Old Cuban
The Old Cuban is a Mojito promoted rank by rank. Aged rum where white stood, champagne where the soda was, mint shaken rather than muddled, a coupe instead of a highball, and two dashes of Angostura that were never in the original at all. Audrey Saunders built it in 2001 and installed it at Pegu Club, where it became the house's gentler flagship alongside the gin drinks. It reached modern-classic status almost immediately and has not left the international lists since. What makes it work is that the promotion is systematic rather than decorative. Every substitution moves in the same direction, and the lime, mint and sugar core is untouched. The bitters are the one addition rather than an upgrade, and they are the masterstroke: two dark dashes grounding all that sparkle in something older and giving the drink a floor to stand on. It is the detail that makes the whole thing hold together.
Glassware: Coupe Glass
Garnish: Mint Leaf floated on the mousse
Ingredients
45ml
The promotion, and the drink's entire upward mobility. Oak and dried fruit where the Mojito pours white, which is what lets it hold its own under champagne.
22.5ml
The Mojito inheritance, unchanged and squeezed to order. It is doing the same job it always did, against a considerably more sophisticated cast.
30ml
The syrup runs above the lime here, precisely because the wine arrives dry and the mint takes some of the sweetness with it. Anything off-dry poured on top doubles up on sugar the recipe has already accounted for, and the drink turns from an elegant one into a sweet one.
6 to 8 leaves
Six leaves shaken through rather than muddled long. Shaking extracts the oils without the chlorophyll, which is the difference between perfume and a grassy bitterness.
2 dashes
The one addition rather than a promotion, and the masterstroke. Two dark dashes ground the sparkle and give an otherwise very elegant drink a floor to stand on.
60ml
Doing the soda's job in black tie. Brut and cold, poured last and slowly over the strained sour, and a good crémant is a perfectly respectable substitute.
Instructions
Add the rum, lime juice, simple syrup, mint leaves and bitters to a shaker.
Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds.
Double strain into a chilled coupe.
Top slowly with the champagne.
Float a single mint leaf on the mousse.
Source: the IBA (Official IBA specification; method ours). Last checked 13 August 2026.
Expert Tip
Shake the mint and strain it out. Six leaves in the tin, hard shake, double strain: you want the perfume in the liquid and nothing green in the glass. One leaf floated on the mousse is all the mint the drink should show. Do not muddle it. Muddled mint releases chlorophyll and turns bitter and grassy, which suits the Mojito's rougher charm and works against a drink built on elegance. Use a brut champagne and pour it last, slowly, over the strained sour. The syrup measure is a full twenty-two and a half millilitres precisely because the wine arrives dry, and anything off-dry doubles up on sugar the recipe has already accounted for.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
Audrey Saunders built the Old Cuban in 2001, during her time at Beacon in New York, and it went on to the list at Pegu Club when she opened it in 2005.
Pegu Club matters to the story. It was one of the rooms that defined the American cocktail revival, and Saunders is one of the few bartenders of that generation whose original drinks entered the canon rather than remaining house specialities. The Old Cuban and the Gin-Gin Mule are both hers, and both are now poured in bars that have never heard of the room they came from.
It reached modern-classic status faster than almost any drink of its era.
Promotion, Rank by Rank
The design is unusually legible, which is part of what makes it satisfying.
Take a Mojito and move every element one step up. White rum becomes aged rum. Soda becomes champagne. Muddling becomes shaking and straining. A highball becomes a coupe. Crushed ice disappears entirely.
What stays is the core: lime, mint, sugar. That is the Mojito's soul and it is untouched, which is why the drink still reads as a relative rather than as something unrelated wearing the name.
The Angostura is the exception. It is not a promotion of anything, because the Mojito has no bitters. It is an addition, and it is the thing that keeps the drink from floating away.
Why the Bitters Matter
Everything else in the glass is bright. Mint, lime, champagne, sugar: four ingredients pulling in the same direction, all of them light.
Two dashes of Angostura do the opposite. Clove, cinnamon and gentian arrive at the finish and give the drink a floor, so it resolves into something with weight rather than simply stopping.
It is a small quantity doing structural work, and it is the detail that separates this from a competent champagne cocktail. A version made without them is pleasant, elegant and slightly weightless, which is precisely the failure mode of a lot of sparkling drinks.
