a thirst their own country was legally denying them. It is a stirred rum drink in the Manhattan tradition: white rum and dry vermouth as the base, orange curaçao as the sweetening modifier, and a small measure of grenadine that adds colour, a faint pomegranate depth and a sweetness rounding the drier components. The result is spirit-forward and elegant rather than tropical, and one of the most underappreciated drinks in the classical canon. The dry vermouth determines the quality of the finished glass more than anything else. At this volume alongside the rum, a stale bottle defines the drink for the wrong reasons before the rum can make its case.