Daiquiri

Long before it became an umbrella category for a massive number of variations and riffs, the three ingredient Daiquiri—a combination of rum, lime juice, and sugar—was a pioneer of the sour category of drinks. In David A. Embury’s highly influential 1948 book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, it’s listed as one of the six essential cocktails to know, alongside the Martini, Manhattan, Old Fashioned, Jack Rose, and Sidecar.

Perhaps one of the most well-known rum cocktails ever created, the Daiquiri has gone through ups and downs over its 100+ year history. Here’s everything you need to know about this iconic drink, and how to mix it right.

The Origins of the Daiquiri

The modern Daiquiri is thought by many to have been invented around 1898 in a mining village situated near beach of the same name on the southeastern tip of Cuba, just east of the city of Santiago de Cuba. One popular telling credits the Daiquiri’s creation to an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox, and a U.S. Navy medical officer who brought Cox’s recipe from Cuba to Washington, D.C., popularizing it stateside.

However, given the drink’s simple combination of three staple ingredients of the Caribbean, it’s likely similar combinations predate this story. Grog, a drink favored by British sailors that involved watered-down rum rations which were often combined with lime and sugar to create a palatable way to combat scurvy, predate Cox’s creations by at least 150 years.

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What the more modern Daiquiri had that these earlier grog-adjacent drinks didn’t was ice. Refrigeration advancements in the 1800s allowed for the production of artificial ice in any environment, eventually at low cost, and this began to take the place of the plain water that was previously used to dilute alcoholic drinks. Fittingly, the evolution of the Daiquiri over the next hundred years would often be tied to the ice used in its preparation, from early iterations that were stirred using cracked ice in highball glasses, to those that were served on the rocks, shaken with ice and served up, or famously, the iconic blended Frozen Daiquiris of later eras.

In the years since its creation, the Daiquiri has become one of the most famous cocktails created, garnering passionate fans that include household names like Ernest Hemingway and President John F. Kennedy. Though the period of the 1980s and ’90s saw the rise of countless blended sugar-bombs that bore the drink’s name but few other similarities, modern bartenders and consumers have since re-embraced the simplicity and perfection of the three-ingredient original.

Why the Daiquiri Works

In its purest form, the Daiquiri is a delicate balance of rum, fresh lime juice, and sugar. This trinity of ingredients form the basis of the sour category of drinks, which includes other iconic drinks like the Whiskey Sour, Margarita, Sidecar, Gimlet, and countless more. In The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, Embury even states, after describing the recipe for a Gin Sour, “Now, supposing that we specify lime juice and white Cuban rum, does this recipe sound familiar? Right! The famous Daiquiri.”

When made correctly, you’ve got a drink that is still dry, drinks smoothly, and doesn’t allow any one of the three base elements overpower the other.

The key to the Daiquiri comes in finding the right balance. An overly sweet rum will throw your ratio of sugar off and leave you sipping liquid candy. Overdo the citrus, and the cocktail drowns in a puckering pool of heartburn-inducing acidity. But most important of all is to recognize how individual tastes differ, and tailor your ratios accordingly to the person that will be drinking it.

This Daiquiri recipe walks the knife edge with a mix of light rum and a darker demerara sugar syrup. The two accentuate the best qualities in each other, with demerara allowing the cocktail a bit of depth, while taking the bite off the rum and fresh lime juice. High quality rum is a must, as there aren’t many ingredients here that will cover for a subpar spirit.

One trick we recommended when juicing the limes: Use a hand-squeezer (or your own hands). The oils from the rind add an extra flash of intensity that gives the cocktail a nice, bright edge, and increased aromatics.