Aged Rum Under Champagne
White rum would not survive this. Champagne is acidic, dry and assertive, and a light rum underneath it disappears entirely.
Aged rum has oak, vanilla and dried fruit, which gives it enough body to stay audible under sixty millilitres of wine. It also puts a warmer register underneath the mint, so the drink has depth as well as brightness.
The right choice is a mid-weight aged rum rather than something very dark or very heavy. A heavy pot-still rum fights the champagne rather than sitting under it.
How to Serve It
Shaken hard for twelve seconds, double strained into a chilled coupe, champagne poured slowly over the top, one mint leaf floated on the mousse.
Cold and on an occasion. It is a celebration drink that remembers the beach fondly, and pouring it for a Mojito drinker at a milestone is the fastest way to demonstrate what the promotion buys.
The Spirit
Aged RumRum matured in oak, usually in ex-bourbon casks, until the wood has given it vanilla, caramel and dried fruit. What an age statement means varies by producer more than in any other spirit category, so the number on the label is worth reading carefully rather than trusting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who created the Old Cuban?
Audrey Saunders, in 2001. It went on to the list at Pegu Club when she opened it in New York in 2005, and it reached modern-classic status faster than almost any drink of its era.
How is it related to the Mojito?
Every element is promoted one rank: aged rum for white, champagne for soda, coupe for highball, shaking for muddling. The lime, mint and sugar core is untouched, and the Angostura is the one genuine addition.
Why shake the mint rather than muddle it?
Because shaking extracts the oils without releasing the chlorophyll. Muddled mint turns grassy and faintly bitter, which suits the Mojito's rougher charm and works against a drink built on elegance. Six leaves and a hard shake is the method.
What champagne should I use?
Brut and cold. The syrup measure is full precisely because the wine arrives dry, so anything off-dry doubles up on sugar the recipe has already accounted for. A good crémant is a perfectly respectable substitute for it.
Master the Techniques
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The Mojito is one of the oldest Cuban cocktails on record, its roots traced to a sixteenth-century proto-version called El Draque, named after Sir Francis Drake, whose fleet anchored off Havana in 1586. Drake’s sailors mixed local aguardiente, the rough precursor to Cuban rum, with mint, lime and sugar as a remedy for dysentery and scurvy. The combination has proved more enduring than the illness. The modern Mojito is built on white rum, with soda water extending it into a long, refreshing serve suited to the Cuban climate. Hemingway is associated with it through La Bodeguita del Medio, and whether that association is accurate or partly mythologised is debated. The drink does not need it. Technique matters here more than most high-volume bars are willing to invest in: mint pressed rather than muddled, lime squeezed fresh, sugar dissolved before the rum, and soda poured gently enough to survive into the first sip.
Airmail
The Airmail is the French 75’s tropical correspondent: golden rum, lime and honey under a champagne top, named in the 1930s for the postal service that was then shrinking the world. It surfaces with Cuban credentials and appears in the 1949 Esquire handbook, carrying the era’s aviation glamour with it, from the moment when crossing an ocean stopped meaning weeks at sea. Structurally it is a honey daiquiri that caught a flight. Rum, lime and honey syrup shaken as usual, then lengthened with champagne so the daiquiri’s warmth arrives with a sparkling wine’s lift underneath it. The honey is load-bearing rather than decorative: it rounds the rum in a way plain sugar cannot, and it survives the champagne’s dryness where a simple syrup would simply disappear. It remains badly underordered for a drink this good. As celebratory as a French 75, considerably warmer at the core, and the right bottle-of-fizz cocktail for rum drinkers who keep being handed gin.
French 75
The French 75 was created at Harry's New York Bar in Paris in 1915 and named after the French 75mm field gun, the defining artillery piece of the First World War on the Western Front. The naming was not incidental: the drink was designed to hit with the force of the weapon, pairing gin and Champagne behind a presentation considerably more elegant than its strength suggests. The structure sits between the Tom Collins and the Champagne Cocktail. A gin sour of gin, fresh lemon juice and sugar syrup is shaken, strained into a flute or coupe, and topped with Champagne rather than soda water. The wine's yeast character, fruit and effervescence interact with the gin and citrus in a way soda cannot. The gin versus cognac debate has run since the drink appeared in print. The gin version is the historically consistent original and the one documented here; the cognac version, richer and more fruit-forward, is a legitimate variation.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
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